In 1944, Charles de Gaulle’s interim government had granted women the right to vote. It was one of the last European countries to provide universal suffrage. Despite this achievement, women were still treated as second-class citizens, unable to seek employment or have their own bank accounts without their husbands’ permission. In addition, married women did not have control over their own property or any rights to their children; they could not file for divorce without provable cause (and even then, not until they had been married for at least three years), nor could they choose where they lived. Contraception and abortion were also illegal. This image presents a young woman agreeing to “marry” the new France (and, by extension, de Gaulle), a patriotic duty emphasized by the red, white, and blue tricolor bouquet and rosette on her Phrygian cap (a symbol of the French Republic). Even the language (“say yes”) is reminiscent of the “I do” in traditional marriage vows. Such design choices underscore the paternalistic overtones of de Gaulle’s government and the larger male-centric social structure of France in the 1950s, one in which women were primarily valued as wives and mothers. The majority of French women at this time would not have found this distasteful, but would have seen it as an assertion of the sacred role of their gender in ensuring a prosperous future for France.