This article traces the development of women's football in France in the context of the evolving political and social status of women over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. It specifically examines football alongside women's broader struggle for social, political and sexual emancipation. In the early 1920s, football was championed by the French feminist movement. Subservient not to men but to a team ethic, robust female players rebutted the myth of women's fragility — seen then as a major obstacle to women's suffrage. Football also appeared to offer a means to rally a new generation of working-class women to what had been a middle-class cause. Sponsored by the feminist movement and administered by the Fédération féminin sportive de France (FFSF) with state funding, French women's football flourished domestically and abroad. However, by the late 1920s it had been abandoned by the feminist movement and the FFSF in the midst of a sexual panic caricaturing participants as unnatural, `masculinised' and lesbian — a charge levelled at feminists in general with increasing vehemence as the suffrage issue made progress. This discussion links football's fall from favour over the course of the 1920s to the increasingly hostile political climate that faced the feminist movement and imperilled the survival of groups such as the FFSF who associated with it.

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Madeleine Blaess a British doctoral student studying at the Sorbonne was trapped in Paris unable to return home to York for the duration of the Occupation. In October 1940 she began a diary which she kept diligently until September 1944. This unique testimony written from the perspective of a British student at liberty to roam wartime Paris, focuses more on the civilian struggle through the everyday than on the political and military situation which Blaess, vulnerable to arrest, thinks wise to mention as little as possible. This exhaustively documented, voluminous record of the minutiae of a daily struggle with material hardship discloses a struggle with mental illness articulated and managed through the writing of the diary. That diaries can have a therapeutic purpose for writers under mental strain is axiomatic and this article examines a variety of palliative strategies both deliberate and involuntary invoked through the writing process. In so doing, the article will survey the incidence and causes of civilian mental distress on the home front over the period; an area of inquiry which, other than recent work into the psychological impact of Allied bombing of civilians, has been largely neglected in recent work foregrounding and valorising the historical importance of life-writing sources in the field of Occupation studies.

vi 320 rue St Jacques put us all in touch. Thanks are due to Errol Nadeau and his brothers, sons of Madeleine's friend Ruth Camp for telling me more about their mother and her later life and to Marie-France Leroy, Madeleine's great niece, and her husband, who were both so welcoming to me when I visited them in Le Mans. I am also grateful to Robert Pickford, Madeleine's friend and solicitor for all the help and advice and information about Madeleine he gave me in the early stages of the project.Thanks are due also to Kate Petherbridge and Tom Grady of the White Rose University Press, who have been a pleasure to work with, and to Michael Fake who set the ball rolling in the early days of the Press.Finally, many thanks to family, friends and colleagues who have been enduringly positive and encouraging about the project. Thanks to my Mother and Father, Shirley and Colin Michallat and to my sister and brothers, Claire, Mark and Clive. Thank you to Dr Roger Baines,

In 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a languages graduate, left her home in England for Paris to begin doctoral research at the Sorbonne. Unable to escape Paris before the German invasion in spring 1940, she was trapped in France for the duration of the war. The letters she wrote to her parents during the Phoney War, and the diary she began in October 1940 and continued until after the Liberation, are a fascinating account of her life as a postgraduate scholar in wartime. Through these written traces we glimpse women-run social and intellectual communities and businesses to which many women students turned for scholarly and moral support and, occasionally, practical and financial succour. This article draws on Madeleine’s letters and diary to describe and evaluate the importance of these extra-curricular networks in supporting women students during wartime with a particular focus on the bookshop and library Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach.