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.

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.