The Fabric of Gender: Working Class Culture in Third Republic France (review)

Sometimes when one opens a book with a title suggesting national coverage to find a local or regional study, one feels slightly cheated by the publisher. This is not the case with Helen Harden Chenut's The Fabric of Gender, which is a rich micro-history, focusing on life in the textile town of Troyes. This narrow geographical focus enables Chenut to be more expansive rather than less so, both chronologically and thematically. Indeed, one of the most distinctive features of the work is that it combines the analysis of working conditions, labour politics and consumer culture in a single volume, bringing together aspects of working-class identities that have hitherto mostly been treated separately. The material on consumption provides a particularly welcome addition to the literature on this topic, giving us a rare insight into the evolution of working-class consumer practices in the first half of the twentieth century. Throughout the work, a wide range of sources are deployed, including extensive national and local archives, notarial records, photographs, interviews and advertising materials.

Troyes was, in Chenut's words, 'a town governed by the whistles of the mills' (p. 110). Yet the large industrialized mills that had come into existence by 1900 coexisted with small workshops, and manufacturers continued to put out certain tasks to homeworkers even in the interwar period. The industry's workforce was a highly feminized one: by the 1930s, fifty-eight per cent of textile workers in the area were women. As Chenut charts the changing organization of work, the bitter struggles between workers and employers, and the growth of working-class organizations in Troyes, from the turn of the century to the eve of the Second World War, questions of gender identity and gender inequality repeatedly come into view. We meet the remarkable Suzanne Gallois, a CGTU activist between the wars, sacked at least once for her militancy, who tells the story of the day she rebelliously tried on a new dress she was hemming for the boss's wife and modelled it for her co-workers. In doing so, she crossed an important class boundary. Chenut argues that consumption played an important part in working-class counterculture, first with the creation of cooperative shops in the 1880s, and later with increasing demands for the right to participate in the expanding consumer market of the interwar years. Photographs of sorties d'usine show how, by the 1920s, women workers had largely abandoned the aprons that were the prewar markers of the class status and were beginning to adopt to the shorter hair and dress lengths that 'identify them easily with their times, but not necessarily with their social class' (p. 301). Perhaps more could have been made of these intriguing visual sources, but overall this is an impressively well-researched and illuminating social history.