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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Michael Hanagan
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 42 , supplement S5: The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? , September 1997 , pp. 129 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1999

References

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