Scholarship
I hold a Ph.D. in History and Interdisciplinary Humanities from Princeton University, with a focus on 19th- and 20th-century French history. My research interests/areas of expertise include the history of gender, women’s history, the history of the family and childhood, visual and material culture, and European-US exchange.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Telling Abortion Stories: The Life of Florence P. Evans (1913–35), Gender & History 36, 2 (2024), 327–33.
Negative and Positive Images: Race, Empire, and Family in Interwar French Pathé Baby Advertising, Film History 34, no. 3 (2022): 23–45.
Decorating Mothers, Defining Maternity: The Invention of the French Family Medal and the Rise of Profamily Ideology in 1920s France, French Politics, Culture & Society 40, no. 1 (2022): 83–106.
Book manuscript
Selling Pronatalism: Population Crisis, Consumerism, and the Family in France, 1900–1958
During the Third Republic, the French people embraced pronatalism and eventually made it a central tenet of the postwar welfare state. How did pro-birth and profamily ideology come to be accepted across an otherwise fractured and divisive political terrain? And with what consequence to families and children in metropolitan and imperial France?
Based on my Ph.D. dissertation, Selling Pronatalism blends the history of consumer culture, media history, and the history of the family to provide new answers to these crucial questions. The Third Republic was not just a time of population crisis; it was also a moment of great innovation in visual media and consumer culture. While prior interpretations of pronatalism have characterized pronatalism as anticapitalist, anti-individual, and politically retrograde, Selling Pronatalism argues that the movement only succeeded because its leaders learned to speak in the emerging language of modern consumer culture, mass entertainment, and personal choice.
Would arguing for population increase in the name of patriotic duty really capture the hearts and minds of young middle-class women? Raised in the age of the department store and the cinemathèque, pronatalist leaders understood that increasing the birthrate and returning women to the home required, as one activist put it, “selling” the pleasures and merits of children in flashier and more personal fashion. Using new sources, the book uncovers how pronatalists partnered with the press, advertisers, and corporations to craft campaigns about the joys and personal pleasures of motherhood that aided their repressive legal and political actions against reproductive freedoms. Repurposing language from developmental psychology and pedagogy, and holding up items like baby photographs and toys, pronatalists argued that childhood was a distinct and dynamic stage of life that enriched women’s lives. A France without children was not just one devoid of eventual workers or soldiers; more immediately and personally affecting, it was a France without the myriad pleasures that motherhood had to offer.
The effects of this activism were contradictory. French women came to accept that having a family was good for both themselves and the nation. At the same time, in valorizing middle-class lifestyles, pronatalists ironically underscored the merits of family planning. A family of four had a higher living standard than a family of eight and France’s postwar baby boom occured on the backs of medium-sized planned families. Naturalizing ideals of French motherhood around the practices and possessions of the bourgeois metropolitan family also had complex social effects, reinforcing the white French identity on the one hand and opening the door to greater integration on the other. Ethnographic collections of West African games displayed throughout the interwar suggested that colonized children were as playful and creative as their metropolitan ones. National children’s beauty contests, meanwhile, crowned immigrant winners, presenting foreign-born youth as exemplars of Frenchness.