All American women aspire to have the nonchalant style and grace of French women, that je ne sais quoi that makes all of their habits seem natural and effortless. In Une Femme Française, fashion designer Catherine Malandrino, a Frenchwoman who has lived and worked in the US for twenty years, reveals French women’s secrets for an American audience. Grab a café crème and learn: - To be your own creation, not a slave to the latest fashion - What defines une femme Française: the little black dress, the boyish look, the rebel touch, and the carefree attitude - The secrets of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the avatar of American women who admire the French - Hair- and skin-care tricks from Paris It Girls - That nonchalance, more than perfume, is sexy - How to seduce anyone - Why red is a necessity - The real reason French women don't get fat: food is family

French Women and the Empire is the first book-length investigation of colonial gender politics in Third Republic France, using Indochina as a case study. Its departure point is the interrogation of the dramatic change in the French colonialist view of the empire as an exclusively male preserve where women feared to tread. At the turn of the century, a reverse discourse emerged in the metropole, forcefully arguing that colonial female emigration was essential to “true” colonisation. The study begins by analysing the highly complex web of interconnected factors underlying this radical transformation in the representation of the empire from being a “no woman's land” into a “woman's haven.” Then, drawing on a large body of hitherto little examined sources, the study continues by reconstructing the experiences and activities of French women in Indochina from the fin-de-siècle to the interwar era. The most significant finding from this study is that contrary to the image propagated by promotional literature of the colonial woman as essentially a bourgeois homemaker, the class and ethnic make-up of the French female population in the Asian colony was in fact remarkably heterogeneous, with a sizeable contingent of them, married or single, actively engaging in a variety of paid employment outside the home. By thus foregrounding the diversity and complexity of colonial female experiences, French Women and the Empire seeks to move the story of French women and the empire beyond the narrow confines of the imperial family romance to the wider arena of the colonial public sphere.

Scholars across disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic have recently begun to open up, as never before, the scholarly study of race and racism in France. These original essays bring together in one volume new work in history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and legal studies. Each of the eleven articles presents fresh research on the tension between a republican tradition in France that has long denied the legitimacy of acknowledging racial difference and a lived reality in which racial prejudice shaped popular views about foreigners, Jews, immigrants, and colonial people. Several authors also examine efforts to combat racism since the 1970s.