Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945

In Sisters in the Resistance, noted scholar and historian Margaret Collins Weitz weaves a remarkable collection of first-person interviews into a unique oral history of the women who fought for the French Resistance. The result is a vivid portrait of defiance and endurance that captures the unsung heroism, quiet courage, and ultimate triumph of the women in "the army of the shadows." Candidly, calmly, and modestly, the women speak - many for the first time - about the driving forces behind their struggle, the ideals that motivated them, and the daily hardships and bitter realities of life in occupied France.










ISBN-13 : 9780471196983
Publisher : Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
Publication date : 06/03/1998
Author : Margaret Collins Weitz

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Both of these works join a growing body of literature on the French Resistance (see, for example, Claire Chevrillon's Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance, LJ 5/1/95). Rougeyron's memoir, first published privately in 1947, recounts his experiences rescuing downed Allied airmen in France during the war years. An auto engineer and experimental race car driver before the war, he joined the Resistance after the Nazi occupation and organized a network of resisters who rescued, sheltered, and assisted British and American flyers. Rougeyron's memoir is translated by the wife of the first Allied airman whose escape he facilitated. In marked contrast to Rougeyron's personal story is Weitz's scholarly account, the first to research women's roles in the Resistance in a thorough and comprehensive way.

In addition to utilizing the limited archival information available, Weitz (humanities and modern languages, Suffolk Univ.) has relied on interviews with more than 70 survivors of the Resistance, primarily women. Weitz places their dangerous and in many ways nontraditional activities against the backdrop of the Vichy regime's antifeminism and stresses the opportunities afforded by the Resistance for women both to change roles and to assume new roles in French society. She painstakingly demonstrates that women's presence in the Resistance was much greater than was believed or known at the time. Both works are recommended for specialists in the field.-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J.

Meet the Author

Margaret Collins Weitz is Chairman of the Department of Humanities and Modern Languages at Suffolk University in Boston, and is a Senior Affiliate at Harvard. She is the author of Femmes: Recent Writing on French Women, coeditor of Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, and has written numerous articles about women in France.