What French Women Wore to the Resistance: Fashion, War, and Gender Transformation, 1940–1945

Abstract

Abstract: In studying French women resistors, scholars have largely fought the erasure of their contributions from the record. I revisit résistante stories as narratives about clothing that mark the specificity of female resistance as well as changes in gender identity. First, I explore how women weaponized their clothing. During the war they used their dresses, underwear, and jackets to hide Resistance documents, carry bombs, and escape enemy notice. Such resistance continued to occur after women partisans were deported to Ravensbrück, a Nazi detention camp for female political prisoners. Here again clothing became an instrument of resistance. Second, I show how the sartorial choices of résistantes provide crucial evidence of their changing selves. How these women chose to clothe their bodies can help us trace how they changed as a result of their wartime activism. Résistantes' shifting views of their clothing registered profound alienation and confusion about their gendered selves.