“Notre Petite Amie”

Abstract

In 1900, composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier founded the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson, an association providing the workingwomen of Paris with free theater tickets, and free music and dance classes. What began as an effort to provide occasional free entertainment to female workers became a multifaceted conservatory, charity, and social network. The men (and some women) who organized and administered the OMP did so by relying on the trope of the gay, seducible, and tasteful young garment worker. These assumptions defined not only the work of the OMP and its relationship with its working-class members, but also reinforced the comforting notion of workingwomen’s pliability for journalists, politicians, reformers, and countless casual observers. Even as the OMP proffered a vision of emancipated French womanhood as a national renovator, it also deployed a powerful typology of the Parisian garment worker to temper its radical potential. Defined and confined by a nineteenth-century type, the female garment workers of Paris were exemplary targets for a benevolent effort which, at a moment in which feminist action and labor militancy were consolidating, reimagined women’s emancipation and working-class uplift as a matter entirely managed by bourgeois male authority and desire.