Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Women, Work, and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879-1919
ISBN: 9780773562059
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / McGill-Queen''s University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Women -- Employment -- Law and legislation -- France; Labor laws and legislation -- France -- History;

In France, during the 1880s and 1890s, the protection of women and girls in the workplace was advocated by sociologists, social economists, union leaders, enlightened industrialists, and politicians of virtually every ideological hue. In response, laws were enacted restricting not only the number of hours and the time of day that women could work but also their access to dangerous trades. Mary Lynn Stewart argues that these restrictions, though initiated to protect women and girls, were actually a method of exploiting women's dual role of short-time wage worker and unpaid housewife and mother.

Mary Lynn Stewart is professor emerita of Simon Fraser University.