As the postwar mass media in France imagined her, the teenage girl was no longer a demure and daughterly jeune fille. Instead, she was an enfant terrible, a "bad girl"--implying that she was unapologetically and unsentimentally no longer a virgin. Focusing on the role of gender in representations of youth in post-World War II France, Susan Weiner traces how, after 1945, young men and women came to symbolize different aspects of social order and disorder in a country traumatized by the Nazi Occupation and Cold War paranoia, seduced by consumerism and Americanization, and engaged in an undeclared war in Algeria. While overtly political discourses about "youth" generally referred to middle-class young men, Weiner argues that it was in media representations of "bad girls" that anxieties over the loss of a morally and socially coherent national identity found their expression.

Contents: 1 From ELLE to MADEMOISELLE 2 Fictions of Female Adolescence 3 The Mal du Siecle: Politics and Sexuality 4 Technological Society and Its Discontents 5 Quantifying Youth Conclusion: From Object to Subject?