1. Gendered bodies were already the site of considerable debate throughout the nineteenth century in discussions about the right to work, social and family policies, the qualifications of citizenship and the problem of male military preparedness. See, for example, Nye, Robert A., Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mosse, George, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modem Europe (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; and Rabinbach, Anson, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990), pp. 224–228.Google Scholar Rabinbach's work is the most extensive study of work science in English, although the book is not designed to focus on the gender or race dimensions of work science. See also, Stewart, Mary Lynn, Women, Work, and the French State (Montreal, 1991)Google Scholar; Villermé, L.R., Tableau de L'Etat physique et moral des ouvriers employes dans les manufactures de coton, de laine, et de soie (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar;Auslander, Leora and Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle (eds), Différence des sexes et protection sociale. xix–xx siècles (St Denis, 1995)Google Scholar; Pedersen, Susan, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914-1945 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar and Michel, Seth Koven and Sonya (eds), Mothers of A New World (New York and London, 1995)Google Scholar;Fuchs, Rachel, Eleanor Accampo et al., Family, the State, and Welfare in Modern France (Baltimore, MD, 1996)Google Scholar;Canning, Kathleen, Languages of Gender and Labor. Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1996)Google Scholar;Downs, Laura Lee, Manufacturing Inequality (Ithaca, NY, 1995)Google Scholar; and Frader, Laura Levine, “Social Citizens Without Citizenship: Working-Class Women and Social Policy in Interwar France”, Social Politics, 3 (1996), pp. 111–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the die way in which this collaboration constructed “a new image of class relationships”, see Maier, Charles, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy”, Journal of Contemporary History, 5 (1970), p. 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. For examples of the naturalizing discourses addressed to the “inherent qualities” of women, see, for example, Phillips, Anne and Taylor, Barbara, “Sex and Skill: Notes Towards a Feminist Economics”, Feminist Review, 6 (1980), pp. 79–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Bradley, Harriet, Men's Work, Women's Work (Minneapolis, MN, 1989)Google Scholar;Chenut, Helen Harden, “The Gendering of Skill as Historical Process: the Case of French Knitters in Industrial Troyes, 1880-1939”, in Frader, Laura L. and Rose, Sonya O. (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 77–107Google Scholar; and Downs, Manufacturing Inequality.

3. See Nogaro, B. and Weil, Lucien, La main d'oeuvre etrangère et coloniale pendant la guerre (New Haven, CT and Paris, 1926)Google Scholar;Stovall, Tyler, “Color-blind France? Colonial Workers During the First World War”, Race and Class, 35 (1993), pp. 35–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar and , Stovall, “The Color Line Behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War”, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), PP. 737–769,CrossRefGoogle Scholar which analyses the different responses of the French to North African immigrant labor versus European immigrant labor. Stovall argues that the war lessened tensions between the French and European immigrants whereas it heightened hostility towards colonial workers of color. On immigrant workers, see Cross, Gary S., Immigrant Workers in Industrial France. The Making of a New Working Class (Philadelphia, PA, 1983)Google Scholar and Horne, John, “Immigrant Workers in France During World War I”, French Historical Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 57–88,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and , Home, Labour at War: France and Britain 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

4. See Rabinbach's discussion of cultural and social modernity with reference to the science of work in The Human Motor.

5. On the mutually constitutive character of these categories, see introduction in Harding, Sandra, The “Racial” Economy of Science: Towards A Democratic Future (Bloomington, IN, 1993).Google Scholar As Harding writes, “[…] it is clear that “race” and gender, racism and sexism, construct and maintain each other […]. Class and gender policies have constructed and maintained racial hierarchies just as race policies have done for class and gender hierarchies”( p. II). See also Turbin, Carole, Frader, Laura L., Rose, Sonya O. and Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, ‘A Roundtable on Gender, Race, Class, Culture and Politics: Where Do We Go From Here?”, Social Science History, 22 (1998), pp. 1–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. I am grateful to Rayna Rapp and to Ann Laura Stoler for conversations on this subject. See , Stoler, “Racial Histories and Regimes of Truth”, Political Power and Social Theory, II (1977), pp. 183–206.Google Scholar See also Stoler, and Cooper, Frederick, “Between Metropole and Colony”, in Cooper, and Stoler, (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997).Google Scholar As Stoler and Cooper write, citing George Stocking and others, “the concepts of culture and race have long served to buttress one another in crucial ways […] [racism] has long depended on hierarchies of civility, on cultural distinctions of breeding, character, and psychological disposition, on the relationship between the hidden essence of race and what were claimed to be its visual markers” (p. 34). On the links between notions of racial difference and the nation, see Malik, Kenan, The Meaning of Race. Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York, 1996), pp. 128–148Google Scholar;Lebovics, Herman, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity 1900-1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1992).Google Scholar On the cultural distinctions of “civility” and their links to concepts of the nation, and to class, see Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Oxford and Cambridge, 1994), especially part 1, ch. 2Google Scholar.

7. See Harding, “Racial” Economy of Science. As Harding points out, science itself is laden with conflicting tendencies: regressive collaboration with racist and eurocentric beliefs on the one hand; and on the other hand, the progressive effects of “scientific procedures that have proved effective in identfying racist and imperialist tendencies in the sciences […]”, (p. 14).

8. In the words of Roy Porter, “the body must be regarded as mediated through cultural sign systems”. See , Porter, “History of the Body” in Burke, Peter (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, PA, 1992), p. 215Google Scholar.

9. On these two approaches and their policy consequences in France and Britain, see Cross, Gary, A Questfor Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1914 (Berkeley, CA, 1989),Google Scholar chapter 5. See Rabinbach, The Human Motor, which examines the important German (as well as French) contributions of this movement.

10. Taylor's first work published in France in 1907, Etude sur Torganisation du Travail dans les Usines was published by the Revue de la Metallurgie; subsequent works were published in French within a year of their appearance in the United States. There is a voluminous literature on Taylorism apart from Taylor's own published work. For a sampling of the literature on the reception of Taylorism in France, see Fridenson, Patrick, “Un Tournant Taylorien de la Société française (1904-1918)” in Annales ESC, 5 (1987), pp. 1031–1060Google Scholar;Cohen, Yves, “Ernest Mattern chez Peugeot (1906-1918) ou comment peut-on etre taylorien?”, in Montmollin, Maurice de and Pastré, Olivier (eds), Le taylorisme (Paris, 1984)Google Scholar;Moutet, Aimée, Les logiques de l'entreprise (Paris, 1997)Google Scholar;Christin, O., “Les Enjeux de la rationalisation industrielle (1901–1929)”, Memoire de Maitrise, Université de Paris I, 1982.Google Scholar See also Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy”, on the cultural and political appeal of Taylorism; and , Rabinbach, “The European Science of Work: the Economy of the Body at the End of the Nineteenth Century”, in Kaplan, Stephen Laurence and Koepp, Cynthia J. (eds), Work in France. Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, NY, 1986), p. 475,Google Scholar n.I. See also , Cross, “Redefining Workers' Control: Rationalization, Labor Time, and Union Politics in France, 1900-1928”, in Cronin, James E. and Sirianni, Carmen (eds), Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900-1925 (Philadelphia, PA, 1983), pp. 143–172Google Scholar;Moutet, Aimée, “Patrons du Progrès ou Patrons de Combat? La politique de rationalisation de l'industrie française au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale”, in Murard, Lion and Zylberman, Patrick (eds), Le Soldat du Travail. Guerre, fascisme, et taylorisme (Paris, 1978), pp. 449–489.Google Scholar See also Georges Ribeill “Les Organisations du mouvement ouvrier en France face à la rationalisation (1926–1932)”, in de Montmollin and Pastré, Le taylorisme.

11. Cross, “Redefining Workers' Control”.

12. Hirata, “Division internationale du travail et taylorisme: Brésil, France, et Japon”, in de Montmollin and Pastré, Le taylorisme.

13. Thompson, Edward P., “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present, 38 (1969), pp. 56–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. , Rabinbach, “The European Science of Work”, p. 506,Google Scholar n. 111. The first stage “represented the creation of a disciplined workforce; the second was characterized by the struggle over the duration and value of labor time”, ibid.

15. Lahy, Jean-Marie, Le Système Taylor et la Physiologie du Travail Professionnel (Paris, 1921),Google Scholar Préface, p.v. On Lahy's critique of Taylor, see also , Rabinbach, The Human Motor, pp. 250–252Google Scholar.

16. See , Lahy, Le Système Taylor, pp. 156–157.Google Scholar Taylorism and work science both shared productivist goals; , Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 253Google Scholar.

17. As Rabinbach points out, the science of labor had to take account of changes in the labor process going on outside the laboratories in which it was first conceived. “Concern with fatigue, time, and motion, reflected deep social changes in the nature of the factory and the emergence of a workforce that no longer had to be subjected to the moral economy of industrial discipline outside the workplace. Instead, workers had to be taught to internalize the regularity imposed by machine technology and adapt to newly intensified work norms”, , Rabinbach, “European Science of Work”, p. 507.Google Scholar See also , Ribeill, “Les débuts de l'ergonomie en France à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale”, Le Mouvement Social, 113 (1980), pp. 3–36Google Scholar; and Fontanon, Claudine and Grelon, André (eds), Les Professeurs du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. Dictionnaire biographique, 1794–1955, 2 vols (Paris, 1994).Google Scholar It is quite possible that in measuring the efforts of the white male body these scientists were also struggling with their own definitions of masculinity. I am grateful to Antoinette Burton for this suggestion.

18. , Ribeill, “Les débuts de l'ergonomie en France”, p. 21Google Scholar.

19. The attention to race in the works of work science experts such as Jules Amar was partly based on early anthropological attempts to classify and evaluate the capacities of humans according to anthropometries. See Amar, Jules, Le Moteur humain et les bases scientifiques du travail professionnel, 2nd edition (Paris, 1923), p. 151. On race in the science of work, see also Elisa Camiscioli, “Labor Power and the Racial Economy: the Selection of Foreign Workers in France in the Late Third Republic”, paper presented to the conference, “Blurring the Boundaries: Politics and Culture in the French Third Republic”, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1997Google Scholar.

20. The law of 27 January 1880 required gymnastics training for boys in lycées; , Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 224.Google Scholar According to Amar, the physiologist Mosso wrote that “the catastrophe of Sedan will go down in history as the victory of German legs”; , Amar, Le Moteur humain, p. 673Google Scholar.

21. , Rabinbach, ‘The European Science of Work”, p. 492Google Scholar; The Human Motor, pp. 130–131, 224-227, 265–270. See also Ehrenberg, Alain, Le corps militaire: politique et pédagogic en démocratie (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar.

22. , Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 265.Google Scholar During the war, work scientists investigated the possibilities of rehabilitating wounded soldiers. Amar in particular worked on the re-education of wounded men and on the development of prostheses that would enable war ctipples to return to work. His work concerned exclusively white French soldiers. See , Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization and the Re-Employment of the Disabled (New York, 1919), pp. 227–358.Google Scholar See also Monod, Hugues, “Jules Amar”, in Fontanon and Grelon, Les Professeurs du Conservatoire national, vol. 2, pp. 102–103Google Scholar.

23. See Downs, Manufacturing Inequality; Fourcaut, Annie, Femmes à l'usine: auvrières et surinten-dantes dans les enterprises françaises de l'entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar;Weil, Simone, La condition ouvrière (Paris, 1951)Google Scholar.

24. , Downs, Manufacturing Inequality, pp. 83–84Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., p. 84; Frois, Marcel, La Santé et le travail des Femmes Pendant la Guerre (Paris and New Haven, CT, 1926), p. 62.Google Scholar Frois' concerns about the white female working body were echoed by British investigations into munitions workers for the Health of Munitions Workers' Committee in 1917 and 1918. See , Cross, A Quest for Time, p. 117.Google Scholar Not all work scientists agreed about the employability of white women in “male” jobs. Jules Amar reviewed differences in the cardiograms of French men and women responding to the sound of the fall of a two kilogram weight. He found that the cardiograms showed strong changes in the women tested, but a negligable changes or none at all in the men – the difference attributable to women's sensation of fear and powerlessness and their greater emotional susceptibility; Dubesset, Mathilde, Thébaud, Françoise and Vincent, Catherine, “Les munitionettes de la Seine”, in Fridenson, Patrick (ed.), 1914–1918: l'autre front (Cahiers du Mouvement Social, 2) (Paris, 1977), pp. 189–219,Google Scholar 196, fn. 34. Amar's conclusions were bolstered by anthropometric data from the 1860s and 1870s that demonstrated women's inferiority to men in measures of height, weight, lung displacement (capacité vitale), thoracic volume, and muscular strength. Amar argued that in general “the shape of the body […] provides a guide for the workers' choice of one form of work over another … normally, men are organized and constructed to work in a certain way because this is the way their work is most economical”; , Amar, Le Moteur humain, pp. 148 and 148-178.Google Scholar Amar argued that as a general rule physical proportions determined professional aptitides. See also pp. 323–324 for Amar's attempt to classify men according to morphology or the “architecture of their bodies”. Thus, he argued that “in the vast majority of work requiring great effort and sustained attention [une attention puissante], there is no place for women workers. They are more appropriate for office occupations”. Ibid., p. 606.

26. Immigrant colonial workers and workers of color during the war were overwhelmingly men. See below.

27. As Downs notes, the original intentions of the founders of the system, organized around republican feminist Cecile Brunschvicg, were to promote wage parity for women with men, over- see their working conditions, and ultimately to protect “women's maternal capacity through care-flil administration of the factory's welfare and maternal services”; , Downs, Manufacturing Inequality, p. 177.Google Scholar Downs makes the important point that this system, managed by a corps of women factory superintendents, functioned as one additional component of the rationalizing impulse of the war and interwar years.

28. Ibid., on the wartime activities of the superintendents, pp. 166–185, and pp. 233–275 on the interwar years; see also , Fourcaut, Femmes à l'usine, pp. 200–207Google Scholar.

29. Stovall, “The Color Line”.

30. I am indebted to Antoinette Burton for calling attention to these points.

31. Of course, these intersections occurred also in practice as Tyler Stovall demonstrates in “The Color Line”.

32. See , Stovall, “The Color Line”, p. 747Google Scholar.

33. , Nogaro and , Weil, La main d'oeuvre étrangere, p. 26.Google Scholar There were approximately 30,000 North African workers already in France prior to the war, most of whom worked as unskilled laborers in mining and industry (p. 5). In 1915, the Undersecretary of State for Artillery and Munitions in the Ministry of War hired several hundred Kabyle workers for artillery manufacture and the Minister of Agriculture hired several hundred for agricultural work in the region south of Paris. A more systematic mobilization of colonial labor began in 1916. On the differences in treatment of European and colonial labor, see Stovall, “Color-blind France?”.

34. , Stovall, “Color Blind France?”, p. 48. Stovall observes that during the war, such supposed physical characteristics came to be viewed as a moral deficiency: laziness. Dexterity was the skill most often associated with women, usually because of cultural beliefs about women's superior fine-motor coordination and their “nimble fingers”. See, for example,Google Scholar, Downs, Manufacturing Inequality, pp. 83–84Google Scholar.

35. , Nogaro and , Weil, La main d'oeuvre étrangère, pp. 49–50, 54Google Scholar.

36. , Lahy, Le Système Taylor, p. ixGoogle Scholar.

37. , Ribeill, “Les débuts de l'ergonomie en France”, p. 24.Google Scholar See also Schneider, William H., “The Scientific Study of Labor in Interwar France”, French Historical Studies, 17 (1991), p. 418CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. , Amar, Le Moteur humain, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1923), p. 43Google Scholar.

39. Ibid., p. 116.

40. On Amar's study of racialized bodies at work, see also , Ribeill, “Les débuts de l'ergonomie en France”, pp. 14–16Google Scholar and , Camiscioli, “Labor Power and the Racial Economy”, pp. 4–6Google Scholar.

41. , Amar, Le Moteur humain, p. xGoogle Scholar.

42. Ibid., pp. 43–44.

43. Ibid., pp. 219–220. This observation also revealed how white French workers' characteristics were defined. I am grateful to James Cronin for pointing this out.

44. Ibid., p. 220.

45. , Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization, p. 204.Google Scholar See also , Camiscioli, “Labor Power and the Racial Economy”, p. 6.Google Scholar The only defect of the French laborer was that “his temperament is impulsive”. Amar believed French workers needed better vocational training and better hygiene at work. He also believed that well-trained French workers should travel to the colonies to train native craftsmen. “Moreover, it is the duty of the European worker to direct native labor which is naturally adapted to fatiguing kinds of work which would not tax the native's endurance as greatly as it would ours […]” (p. 210)[emphasis is mine - LLF].

46. See Schneider, “The Scientific Study of Labor”. On how the arguments of these men transcended solidaristic arguments for marrying the interests of labor and capital, see , Cross, A Quest for Time, pp. 120–122.Google Scholar As Cross also points out, in Britain work scientists believed that die increased leisure that would result from a shorter, more efficient working day and higher productivity would allow Britain to "build an improved race […]” (p. 120). This is a not atypical example of the looseness with which the notion of race was used to reflect both whiteness and nationality. On the vocational guidance applications of work science, see also Robens, Mary Louise, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, IL, 1994), pp. 183–196 and 206-211Google Scholar.

47. Much of the research of these laboratories was specifically directed towards the prevention of industrial accidents and focused on masculine jobs such as those of railway switchmen, tramway and bus drivers, welders, and mine workers. See, for instance, , Lahy, La Sélection psychophysiologique des travailleurs: conducteurs de tramways et d'autobus (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar and articles in the review Travail humain founded by Lahy and Laugier in 1933. See also Schneider, “The Scientific Study of Labor”.

48. See Delphine Gardey, “Un Monde en Mutation. Les Employés de Bureau en France, 1890-1930. Féminisation, Mécanisation, Rationalisation”; Thèse de Doctorat nouvelle régime. Université de Paris VII, 1995, pp. 824–833. See also Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 306–326Google Scholar.

49. See “L'organisation methodique du Travail et son Application aux Postes et Télégraphes”, Annaks des PTT, 8 (1923), pp. 835–976Google Scholar;“Le Téléphone en France et à l'Etranger. Progrès technique, organisation rationnelle”, Annaks des PTT, 8 (1923), pp. 565–598Google Scholar;“Administration industrielle”, Annaks des PTT, 2 (1917), pp. 356–386Google Scholar.

50. This story of the feminization of the French postal and telephone service is well told by Bachrach, Susan in Dames employees: The Feminization of Postal Work in Nineteenth Century France (New York, 1984), pp. 30–50.Google Scholar See also Bouvier, Jeanne, Histoire des dames employées dans ks Postes, Télégraphes, et Téléphones (Paris, 1930)Google Scholar;Bertinotti, Dominique, “Carrières féminines et carrières masculines dans l'administration des postes et télégraphes à la fin du XIXe siècle”, Annaks. ESC, 3 (1985), pp. 625–640.Google Scholar The grade, ”dame employee”, actually included all women working in the postal, telegraph and telephone (PTT) service; , Bachrach, Dames employées, p. 41.Google Scholar On differential wages, see Bachrach, Dames employées; Pezerat, Pierrette and Poublan, Danielle, “Femmes sans maris. Les employees des postes”, in Klapisch-Zuber, Arlette Farge et Christiane (eds), Madame ou Mademoiselle? Itineraires de la solitude feminine, 18e–20e siècle (Paris, 1984), p. 123Google Scholar.

51. Vignes, Madeleine, Les téléphonistes des PTT (préface de Madeleine Rebérioux) (Paris, 1984), p. 12Google Scholar;, Bachrach, Dames employées, p. 69.Google Scholar Figures on the interwar period are not disaggregated by service, see française, République. Ministère du Travail, de l'Hygiène, de l'Assistarice et de la Prévoyance sociale, Statistique générale de France. Resultats statistiques du Recensement générale de la Population (1921, 1926, 1936) (Paris, 1922, 1928, 1937).Google Scholar Women counted for 22.5 per cent of PTT workers in 1906, 30.3 per cent in 1926 and 32.8 per cent in 1936.

52. , Bachrach, Dames employées, p. 51Google Scholar;, Bertinotti, “Carrières féminines”, p. 637Google Scholar.

53. République française. Ministère des PTT, Bulletin mensuel des PTT Janvier 1890 (Paris, 1890), pp. 315–316Google Scholar;Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), pp. 411–415Google Scholar.

54. See Poublan, Pezerat et, “Femmes sans maris”, pp. 129–130,Google Scholar who report that in 1921, fifty per cent of all female postal workers were widowed, divorced, or unmarried. Although this figure incorporated the effects of male mortality during the war, it was consistent with low marriage rates among women postal workers before the war. The vast majority of male workers, on the other hand, tended to be married.

55. Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), p. 411Google Scholar; Republique francaise. Ministère des PTT, Bulletin officiel du Ministère des PTT, 17 (1930), p. 694Google Scholar.

56. The phrase is Rayna Rapp's, (personal communication to the author). On the requirements for admission to the competency examinations where these criteria were spelled out, see, for example, Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), pp. 411–415Google Scholar.

57. Cultural competence also incorporated “civility”, and itself contributed to the construction of Frenchness within the public service. See Elias, The Civilizing Process.

58. See Conklin, Alice, “Redefining ‘Frenchness’: France and West Africa”, in Clancy-Smith, Julia and Gouda, Frances (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA and London, 1998), pp. 76–83. Janet Home places somewhat more emphasis on white French women's “civilizing” work among Muslim women in North Africa whose wearing of the veil was considered a form of dissimulation and whose hygiene was by implication not up to French standardsGoogle Scholar; Horne, “In Pursuit of Greater France: Visions of Empire Among Musée Social Reformers, 1894–1931”, ibid., pp. 37–41. A somewhat different picture was painted by Hubertine Auclert in her Femmes arabes en Algérie (1900). See Julia Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender, and Identities in the Making of French Algeria, 1830-1962”, in , Clancy-Smith and , Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, pp. 168–172Google Scholar.

59. This difference suggests that nineteenth-century suspicions of the woman worker and especially the single woman worker remained alive in the period after the Great War. On those nineteenth-century suspicions, see , Scott, “‘L'Ouvrière, mot impie, sordide’, […]” and “A Statistical Representation of Work”, in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

60. Thus, “race” was also complicated by regionality – an employee who spoke with a thick regional accent was not acceptable unless her pronunciation could be “corrected”. Moreover, “Frenchness” was still a category that distinguished among and between French women of different social, regional, and educational – as well as racial – backgrounds. I am grateful to James Cronin for raising this point. See République française. Ministère des PTT, Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), p. 412Google Scholar;Bulletin officiel du Ministère des PTT, 17 (1930), p. 695Google Scholar.

61. See also Martin, Michele, “Hello Central': Gender Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. (Montréal, 1991), pp. 58–60Google Scholar; Bachrach, Dames employées. See also Fontègne, Julien and Solari, Emilio, “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste. Essai de psychologie professionnelle’, Archives de psychologie, 17 (1918), p. 92.Google Scholar

62. See Fontègne and Solari, “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste”. Roberts argues that in debates about vocational guidance, the French attempted to “reconcile the ongoing modernization of economic and social life with time-honored cultural traditions”; , Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, p. 187.Google Scholar I am not so sure there was that much reconciliation to be done in matters of gender. The points of departure for both modernization and “cultural tradition” were the same: both already incorporated cultural notions of gendered bodies.

63. Solari, Fontègne et, “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste”, pp. 85–86 and 95Google Scholar.

64. Ibid., pp. 93–95. Work science was applied to telephone operators even more aggressively in the Netherlands. See Korving, Robert and Hogesteeger, Gerard, “Psychotechnik bei der PTT Niederlande”, in Gold, Helmut and Koch, Annette (eds), Fräulein vom Amt (Munich, 1993), pp. 120–134. On male operators, seeGoogle Scholar, Bouvier, Histoire des dames employées, p. 179Google Scholar.

65. Good nerves, of course, were not enough; Amar judged the Muslim and Kabyle men he tested to have good neuromuscular systems and display a capacity for quick reactions to stimuli, but they were never considered for this kind of work in France. Nor is it clear that they performed public sector work in the colonies. The qualities that work scientists and the state believed made women especially fit to be telephone operators illustrated the instability of gendered categories of skill. The shift from muscles to nerves as the desirable female quality that made women good operators involved a reversal of the frequent criticism of women's presumed “nervous” qualities. Thus women's supposedly inherent “nervousness” that made male workers criticize women's inappropriateness for certain tasks in the defense industries during World War I, for example, enabled them to be effective operators in the eyes of the PTT.

66. Rougier, E., Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar.

67. Ibid., p. 7.

68. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

69. Ibid., pp. 12-13 and 17.

70. Bertho, Catherine, Histoire des télécommunications en France (Toulouse, 1984), p. 75Google Scholar.

71. See , Vignes, Les téléphonistes des PTT, p. 23Google Scholar and Bertinotti, Dominique, Artisans d'hier et communications d'aujourd'hui, 1850–1950 (Paris, 1981), p. 14Google Scholar.

72. , Bouvier, Histoire des dames employées, p. 182.Google Scholar Women did resist some of these practices, although the majority of the labor struggles were directed not at the constraints of rationalization and work discipline, but at pay scales, poor opportunities for advancement and the elimination of the dame employée as a separate category with assimilation of women into the categories reserved for men.

73. See République française. Ministére de Commerce, de l'lndustrie et des Colonies, Bulletin mensuel de Ministère de Commerce, de l'lndustrie et des Colonies, I (1890), p. 315.Google Scholar This requirement remained in effect through the 1930s. It was based on the principle of incompatibity of certain public services (operators could not obtain authorization to marry policemen or mayors or assistant mayors, for example) and operated as another element of regulation. See , Bouvier, Histoire des dames employées, pp. 204–205Google Scholar.

74. , Rougier, Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste, p. 24.Google Scholar The focus of these activities as well as of the housing arrangements for operators was the single women who made up the majority of telephone operators. Telephone operators, along with other postal workers, were awarded paid maternity leave in 1911. See (anonymous) “La Poste au Féminin”, Réference, 7 (1984), p. 17Google Scholar.

75. Dr , Clapart (fils), Maladies et Accidents professionals des téléphonistes à Paris (Paris, 1911), p. 12–17.Google Scholar This was very likely because of the fact that the vast majority of operators were women who worked on the busy daytime shirts.

76. Ibid., p. 19.

77. This is probably why Alexander Millerand, Minister of Public Works and the PTT in 1910, had proposed creating a revolving recruitment of young operators who would be encouraged by a system of bonuses to leave the administration at age twenty-five and who, in any case could work no longer than age thirty-five. See “Le Nouveau recrutement des téléphonistes”, L' February 1910. The rationale was to replace an ageing corps of operators with fresh blood. Since they were considered “floating personnel” they could be easily let go, permitting the administration to save money or adopt new technologies without worrying about the seniority of public service workers. The project was never adopted. On the concern with “nervous fatigue”, see , Cross, A Quest for Time, p. 113Google Scholar.

78. Syndicat national des Agents des PTT (CGT), IVe Congrès des Agents des PTT tenu à Paris les 19-22 avril 1922 (Limoges, 1922).Google Scholar See especially the intervention of Mme Stanko, delegate for the operators, pp. 130-132. On labor's reaction to Taylorism, see Cross, “Redefining Workers' Control”, and A Quest for Time; , Ribeill, 9Les Organisations du Mouvement”, pp. 127–140Google Scholar; Fridenson, “Un tournant taylorien”.

79. IVe Congrès des Agents des PTT, pp. 107, 140. See also discussions in this congress on specialization and the scientific organization of labor.

80. Syndicat national des Agents des Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (confédéré), Vllième Congrès national tenu à Toulouse les 10–13 juin 1925 (Epernay, 1925), pp. 268–283.Google Scholar One delegate's suggestion that a solution to the problem of operators' fatigue would be to introduce men into the telephone exchanges was laughed off. On the German use of psychotechnics, see Horst Gundlach, “Psychotechnische Untersuchungen bei der Deutschen Reichspost”, in Gold and Koch, Fräulein vom Amt.

81. Dr Begoin, D.P., Le Travail et la Fatigue. Le Névrose des Téléphonistes et des mécanographes, special number of La Raison, 20/21 (1958)Google Scholar.

82. See, for example, the essays in Frader and Rose, Gender and Class in Modem Europe; and Downs, Manufacturing Inequality.

83. Tyler Stovall's excellent work, cited above, is an important exception. There has been much work, of course, on the subject of racism in post-World-War-II France. An abundant literature has examined immigration and the salience of cultural and ethnic difference in shaping working class identities in the interwar and post-World-War-II periods (see, for instance, Green, Nancy, Ready-to-Wear, Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC and London, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially pp. 188-218 and 251–279). However, most historical work on immigration does not address the category of race nor does it attempt to theorize the meanings of racial difference in France, particularly in relation to France's colonial empire. This work remains to be done.

84. Of course, those differences dictated the terms of “scientific” investigation itself.

85. See , Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, p. 210,Google Scholar who cites Marjorie Beale, that the French adopted “techniques of social management […] in order to preserve what they saw as traditional social relations and cultural traditions”.