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Mason Norton Resistance in Upper Normandy, Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Edge Hill University, 2017
"... That is to say, they were in the Resistance because their husbands or other male relatives happened to be. This was often the case in rural parts. Guy Cressent s mother Madeleine was an active resister, and according to Guy at the heart of all the resistance activities, and well-informed about them. Her role was largely to act as a support for her husband s activities; she maintained the clothes that the airmen seeking shelter were obliged to wear, talked to the airmen in order to ascertain intelligence about them, such as where in either America or Britain they came from, and cooked for the family and for the airmen being sheltered. Yet she was more than just an auxiliary- in the 1983 interview with her husband, she speaks for almost as long as her husband, and if she was the woman at the doorway, she was also the equal of her male resister husband, a schoolteacher as politically active as her husband was, with views formed independently of the marital home, and she held the CVR in her own right. 784 In the case of the Cressents, resistance appears to have been taken as a joint decision, with her political views clearly formed, and with herself very much responsible for her own agency- the decision to resist seems to have truly been a case of joint enterprise rather than something totally framed and conditioned by marriage and gender. The case of Madeleine Cressent was slightly more isolated though in terms of agency. Amongst les diables noirs in Ry, it was the wives of the Boulanger brothers, Henriette and Augustine, who helped organise the complex operation of feeding a maquis of twenty men, almost all of whom were living underground in the daytime, and this maquis in itself required a network of five or six women in the local villages manipulating the ration coupons and obtaining food from neighbouring farms..." Laurent Laloup le lundi 10 août 2020 Contribution au livre ouvert de Madeleine Berthe Louise Postel épouse Cressent | |
