Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France by Kelly Ricciardi Colvin (review)

Reviewed by: Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France by Kelly Ricciardi Colvin Jane Nicholas Ricciardi Colvin, Kelly – Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. 230 p. Charm Offensive examines the image of the French air hostess as a purposeful construction of femininity designed to charm largely American tourists. Ricciardi Colvin suggests air hostesses were ambassadrices or cultural diplomats whose embodiment of a purportedly unique French femininity was crucial to post-war France. In the post-war period, the ambassadrices expanded to hostesses at exhibitions and then to what Ricciardi Colvin calls "translational figures" (p. 103), like the actress Brigitte Bardot, who sold a sensual image of French femininity to American consumers and tourists. These figures of femininity suggested naturally superior qualities of beauty, fashion, and charm aligned with the nation. Ricciardi End Page 220 Colvin makes a novel argument, and the book is full of insight into how images of women continued to propel economic and nationalist aims in post-war France. That said, I will qualify my review here by stating that I am not a French historian but read this volume as a historian of beauty and the body, a field to which Ricciardi Colvin's book contributes in compelling ways. The book has five chapters. The opening two chapters address the air hostess program by Air France, one chapter examines hostesses at expositions, one examines the translational figures, and one looks at travel writing for American tourists. The overarching theme of the book is how a commodified version of French femininity was packaged to international but especially American audiences in relation to building post-war tourism. The chapter topics are as eclectic and novel as the sources they are drawn from, and this selection leads to insightful commentary on the intersections between gender, travel, diplomacy, and nationalist purposes. Training manuals, novels, newspapers, trade publications, travel books, and a handful of memoirs form the basis for the book. In turn, the argument addresses a fulsome range of topics including air hostesses, smiling, French fashion, the bikini, and the 1968 Olympics at Grenoble. Across these varied fields, women who fit a certain vision of French femininity were deployed to represent the nation on an international stage and ensure visitors and potential tourists felt a sense of French hospitality. Ricciardi Colvin situates her work as making three "direct and indirect interventions" (p. 12) drawing on the established work of philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky (influenced by early feminist readings of Michel Foucault) and the concept of "soft power" from international relations theory. One of the interventions is a reassurance of existing work that locates the disciplining of modern female bodies beyond formal institutions. The historical interaction between women, modern visual economies, nationalism, and commodities has been an important topic in modern women's and gender history globally in recent years. Yet Ricciardi Colvin's argument shows that there is still value in understanding the disciplinary function of beauty on an international stage. Her insight into the government's role in crafting an image of French femininity embodied by air hostesses to sell the idea of France as destination is provocatively good. The second intervention on decolonization falls into the indirect category and suggests that femininity was utilized by the French government as a "tool" to bring attention and money to the country to redress France's international standing at the end of empire. The third intervention suggests that the export of certain sexually charged images of French femininity was a coercive means to lure American tourist dollars. Of all these interventions, decolonization is the most lightly addressed, which Ricciardi Colvin acknowledges, stating it serves as a "backdrop" (p. 167). In some chapters, this backdrop falls out of view. A more fulsome examination of the body politics of decolonization would be welcome in part to explore the uniform Whiteness of this presentation of French femininity. Because the preponderance of sources are of commodified images of women, the book tends toward a view that women accepted these roles and that the images only had a negative disciplinary function for them. In the conclusion, the argument extends from particular images to all women in all...