We Will Wait

Sarah Fishman's "We Will Wait" offers a view of the condition of women, and particularly the 800,000 wives of French prisoners of war, in Vichy France. It provides both personal accounts of several representative women and an analysis of the Vichy state. The paternalistic government assumed that women without husbands needed not only financial help, but also guidance, leadership, and moral protection - which exposed the hypocrisy, manipulation, and ineffectiveness of the regime. Drawing on interviews and archives, Fishman's book shows that although the POW wives faced widely differing conditions, they did have a sense of shared identity, which was reflected in the support groups they formed. The book explores popular attitudes towards the wives, which were shaped by unspoken cultural assumptions about the inherent nature of women. The strength of social norms allowed them to adjust to war and separation without challenging their ideas about the position of women in the family, and mediated their readjustment once their husbands returned. The war was by no means a catalyst for social change.
The analysis benefits from oral histories, rarely used sources such as 1940s women's magazines, and restricted Vichy archives.