1560
Reviews of Books
that Silverman met the challenge as well as she inight
have. She writes with calm, treating Gyp's politics with
a dispassion that I ultimately found disturbing. She
presents copious details about Gyp's daily schedule,
her dress, her working style, the furnishings of her
homes, social gossip, and family news, but these matter
only if Gyp is made to matter. Silverman offers
psychological interpretations for Gyp's views-for example, that Gyp's hatred of Jews related to her hatred
of her feminine self, that her nationalism related to
sexual anxieties, that her disdain for women was driven
by anger for her mother-but psychological interpretations further focus our attention on a biographical
subject who simply does not merit all this attention. A
strategy more to my liking would have been to focus
our attention instead on the broad intellectual and
political discourses of Gyp's era. What matters about
Gyp is that she was at the center of the most significant
events of her time: the birth of racialized anti-Semitism, fascism, and totalitarianism. Gyp's life takes on
significance for the light it sheds on these events.
CLAIRE G. MOSES
University of Maryland
MARY Jo MAYNES. Taking the Hard Road: Life Course
in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in the
Era of Industrialization. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 263. Cloth $39.95,
paper $16.95.
Mary Jo Maynes bases her book on ninety workingclass autobiographies, allowing us to hear a myriad of
previously unheard French and German men's and
women's voices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To Maynes' historically keen interpretive ears, they tell their life histories from childhood to
early adulthood, emphasizing issues of class. Maynes
not only regales us with stories from these invaluable
autobiographies, but she also provides a clear and
nuanced analysis of their content, evaluating similarities and differences in the recorded life experiences
according to gender, age, geography, chronology, and
cultural milieu. This book contributes in original ways
to working-class and gender history.
Maynes acknowledges the pitfalls of studying the
formation of working-class consciousness from selected published autobiographies, and she approaches
her sources with caution, realizing that only a narrowly
defined group wrote their life stories. She does not
claim that these represent the voice of the average
European worker. Rather, they are emblematic of
special, literate, working-class constructed memories.
Maynes points out that by writing these autobiographies for a public audience, men and women transmitted a particular culture while fashioning their own
identities. Her book follows the life course of the
autobiographers, revealing the remembered experiences of their childhood, their education, their early
work record, their initial sexual involvement, and the
beginning of their adult lives. The socialist movement
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
played a crucial role in the writers' lives, helping them
in their self-definition and education.
With a sensitivity to gender, Maynes distinguishes
the working-class men's discourse from the women's.
She begins with the workers' remembrances of their
bleak childhoods, demonstrating that those autobiographers born early in the nineteenth century recount
more stark material and emotional family deprivation
than those born after 1870. Furthermore, she shows
marked national differences; French children born
after 1870, more than German children of that age
cohort, remember work-free childhoods. These chronological and geographical differences also obtain for
school experiences. The French writers, especially
those born after 1870, remembered a more humane
and rational approach to education and discipline than
their German counterparts, with school more appeal:..
ing to girls than boys. Unfortunately, Maynes does not
adequately explain why these differences occurred.
Did they write with distinct political agendas, thereby
placing disparate emphasis on certain negative aspects
of their lives according to different working-class
cultures emerging in Germany and France?
Leaving school, entering full-time work, and experiencing a First Communion or confirmation marked the
passage to adulthood, usually at age fourteen, with the
transition more clearly conspicuous at the end of the
century. The stories poignantly express the humiliations due to family poverty. When forced to leave
school, the workers educated themselves, with help
from the socialist movement. Both male and female
autobiographers condemned the sexual victimization
and harassment to which they had to submit. It is
unsurprising that women told different stories of sexual experiences than the men, that the working classes
had arranged pragmatic marriages, or that preserving
one's virginity (for women) was the key to success and
upward mobility. However, it would have been meaningful to know what the working class thought about
the politics of sexuality affecting it in Germany and
France. The book ends with young adulthood; it would
have been more complete if Maynes continued the
lifestage approach to the end of the recorded passages
into adult life. Maynes presents a working-class consciousness with a strong-and sometimes successfuldesire for upward mobility. By their writing and experiences, these autobiographers moved across the
cultural boundaries of class.
Historians owe a debt to Maynes for bringing to us
the hard-to-find words of working-class men and
women, interpreting them, and allowing us to understand better one segment of the working-class experience.
RACHEL G. FUCHS
Arizona State University
JEAN-PIERRE LE CROM. Syndicate nous voila! Vichy et Ie
corporatisme. Foreword by ROBERT O. PAXTON. Paris:
Les Editions de l'Atelier. 1995. Pp. 410. 190 fr.
DECEMBER 1996