“They are nothing but birdbrains!”

From 1901, the Parisian clothing trades saw a remarkable escalation of labor activism and subsequent legislative reform driven by and on behalf of the more than 80,000 women working in the capital’s couture industry. Time and again (in 1901, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1919), the midinettes of Paris took to the boulevards in work stoppages that captured unprecedented media attention and garnered meaningful gains for garment workers across the city. French journalists, government officials, and labor leaders alike promoted a romantic and infantilizing vision of the female garment strikers as insouciant girls in need of paternal care (whether of the state, union, or reforming bourgeoisie), and replicated the pervasive belle époque type of the midinette. In the face of strikes in the heavily feminine garment trades, an image of the female Parisian fashion worker as charmingly capricious and pleasure-loving persisted. This chapter assesses the symbolic work performed by such a persistence, and also attends to the workingwomen who lamented the condescension of strike coverage and stressed their own demands and experience. In tracing the discursive work of the midinette as type, this chapter draws upon archival material from the Préfecture de Police, union journals, cartoons, workers’ memoirs, reform inquiries, songs, novels, and newspapers. The aestheticization of workingwomen had real consequences for the handling of garment trade militancy by the press, politicians, police, labor leaders, and couture workers themselves. It also framed the evolution of a new brand of militant midinette over the course of these strikes