Mimi Pinson Goes to War

During World War I, the midinettes of Paris suffered unemployment and drastically cut wages; at the same time, they were elevated in wartime ephemera as a nostalgic and erotic image of a France made whole. They were embraced by the press, by government agencies, and by trench soldiers as a soothing counterimage to more troubling female types on the homefront. As a cheerful and desirable national girlfriend, the Parisian garment worker was imagined offering her body, her gaiety, and her inimitable taste to the war effort. Physical intimacy between these women and trench soldiers emerged, particularly in the early years of the war, as a potent fantasy of pre-war wholeness—with the midinette’s body serving as a talisman to ward off violence, defeat, and death. Two patriotic initiatives through Charpentier’s Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson are examined. First, the Cocarde de Mimi Pinson, a campaign by female Parisian needle workers to manufacture tricolor cockades for front soldiers. What began as the spontaneous production of morale-boosting mementos by a group of unemployed garment workers soon expanded to include a government-funded exposition, a shop, an operetta, poems, and several songs. Second, Charpentier created an association to fund and train workingwomen as nurses. Government officials, journalists, and even soldiers applauded garment workers’ patriotic participation under the sign of Mimi Pinson, gay guardian of French taste and the loving and (safely) eroticized national Girlfriend.