title: Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France
author:  Mary Louise Roberts 
description: <DIV>In fin-de-si&egrave;cle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.<BR><BR>Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper<I> La Fronde</I>; the journalists S&eacute;verine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of <I>La men&#8212;even</I> itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men-even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for <I>La Fronde</I> put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny.<BR><BR>Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, <I>Disruptive Acts</I> will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.</DIV>
zlib_text: **Mary Louise Roberts** is professor of history at the University of
  Wisconsin–Madison and the author of _Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-
  Siècle France_ and _Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in
  Postwar France, 1917–1927_.
  
  
  
  
  
  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
  
  
  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
  
  
  © 2013 by The University of Chicago
  
  
  All rights reserved. Published 2013.
  
  
  Printed in the United States of America
  
  
  22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
  
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92309-3 (cloth)
  
  
  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92312-3 (e-book)
  
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  
  Roberts, Mary Louise.
  
  
  What soldiers do : sex and the American GI in World War II France /
  
  
  Mary Louise Roberts.
  
  
  pages. cm
  
  
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
  
  ISBN 978-0-226-92309-3 (cloth: alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92312-3
  (e-book)
  
  
  1\. United States. Army—Officers—Sexual behavior—France—History—20th century.
  2. Soldiers—Sexual be