My father would in the evenings read for my mother the book by Bebel, ‘The woman in Socialism’. She could not read it herself as she was busy darning socks and mending clothes.

At the Conference of the amalgamated unions of France (CGT) 10–14 September 1900 the following statements were made:

• • A woman's place is at home where she should occupy herself with the wellbeing of her husband and children. Female work is against nature.

• • Female work is contrary to health and hygiene and causes degeneration.

• • Female work is against morals and breeds promiscuity and prostitution.

• • As women are paid less female work undermines men and the proletarian fight against capitalism.

• • Female work is not emancipating but makes women slaves to the employer on top of family duties.

• • When the proletarians have achieved the victory over the capitalists women will not need to work outside the home anymore.

And finally:

• • All workers agree that the introduction of women into industry has been bad for the working class in the moral as well as the physical and economic sense. While it is not within our power, today, to change the situation, our goal is at least to ameliorate the bad effects of female industrial work.

When discussing the position of women in the workplace in the late nineteenth century and the ideological background against which they had to operate, it is of some importance to analyse the stance taken by the unions and the socialist movement.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the new wave of feminist research made serious challenges regarding existing views of the past. One of the debates focused on the absence of interest in the life and condition of women. The issue was raised that scholars who had challenged paradigms on political grounds and demanded the right of the working class to enter into history, themselves made unfounded claims of what women had wanted. Such claims were on the one hand linked to their own prejudices, on the other hand to those of working-class men of past centuries