In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • En découdre. Comment les ouvrières ont révolutionné le travail et la société by Fanny Gallot
  • Christine Hamelin
Gallot Fanny, 2015, En découdre. Comment les ouvrières ont révolutionné le travail et la société [Raring for a fight: How women factory workers revolutionized work and society in France], Paris, La Découverte, 288p.

This work, which the author derived from her doctoral thesis, focuses on women factory workers hired in the late 1960s at a time when the French economy was still growing; many were laid off early in the 2000s, a time of de-industrialization and factory closures. Fanny Gallot’s undertaking is ambitious: to reconstitute the contours of an entire generation of women workers using a socio-historical approach that is both cross-sectional and dynamic. Cross-sectional in that the analysis is not restricted to the factory world but extends to the continuous balancing act women had to perform between work and family life; dynamic in that studying a generation is a means not only of measuring changes in female factory work organization but also of tracking the experiences and demands of women working in conditions that grew constantly harsher over the period.

Gallot draws primarily on an in-depth study of two companies: Chantelle, a maker of women’s lingerie, and Moulinex, a home appliance manufacturer. The companies were distinct not just in terms of business sector and products but also the profile of their women workers. At Moulinex they were from rural farms in Lower Normandy, whereas at Chantelle, whose main factory was in the industrial region of Nantes, more were of working-class origin. Another major difference: whereas the Chantelle workforce was exclusively female, at Moulinex it was mixed. But despite the heterogeneity of these women’s living, working and collective action conditions, the book is concerned to portray a shared experience, the “collective culture” of women factory workers. Hired as very young unskilled workers, these women aged together in the factory and experienced the same life events at the same ages. Their long careers at a single company ultimately created a feeling of attachment to the factory and its products. Strong ties were also created, though they do not seem to have withstood the shock of factory closures and “restructuration” very well.

The materials used to study Moulinex and Chantelle (and a few other companies mentioned occasionally, such as Lejaby [another women’s lingerie manufacturer]) are extremely varied. They include written sources (ministerial, company and union archives; feminist archives; women workers’ own written accounts); oral sources (interviews with workers, some conducted by the author herself) and audio-visual sources (documentaries and fiction films). While events are viewed primarily through the women’s eyes, source diversity enables the author to apprehend changes in public policy, management stances and union debates on female employment, as well as the difficult encounter between the feminist movement and women factory workers.

Gallot combines analysis of class and gender positions. In the course of the twelve chapters, each focused on a different theme, she probes the social and gender-based divisions operative not only in factory work itself but also in union activism and the family sphere. She thus brings to light the range of constraints [End Page 562] these women had to cope with: their confinement to relatively low-skilled, lowpaid jobs despite policies for promoting occupational equality; the devaluing of their skills, considered “natural” and remunerated less than men’s; increasingly harsh working conditions, including work pace acceleration, permanent production uncertainties, paternalism and/or the rigidity of an almost exclusively male hierarchy; the physical discomfort that comes of performing the same movements and assuming the same positions all day long; sexual harassment by male superiors, considered an ordinary occurrence; the daily strain of organizing and doing both housework and paid work; the impediment to mobilizing represented by having a new house and a mortgage to pay off; possibly having a husband who did not look kindly on an activist wife who was spending less and less time at home, spoke out in public in some cases, and who kept company with other men when occupying factories. Here we...

pdf

Share