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.