The daily lives of female French laborers and the transnational dynamics of gender production in Berlin from 1940 to 1945.

In World War II Europe , the mass production of weaponry characteristic of the "total wars" of the 20th century and the policy of economic collaboration disrupted gender relations in societies involved in the conflict. From 1940 to 1945, nearly 80,000 women voluntarily left France to work in German arms factories where, strongarmed into service, they found themselves integrated into a vast system exploiting foreign labor. Romantic and maternal relationships were forcibly reinvented in urban settings and on the fringes of concentration camps, a world away from the restoration of familial order advocated by the Vichy regime.