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Patricia Tilburg's\xa0Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919\xa0(Oxford University Press, 2019)\xa0is at once a\xa0cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era.\xa0The\xa0midinette\xa0is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, this female garment worker became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital.\xa0Represented by a range of observers during the period as young, cheerful, attractive, and sexually available,\xa0the\xa0midinette\xa0became\xa0the subject of (male) fantasy and philanthropy, her image working to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing world.\nThe lived experiences and activisms of the\xa0women workers who inspired\xa0these\xa0projections play significant roles throughout the book. Using a wide array\xa0of sources--state and police documents, municipal and\xa0philanthropic archival collections,\xa0press, fiction, music, letters, and more--the author\xa0ensures that\xa0the conditions of their working lives, their voices and\xa0demands, do not get lost in the swirl of ideas surrounding them. A\xa0cultural history\xa0that moves deftly between the material and the metaphoric,\xa0Working Girls\xa0is a pleasure to read, and I so enjoyed speaking with its author.\xa0\xa0\nRoxanne Panchasi\xa0is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies