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Family, Work and Wages: The Stéphanois Region of France, 1840–1914*

  • Michael Hanagan
Extract

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.

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References
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1 Derived from Seecombe, the definition of the “family wage” employed here is the “notion that the wage earned by a husband ought to be sufficient to support his family without his wife and young children having to work for pay”: see Seecombe, Wally, “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Social History, 1, 11 (1986), pp. 5376, esp. p. 54. Seecombe prefers the term “male breadwinner norm” to “family wage”, but the concept of “norm”, as we shall see, has its own problems.

2 Creighton, C., “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (1996), pp. 310337, esp. p. 330.

3 Frader, Laura, “Engendering Work and Wages: The French Labour Movement and the Family Wage”, in Frader, Laura L. and Rose, Sonya O. (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, 1996), pp. 141164 and Pedersen, Susan, Family Dependence and the Origin of the Welfare State (New York, 1993).

4 Bairoch, P., The Working Population and Its Structure, vol. 1 (Brussels, 1968). It is very likely that French female labour force participation is underestimated because the participation of women in peasant agriculture is not fully incorporated into census estimates.

5 Sowerwine, Charles, “Workers and Women in France Before 1914: The Debate Over the Couriau Affair”, Journal of Modern History, 55 (1983), pp. 411441.

6 Perrot, Michelle, “L'éloge de la ménagère dans le discours ouvrier français au XIXe siécle”, Romantisme, 13–14 (1976), pp. 105122; Shorter, Edward and Tilly, Charles, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (Cambridge, 1974); and Friedman, Gerald, “The State and the Making of the Working Class”, Theory and Society, 17 (1988), pp. 403430.

7 This kind of division of labour seems to have been quite general: Bradley, Harriet, Men's Work, Women's Work: A Sociological History of the Sexual Division of Labour in Employment (Minneapolis, 1989).

8 A point well made for the commune of Marlhes by Lehning, James, “Nuptuality and Rural Industry: Families and Labour in the French Countryside”, Journal of Family History, 8, 4 (1983), pp. 333345.

9 The importance of looking at the ecological relationship between proto-industrialization and industrialization is stressed by Mastboom, Joyce M., “Protoindustrialization and Agri-culture in the Eastern Netherlands”, Social Science History, 20, 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 235258.

10 Hanagan, Michael, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France, 1840–1880 (Oxford, 1989). On seasonal migration, Lucassen, Jan, Migrant Labour in Europe 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea (London, 1987).

11 du Maroussem, Pierre, “Fermiers Montagnards du Haut-Forez”, in Les Ouvriers des Deux Mondes, vol. 4, Deuxième Serie (Paris, 1892), p. 421.

12 Vallès, Jules, “La Situation, 22 septembre 1867”, in Bellet, Roger (ed.), Oeuvres (Paris, 1975), p. 979.

13 Gonon, Marguerite, Coutumes de mariage en Forez (Lyon, 1979), pp. 6768.

14 Ibid., pp. 98–99.

15 On the ambiguities within the rituals, Lehning, James R., Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1995).

16 Boissier, Albert, “Essai sur l'histoire et sur les Origines de l'Industries du Clou Forgé dans la Région de Firminy”, Revue de Folklore Français, 12, 2 (1941), pp. 63109.

17 The saying probably originated in a description of Paris. Louis-Sebastien Mercier referred to survival rates of women, men and horses in urban environment of the capital, quoted in Kaplow, Jeffrey (ed.), Le Tableau de Paris (Paris, 1982), p. 31.

18 Fournier, M., La vie d' une cité: Impressions de Rive-de-Gier (Saint-Etienne, 1936), pp. 89.

19 Guillaume, Pierre, “La situation économique et sociale du département de la Loire d'aprés l'Enquête sur le travail agricole et industriel du 25 mai 1848”, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporain, 10 (1963), pp. 534.

20 Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians, p. 160.

21 Ibid., pp. 142–143.

22 Cohn, Samuel, The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing: The Feminization of Clerical Labour in Great Britain (Philadelphia, 1985).

23 Brenner, Johanna and Ramas, Maria, “Rethinking Women's Oppression”, New Left Review, 144 (1984), pp. 3371.

24 The infiltration of a miners' quarter of Saint-Etienne, Côte Chaude, by ribbonweaving is another example of this process. On domestic work in another Stéphanois miners' community, see Burdy, Jean-Paul, Le Soleil noir: Un quartier de Saint-Etienne, 18401940 (Lyon, 1989).

25 Accampo, Elinor, Industrialization, Family Life, and Class Relations: Saint-Chamond, 1815–1914 (Berkeley, 1989).

26 Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians, p. 141.

27 “Rapport n. 240, commissariat de police de Saint-Chamond au préfet”, 27 March 1911, ADL 93/M/11.

28 On alliances, Morgan, Carol E., “Women, Work, and Consciousness in the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry”, Social History, 17, 1 (1992), pp. 2341.

29 Archives de le Prefecture de Police, 4 juillet 1878, no. 47, Ba 171.

30 Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians, pp. 98–101.

31 van der Linden, Marcel, “Connecting Household History and Labour History”, nternational Review of Social History, 38 (1993), Supplement 1, pp. 163173.

32 Droulers, Paul, “Le Cardinal de Bonald et la gréve des mineurs de Rive-de-Gier en 1844”, Cahiers d'histoire, 3, 6 (1961), pp. 265285.

33 For a discussion of the origin of the society and its Parisian operations see Ratcliffe, Barrie M., “Popular Classes and Cohabitation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Paris”, Journal of Family History, 21, 3 (07 1996), pp. 316350.

34 ADL 28/M/l.

35 Rigaudias-Weiss, Hilde, Les Enquêtes Ouvrières en France entre 1830 and 1848 (Paris, 1936), pp. 184203.

36 “Enquête de 1848 – mineurs de Rive-de-Gier”, AN C956.

37 Le Play, Frédéric, The Organization of Labor in Accordance with Custom and the Law of the Decalogue (Philadelphia, 1872), pp. 41 and 167.

38 Le Play, The Organization of Labor, p. 155.

39 Kulstein, David, Napoleon III and the Working Class: A Study of Government Propaganda under the Second Empire (Los Angeles, 1969).

40 For Pelloutier's defence of the “Iron Law of Wages”, see L'ouvrier des deux mondes, 1 February 1898.

41 Guesde, Jules, “La Loi des Salaires et ses consequences”, Collectivisme et révolution (Paris, 1945; 1st pub. 1878), pp. 4344.

42 Stuart, Robert, Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class and French Socialism During the Third Republic (Cambridge, 1992), p. 466. For the Guesdist attitude towards women workers, see Hilden, Patricia, Working Women and Socialist Politics in France, 180–1914, A Regional Study (Oxford, 1986).

43 Le Socialiste, 5 March 1893.

44 For US studies which suggest that appeals to a domestic ideal had little purchase among African-American women who had high labour force participation rates, see Boris, Eileen, “The Power of Motherhood: Black and White Activist Women Redefine the Political”, in Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993), pp. 213245 and Gordon, Linda, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994), pp. 112114. On poor women in London's East End, see August, Andrew, “How Separate a Sphere? Poor Women and Paid Work in Late-Victorian London”, Journal of Family History, 19, 3 (1996), pp. 285309.

45 Steedman, Carolyn, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, I860–1913 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990).

46 See Klaus, Alicia C., “Babies All the Rage: The Movement to Prevent Infant Mortality in the United States and France, 190–1920” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1986). See also, Accampo, Elinor A., Fuchs, Rachel B. and Stewart, Mary Lynn (eds), Gender and the Politics of Social Reform (Baltimore, 1995).

47 Klaus, “Babies All the Rage”.

48 Burdy, Le Soleil noir, pp. 133–154.

49 Le Mercure ségusien, 21 May 1848.

50 “Enquête de 1848 – mineurs de Rive-de-Gier”, AN C956.

51 Le Mercure ségusien, 16 June 1848.

52 Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians, p. 21.

53 Ibid., pp. 191–196.

54 L'Eclaireur, 4 June 1869.

55 Imbert, Eugène, Chants, Chansons et poésie de Remy Doutre (Saint-Etienne, 1887), pp. 2425.

56 ADL 92/M/41.

57 Leaflet distributed July 1911, ADL 92/M/185.

58 Cited in Dubesset, Mathilde and Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle, Parcours de femmes: Réaltiés et representations, Saint-Etienne 1880–1950 (Lyon, 1993), p. 115.

59 L'Eclaireur, 23 April 1870.

60 Clark, Frances Ida, The Position of Women in Contemporary France (London, 1937), pp. 165168.

61 Seilhac, Léon de, Les Gréves du Chambon (Paris, 1912), pp. 57. On the “turnout” and the “crowd” see Steinberg, Mark, “Riding the Black Lad and Other Working-Class Ritualistic Actions: Towards a Spatialized and Gendered Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Repertoires”, in Hanagan, Michael P., Moch, Leslie P. and Brake, Wayne te (eds), Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics (Minneapolis, forthcoming 1998).

62 Gras, L.J., Histoire économique générale des mines de la Loire, vol. I (Saint–Etienne, 1910), p. 315.

63 On different framings for gendered protest see “Providers: An Exploration of Gender Ideology”, in Kessler-Harris, Alice, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings & Social Consequences (Lexington, 1990), pp. 5780.

64 See Sen, Amartya, “The Standard of Living Lecture 2, Lives and Capabilities”, in Hawthorn, Geof-frey (ed.), The Standard of Living (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 2038.

* I would like to thank Miriam Cohen, Louise Tilly and Angélique Janssens.

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International Review of Social History
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