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

Abstract

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. 1 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.2 Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. 3 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.In France, conditions of labour supply contrasted sharply with the UK, for it was far more difficult to recruit factory labour in France than in Britain. As a result of the difficulty of recruiting males, many of whom remained in peasant agriculture, female participation in the French labour force grew rapidly at a time when it was declining in England; in France, even a significant number of married women with children worked in factories. Censuses indicate that 24.7 per cent of the total female population of France was economically active in 1866, compared with 27.2 per cent in Great Britain in 1871, and 9.7 per cent in the US in 1870. However, forty or more years later, France had 38.7 per cent in 1911, Britain 25.7 per cent in 1911 and the US 16.7 per cent in 1910. 4 With female labour * I would like to thank Miriam Cohen, Louise Tilly and Ange' lique Janssens. 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 Wally Seecombe, "Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in NineteenthCentury Britain", Social History, 1, 11 (1986), pp. 53-76, 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 C. Creighton, "The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (1996) 130Michael Hanagan force participation in France high and growing in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was much harder to foster an image of "domesticity" as a "norm" for working-class women. French labour unions were also generally less formally organized than their British counterparts and less able to carry out exclusionary practices had they so desired. In France, even in the 1900s, such flourishing British institutions as collective bargaining and strongly-organized national craft unions were almost non-existent -with one exception. By far the bestknown case of the exc...