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Catherine Omnès, Ouvrières Parisiennes: Marchés du travail et trajectoires professionelles au 20e siècle. Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1997. 374 pp. 190 francs.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2001

Laura Levine Frader
Affiliation:
Northeastern University

Abstract

For many years the history of women workers in France focused on the “heroic period” of economic transformation, the rise of the labor movement, and the emergence of socialist politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to World War One, mirroring the scholarship on French working-class history generally. More recently, scholars have challenged the unitary story of French working class formation by examining how cultural and historical meanings of sexual difference shaped workers' experiences and inflected the process of class formation. Now historians are turning their attention to the history of working-class women and gender after World War One, and are investigating how gender relations at work were affected by the war and the developments of the 1920s and 1930s. Catherine Omnès's meticulously researched Ouvrières Parisiennes contributes to this latter body of literature on the interwar period. Omnès's book, focused largely on women (rather than gender) in the metalworking, pharmaceutical, garment, and food processing industries of the Paris region, constitutes a major departure from some of the recent interpretations of women's work experience between the wars. Relying principally on the retirement dossiers of the Institution de retraite nationale interprofessionnel des salariés (IRNIS), the internship reports of women factory superintendents in training, and the personnel dossiers of a selection of Parisian firms (including the Compagnie française des téléphones, Thompson-Houston, La société Thibaud-Gibbs, and Panhard et Levasseur among others), Omnès produces a detailed and solidly crafted study of professional mobility and labor markets. Her study focuses on structures, institutions, and market forces as the prime movers of women's professional trajectories. In contrast to studies that have emphasized how gender difference negatively affected women's occupational mobility or their opportunities for learning new skills, Omnès offers a more positive account of women's experience both during World War One and World War Two.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2000 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

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