Classified commerce: gender, labor, and print capitalism in Paris, 1881–1940

“Classified Commerce: Gender, Labor, and Print Capitalism in Paris, 1881–1940” demonstrates how classified advertising and the livelihoods and lives it enabled were central to the development of a flexible service economy and to the long-term definition of what counts as labor and what (or whose) labor counts. At the turn of the twentieth century, women sold sex, read palms, birthed babies, performed abortions, and made matches in Parisian apartments. Cheap newspaper advertising brought customers for these petty entrepreneurs and revenue for the newspapers that were foundational to the project of the Third Republic (1870–1940), serving as the crucible of (male) citizenship and, as such, protected by press laws. Moralists, legislators, and law enforcers expressed concern and worked to fill in legal lacunae and stamp out the illicit economic possibilities of this democratic advertising space. Debates about these ads oscillated between lewd humor and elevated discourses about liberal politics and economics. Legislators were torn between safeguarding press freedom and finances and the perceived need to control the public actions of women and queer people. They struggled, that is, to maintain their own economic, political, and sexual freedoms while regulating those of morally and sexually dubious others. “Classified Commerce” reconstitutes the economic and social lives of suspect classified advertisers and the cultural discourses construing them as a “problem.” Part One outlines the establishment of the “immoral classifieds” as a discursive and legal problem, exploring the ways in which an image of the classifieds as a sexual space rather than a commercial one was constructed through popular culture and mass media (Chapter One), legislation and jurisprudence surrounding obscenity (Chapter Two), and narratives of so-called “white slavery” (Chapter Three). Throughout, I argue that moralizing responses to the classifieds and attempts to legislate the back page were simultaneously central to the construction of a secular democratic regime through law and its Achilles heel—the limits of the law’s reach made it possible for women and sexual “deviants” to evade social control and enjoy minimal sexual and economic autonomy. Part Two turns to prostitution (Chapter Four) and midwifery/abortion (Chapter Five) as case studies to explore how women and other minorities used the classifieds in spite of (and thanks to) these scandals, debates, and legislation. Throughout these chapters, I draw on a broad range of archives—including police surveillance, legislative debates, pseudo-scientific treatises, court records, advertising, newspaper articles, and illustrations—to make three major arguments: (1) classified ads for women’s businesses posed a problem by giving women a space to act as economic agents, rather than as the dependent moral guardians of the republican family; (2) new projects to morally and sexually regulate the market in order to target this “problem” marginalized and criminalized economically independent women; (3) male legislators’ attacks on “immoral” advertising thus laid bare how, while they paid lip service to abstract republican freedoms, they also benefited economically, politically, and sexually from a regime of gendered inequality.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference