The overlap between the domestic unit and the production unit – the household economy – is an important issue in historical studies of European societies. In the literature, the household economy is studied mostly in the context of historical periods preceding industrialization.Footnote 1 Its development in modern times is mentioned, but little studied.
Yet family business in the twentieth century was, as in the past, the dominant form of economic organization in western Europe. Recent studies conducted by the Family Business Network have quantified the number of family businesses not measured in public statistics and concluded that they can no longer be regarded as marginal or residual. According to these studies, in 2007, for example, 83 per cent of French enterprises were family businesses, accounting for around one-half of total employment.Footnote 2 Although not all family businesses are of equal size and some family businesses, especially those listed on the stock market, employ large numbers of workers and operate more like capitalist and managerial firms than early modern households, these large family businesses constitute only a very small, albeit economically powerful, minority. In France 84 per cent of family businesses employ fewer than 10 workers. In all these instances household and family businesses presumably interact with one another very frequently.Footnote 3 The unpaid work of women and of other members of the family is often crucial to the constitution, survival, and development of these small and very small businesses.
How many people are involved in this type of activity within small enterprises? What professional status characterizes them across different economic sectors? Until World War II the only available data were qualitative observations, and even after the war they were very unequal, and probably underestimated the actual numbers.Footnote 4 In France family workers were identified in the 1954 population census, but they were no longer recorded in 1968.Footnote 5 They were once again counted in the 1975 census, but family workers in agriculture, for instance, were estimated to number a total of 506,000 (including 377,100 women), even though in 1971 a Ministry of Agriculture estimate based on a more extensive definition of the rural working population, and including people working not only full-time but also part-time on farms, put the number of family workers at quadruple this figure. The number of people who were not heads of farms but “regularly” worked on farms totalled 417,523 men and 1,374,661 women in the 1969–1970 “agricultural season” (campagne agricole).Footnote 6
Like other precarious and intermittent employment in a family business, the work of kin, and particularly women's work, lacks visibility and might indeed be completely “invisible”. Nevertheless, at the end of the 1930s the ILO considered the contribution to family businesses so significant that, beginning in 1937, it was considered to meet the threshold for the International Classification of Status in Employment (ICSE) and appeared in the statistical table on the active population (gainfully occupied population, distribution by industrial status). Despite the fact that these boxes remained empty for many countries, the “unpaid family workers” category continued to appear in every ICSE update until the final update in the 1990s.Footnote 7
Besides the statistical tracking, this important decision was no doubt frequently discussed in the corridors and meetings of the ILO.Footnote 8 At the end of a major investigation that began in 1936, Marguerite Thibert, a militant feminist and ILO official in charge of women and child labour issues, drafted a report published two years later with a subtitle: “A Contribution to the Study of the Status of Women”, that does justice to the intellectual openness and analytical skills of this international expert on female employment.Footnote 9 In the section on “Female employment problems related to the civil and political status of women”, she demonstrates her grasp of a major limitation in recognizing productive female labour that at the time especially affected married women:
Another disability imposed in several countries on women married under the regime of the “community of property” is that of having no legal title to remuneration for a job done in their husband's employment. The disability exists in French law for instance, the revenue authorities having disputed the right of a woman who helped her husband in his business to deduct her wages from his earnings. A similar situation arises under other laws of the same kind, notably in some of the United States of America.Footnote 10
As a Frenchwoman, she was referring to her country, where, on the eve of World War II, small firms and independent shops benefited greatly from the work of spouses, as they had done throughout the preceding century after the Civil Code underlying this civil legislation had been conceived in 1804.Footnote 11 She was most likely thinking of small family production units when she wrote these lines underscoring the lack of recognition of the occupational status of female labour. Her voice was that of a small minority. The contribution of a collaborating spouse was difficult to determine at the time, for the actors themselves and also for legal professionals, since it involved several areas of civil law: marriage, tax, and family.Footnote 12
Thus, despite reflections leading to very precise framings of this issue, it was not until 1982 that France implemented a law to define the condition and status of these predominantly female workers, and their rights deriving from working in a family business. The 1982 law adopted a liberal approach in its attempt to address the most pressing issues concerning the role of the business owner's spouse, and it did not require collaborative activity to be mandatorily declared.
The law's limitations, which sociologists and legal experts highlighted as soon as it was enacted,Footnote 13 were most flagrantly illustrated by its weak effect on family business practices. The institutional response to this lack of factual efficiency had to wait for a comprehensive revision of small business regulations. Almost a quarter of a century later, the Dutreuil Law, enacted in 2005 “in favour of SMEs”, provided an opportunity to reform the 1982 law and to mitigate the most obvious of these limitations. After years of debate, the 2005 law finally introduced an obligation to declare the status of a spouse in accordance with the 1982 law: associate, employed, or collaborating spouse.Footnote 14 As this can be considered a milestone in the history of the condition of collaborating spouses in productive activities, it is worth retracing the historical path that brought this issue to the forefront and gave it a visibility in the eyes of social decision-makers and actors. This path also has a broader dimension as it deals with the connection between the private and professional spheres that is especially prevalent in craftwork, where it has persisted throughout history to this day.Footnote 15
The reasons for the late and limited recognition of the role of craft family workers (primarily spouses, sons, and daughters) can be illustrated through an analysis of different and competing legal and political conceptions that emerged, particularly beginning in the mid-1960s, about the productive work of the helping spouse. This empirical perspective will show how this prolonged process reflects the slow transformation of generational and gender relations in families.
The normative conception of the family included in the Napoleonic Code of 1804 left little room for the emergence of contractual relations, especially between spouses. According to the Civil Code of 1804 the husband is the head of the family and the administrator of any joint property and earnings.Footnote 16 Another institution specific to the Napoleonic Code formed the pillar of this gendered construct: the institution of marital authority whereby the wife is obliged to obtain authorization from her husband before taking any public action.Footnote 17 As the enterprise was neither defined nor covered by the Commercial Code of 1806, which regulated the actions of individual entrepreneurs only, family workshops were subject mainly to civil law norms that defined both economic and moral obligations.Footnote 18
The existing literature on family history and gender history in France has focused mostly on the first two aspects of this normative construct. This article will specifically address a third obligation outlined in the Civil Code and that concerns the nature of matrimonial relations: the spousal duty to assist. This framework considerably held back the establishment of contractual relations between spouses; arguments tied to the duty to provide mutual aid were most frequently invoked to deny the legitimacy of contractual relations between spouses, especially once the barriers surrounding marital potestas fell.
DEBATES ON MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS IN FAMILY BUSINESS
The nature of family ties, which at a very intimate level forms the basis of relationships between spouses in households and family businesses, is at the crux of arguments put forward by legal experts. The particular relations that characterize marriage generate arguments that are most often made on “moral” grounds, and that point to obligations of mutual aid within the marriage and family as guaranteeing the smooth functioning of economic activities. Discussion on defining economic relations within a household and family business was reopened in the mid-1960s with legal and political arguments emphasizing the market value of this work and the need to create contractual relations among family members involved in productive activity.Footnote 19
Our aim is, first of all, to follow the main institutional steps preceding and accompanying the debate opposing these conflicting visions of marital and interfamilial relationships within family businesses. This long-term historical analysis will allow us to catch the apparently contradictory dynamics of the law enacted in 1982 and which defined the collaborating spouse status, and to identity its achievements and the resistance to which it gave rise. Undoubtedly, the moral arguments directed at a contractual definition of family relationships by jurists, politicians, and social actors in the second half of the twentieth century were rooted in the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, matrimonial and family law was defined.
One of the most important consequences of the subordination of other family members to the head of the family is that the fruits of any joint labour were considered inseparable from the workshop's assets (also the family's joint assets) and subject to the direction of a paterfamilias acting for the common good.Footnote 20
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century these workshops began to interact with productive systems that, for the first time, included much more complex, mechanized, and concentrated units than in the pre-industrial past. The novel and disruptive effects of these changes shaped new forms of labour organization, but the changes also coexisted with old production conditions and social institutions. Contrary to what researchers and analysts of the social consequences of the industrial revolution had anticipated, industrial concentration in France was a gradual and very uneven process in some areas. The average number of employees by industrial unit throughout the industrial sector as a whole totalled 6 in 1906, 8.7 in 1921, and 10.8 in 1931.Footnote 21 In 1926, 52 per cent of the working population was employed in businesses with fewer than 20 employees; in 1962 and 1966 the corresponding figure was 30 per cent. Since the mid-1970s the trend has actually strengthened: in 2005, these businesses employed 37.6 per cent of the working population.Footnote 22 The developments help to explain the resurgence in the twentieth century of seemingly outdated forms – that had in fact never completely disappeared – of definitions of relations among family business members.
In the mid-nineteenth century, a majority of the representatives that were about to vote on the social and tax laws of the Third Republic were of the same opinion as Frédéric Le Play, founder of the Social Economy Society: “Our most fatal error is to allow State encroachment to disrupt the authority of the family father […] the error is to submit the household, workshop, and family personnel to the authority of legislators, bureaucrats, and their agents.”Footnote 23 Thus, in line with the safeguard principle that Karl Marx called “the sacred institution of the family” at the time, many rejected any interference in family workshops. In the words of Marx:
So long as Factory legislation is confined to regulating the labor in factories, manufactories, etc., it is regarded as a mere interference with the exploiting rights of capital. But when it comes to regulating the so-called home-labor, it is immediately viewed as a direct attack on the patria potestas, on parental authority.Footnote 24
As is the case for relatives actively involved in family businesses in France today, at that time a family member's or spouse's unpaid, regular work was recognized solely through a family's internal convention and transaction, subject to the goodwill and intentions of the head of the household.
Alternately, it could be recognized through litigation and conflict brought about by individual demands to be compensated for labour provided in market production. In some cases craftsmen based these claims on the existence of institutions created for farmers, such as “deferred salary”, a form of compensation for unpaid work on family property created in 1939, or on concepts of civil and commercial law, such as “unjust enrichment”.
Deferred salary in particular was an important legal development in this area: an unpaid son or daughter's right to claim an additional share of the paternal inheritance in the event of the father's death. This legal provision is especially interesting for three reasons. The first is that it was added to the group of measures affecting the family that were voted into law on 29 July 1939 (two months before the outbreak of World War II on 3 September) and which have since unofficially been called the “Family Code”.Footnote 25 Indeed, in a way, establishing the right to a debt to be paid after the death of the head of the family involves ruling on the conditions determining the continuity of both the farm and the family. It is no coincidence that this law was part of a series of measures taken to promote the cohesion of this social institution that, for over a century, many had feared would dissolve.Footnote 26 The second reason is that the law introduced the possibility of taking into account the unpaid work performed by the spouse of a son working on the step-family's farm. This was one of the first forms of recognition of the unpaid work of women in the context of production activity.
The third reason is that the link between an unpaid child and his or her ascendant was defined as a contract, a “work contract with a deferred salary”. Some ambiguity remained since, a little further on, article 73 specified that it was a contract in name only since it did not have any of the attributes of a work contract (especially in terms of social rights) given that it linked two members of the same family, and more specifically a child to his or her ascendant (moreover, it was only in this case that the right could be claimed).Footnote 27
A key feature of these provisions is that they create very strong links between unpaid work within a family enterprise and the distribution of assets when they are bequeathed after the death of the head of the family business. For historians, there is a clear parallel with ancient informal provisions for the bequeathing of property in farm and craft families. The overlap between family assets, individual assets, and capital from family holdings could hardly be more embedded. This type of arrangement prevailed for a long time, but it began to change around the end of the 1960s, when a growing number of people realized that the marriage bond might dissolve even before death, due to divorce or separation. Alternatively, there might simply have been a realization that, upon retirement, the labour-force withdrawal of two working partners of the same age collaborating in the same business would leave no trace of the lifetime's work of one of the two – the husband would receive a pension for his professional activity but his spouse would not.
Debate over these issues became widespread in the 1960s, as we will show more precisely below, but criticism had begun much earlier. The arguments put forward could draw on changes in doctrine and case law that occurred during the interwar period. As we have seen in relation to the deferred salary in agriculture, the vision of the complete embedding of household and economic activity, with strict gender and generational hierarchies, drew criticism from reformers, including jurists, in the interwar period.Footnote 28 The abolition in 1938 of the married woman's juridical minority was part of this new attitude toward women's rights and opened new avenues. Jurists started to ponder the fundamental question of whether paid contracts between spouses were legally valid. Was it possible to conceive of a commercial enterprise and work contracts, and therefore subordination, between spouses?
This form of market intrusion into the household caused a rift in legal doctrine and practice between legal experts not ready to consider this possibility and others who were supportive, although with reservations. The courts were divided in the face of the realities of daily economic life leading to disputes openly raising this question. In the interwar period some courts denied the possibility of labour contracts or legal forms of associated activities between spouses on the basis of marital authority, the married woman's legal minority, or the immutability of marriage contracts. Other courts adopted compromise positions. Certain interwar rulings accepted the idea of granting management mandates to spouses, for example, while not subjecting them to the same rules as other proxies, with the argument that trust, solidarity, and the moral foundations of the marriage contract had to be preserved.Footnote 29
This type of interpretation was linked once again to gender issues that created a hierarchy within families. Even if the woman was no longer legally a minor, until 1965 the husband remained the head of the family, to be entrusted with managing their joint earnings. Progressive lawyers nonetheless called on the legislator to “not stop halfway as it had done in the law of 18 February 1938 which abolished marital authority, and that it complete the process of the legal liberation of married women”.Footnote 30 Until well after World War II, however, illustrious legal experts such as Raymond-François Le Bris expressed much more nuanced arguments and insisted that the available legal concepts were insufficient to describe this situation.Footnote 31
In spite of all these nuanced positions, reformers began to prevail in the late 1960s. This resulted from a radical change in the political context for female labour issues in particular. The creation of the Committee on Women's Work in 1965, in which Marguerite Thibert participated at the end of an increasingly global career within the ILO, was an important contribution to raising the Labour Ministry's expertise and awareness in relation to female labour.Footnote 32 In the same context, the Women's Secretariat, to which Françoise Giroud was appointed, led by the centre-right president Giscard d'Estaing upon his election, generated the first major survey of assisting spouses: the Claudé Report, published in 1976.Footnote 33 At the same time, an ad hoc commission was created in 1977 within the Committee on Women's Work.Footnote 34 Although the sociologist Anne Revillard stressed the committee's autonomy from the Giroud secretariat, the sequence is in itself telling, institutional impetus aside. This period also saw professional associations (chambres des métiers) initiate consultations on recognizing the role of spouses, thereby creating powerful pressure for union organizations seeking to control the election of professional association representatives. This double impetus culminated in a boost to the process, with the election of socialist president François Mitterrand in 1981.Footnote 35 His commitment to women's rights during the electoral campaign accelerated an existing trend. The 1982 law can be considered part of a series. A cluster of norms specifically focusing on collaborating spouses was adopted in France between 1980 and 1982.
The first law recognizing the contribution of spouses participating in a family business once again emerged in the agricultural sector. The large number of spouses involved in farm work and the fear that they might abandon these activities turned agriculture into a pioneering sector. Following the Seventh Annual Agricultural Conference with government officials and agricultural organizations, which took place on 7 July 1977, two bills were introduced in the National Assembly and the Senate proposing a civil and professional status for farmers’ spouses. Pending the general reform of matrimonial regimes, the concept of a collaborating spouse and co-farmer was thus introduced in the “Agricultural Law” of 1980 (Rural Code), guaranteeing recognition of the status of co-farmer spouse and her rights in the administration of the farm's assets.Footnote 36
This was a first step toward the law concerning the status of collaborating spouses in industry and trades, which was finally enacted in 1982. This law explicitly “relates to the spouses of craftsmen and tradesmen working in a family business”, and introduced an important new feature in the French normative landscape on family and business. It decreed the legal creation of the status of collaborating spouse, salaried spouse, and associate spouse of a self-employed worker or entrepreneur.Footnote 37 This was an unprecedented status in French law insofar as its hybrid nature both strictly and metaphorically combines professional and familial ties. And the debate that took place before the law was passed showed that the rapporteur, socialist deputy Odile Sicard, and the deputies who participated in the debate were all aiming beyond the sexually neutral formulation to focus on the wives of self-employed businessmen.Footnote 38 A year later the minister for women's rights, Yvette Roudy, introduced another law on women's rights and against discrimination in the workplace. This law defined professional equality in the broadest sense and was a complement to the 1972 law on equal treatment for equal work.Footnote 39
By creating a favourable environment for the recognition of women's work, France became a model of advances on this issue, not so much for their pioneering nature in Europe (as claimed by the stakeholders) but for their compromise nature. In its 1982 formulation, the law on the status of collaborating spouses revealed the tensions that explain why it was but one step in a long process that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in 2005. In this specific sense the law is also part and parcel of the parallel and equally contradictory development, lagging behind by a few years, of European legislation.
National legislative delays and progress aside, the French law was created within a larger global context of international social and institutional mobilization that began to gather strength in the 1970s. In the context of European integration, these debates focused on employment and productive work for women, beginning with the EEC treaty of 1957 but really enforced with the 1976 directive implementing the principle of equal treatment of men and women at work. This context fostered the creation of a new field that “state feminist sociologists” describe as a relational and institutional “epistemic community” at the crossroads between expertise on labour and expertise on the status of women and equality issues. The debate and subsequent political action were guided by protective and egalitarian principles, and favoured introducing into the family the contractual dimension usually applied to interpersonal relationships in the market economy.Footnote 40
While the international context is not the focus of this study, nor is it just a backdrop. The French protagonists themselves created a link to Europe by claiming their positions were prescient. It was clear in the mind of the rapporteur Sicard that this was an avant-garde law. When the law was presented to the Assembly, André Delelis, the socialist minister of commerce and craft industry, did not hesitate to state in his concluding remarks that: “Passing this bill will grant Frenchwomen and Frenchmen one of the best laws in the European Community on this issue”.Footnote 41 These references to the European level were more than attempts to claim that France was an exception during the heroic days of legislative activity in the first “Mitterrand years”;Footnote 42 rather, they point to a history of crossed paths, with much toing and froing between European incentives and French participation in the work of supranational bodies.
Some of the French actors mentioned participated in the activities of transnational networks of experts on these issues. Before becoming François Mitterrand's minister for women's rights from 1981 to 1986, Yvette Roudy had served in the European Parliament from 1978 to 1981. With the backing of Simone Veil, elected President of the European Parliament, Roudy became president of a commission on women's rights: “I travelled a lot through Europe and was able to compare the histories and statuses of women”.Footnote 43
During the 1970s several countries implemented European measures, and especially those outlined in the 1957 Treaty establishing the EEC that called for “equal treatment” between men and women for work “of equal value”.Footnote 44 In The United Kingdom the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 prohibited any discrimination in employment; furthermore, in Quinnen v Hovells (1984) the courts established that self-employment fell within the scope of the Sex Discrimination Act.
Italy went furthest in recognizing unpaid work with a series of family law reforms in 1975.Footnote 45 These reforms went beyond equal treatment and addressed the situation of family businesses by calling for the elimination of any presumption of cost-free work from either the spouse or other family workers. According to the jurist Stefania Scarponi: “It is a specific regulation at the intersection of family law and labour law, and therefore may be considered a true statute on work in a family business.”Footnote 46 In contrast, other countries, such as Spain, continued to lack any legal status for collaborating spouses throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 47 Not surprisingly, in France the Italian case was frequently mentioned as an exception in Europe until the French reforms of 1982. Interaction at the European level continued after this year. Of significance from this perspective is the subsequent enactment of a 1986 European directive.Footnote 48 This directive was probably linked to the passage of the French law, as its preamble cites proposals and resolutions dated after 1982.Footnote 49 The directive was based on an egalitarian principle, advocating equal treatment for men and women autonomously engaged in self-employed activities or contributing to these activities (art. 1), including agriculture and liberal professions. Significantly, the first assessments made at the beginning of the 1990s on the implementation of this directive were quite pessimistic.Footnote 50
The legal recognition of unpaid women's work faced several forms of resistance. Resistance in France in 1982, and later in the EU on numerous occasions, slowed the adoption of highly innovative ideas and led to soft norms aiming to compensate for legal and social shortfalls in the recognition of a spouse's unpaid work. This resistance stemmed from tensions surrounding the opposition, once again, between the market model, which is based on market exchange relations determined by contracts among freely consenting individuals, and the family model, which is based on mutual aid and solidarity.
A book commenting on the rights of craftsmen's spouses in the wake of the 1982 law surveyed the discrepancies between marriage, business, and labour law, and concluded by valorizing the status of the undeclared assisting spouse:Footnote 51
The assistant's activity is neither motivated by the search for an official status nor maintained for the sake of preserving it. Rather, the assistance is a voluntary, spontaneous, and disinterested contribution of the type that marriage law prescribes spouses to provide to each other where needed, by stating that they owe each other mutual […] assistance. (Code civil, Art. 212)Footnote 52
This kind of statement was expressed not only in legal debates but also by the courts. Despite legislation in principle favourable to recognizing the statuses and rights of spouses, even Italy – as we have seen, one the most advanced countries in terms of family business regulation – saw a raft of adverse court rulings on unpaid work in the 1980s, and such adverse rulings continue to appear to this day.Footnote 53 These rulings were made citing the feeling of affection and mutual aid that are specific to married couples (this affectionis vel benevolentiae causa may include the case of a loan that was unpaid in the name of solidarity between partners). As demonstrated by the jurist Maria Rosaria Marella, legislation offering a market definition of roles does not suffice to change dominant representations and practices associated with these roles.Footnote 54 Highly novel laws do not prevent behaviours as well as rulings based on older ideas, or in any event non-economic ones, of relationships between spouses defending their moral character. These conceptions consider the contractual dimension as disruptive to familial cohesion. Yet historians, sociologists, and even jurists have shown that contractual relations are not necessarily bereft of feelings.Footnote 55
Achievements and limitations of the 1982 law
Understanding how these opposing models are linked in practical terms requires returning to the enactment of the 1982 law, our main normative and chronological point of reference. From this perspective the achievements of the 1982 law are undeniable: it was legitimately considered a novel law that defined the occupational status of a spouse's labour. From the outset, in its first article, the law recognized the occupational aspect of the spouse's activity and made a basic distinction between intangible and material mutual aid between spouses, and intangible and material contributions that are also professional. On this point the parliamentary committee tasked with preparing a report on the proposed law overcame the legal opposition between spousal help, and work and partnership contracts. This aspect is especially important because even in the 1980s spouses were no more aware than before of the specific nature of their contribution to the smooth running of the company.Footnote 56 As labour sociologists have shown, the share of family workers who declare themselves as such rather than “without an occupation” varies depending on the survey and question sequencing, but it remains consistently small. In the INSEE's 1982 “Family” survey, 16.2 per cent of women polled reported working as assistants to a family member, whereas in the following year's “Employment” survey 27.5 per cent reported that they were assistants. Of course, the awareness of being engaged in an occupational activity was higher if the spouses had degrees, especially for the spouses of liberal professionals (90 per cent), but it was only 60 per cent for the wives of food merchants and artisans, and fell to 53 per cent for the wives of construction-industry entrepreneurs.Footnote 57
Yet a declared occupational activity yields three statuses that share the particularity of having adjectives – associate, employed, and collaborating – qualify the spouse, which is the principal term in this nominal group. This implies the recognition of formal equality between spouses in the family: France only officially established equality within the family with the law of 13 July 1965. Despite abolishing the institution of husband's authorization in 1938, French law continued to qualify the husband as head of the family.Footnote 58 This asymmetry was invoked to forbid work contracts implying a subordinate relationship between a husband worker and wife employer, even if in real life they frequently existed, of course (see for example the video testimony of a 1950s baker couple in the INA's archives).Footnote 59
For our purposes it is also interesting to note the principal difference between the statuses of employed and associate spouse and that of collaborating spouse. In the first two cases the spouse is remunerated through operating profits or a monetary salary for participating in the company's work, but this is not the case for the collaborating spouse. The latter, called a collaborator and not an assistant to highlight the non-ancillary nature of the work, is, as such, unpaid and until 1989 was furthermore prohibited from working outside the company. This status nonetheless grants certain rights, mostly in terms of managerial autonomy and social security. The collaborating-spouse status assumes an implicit mandate from the head of the company for administrative acts. Moreover, the declared collaborating spouse receives certain social security benefits in kind (medical expenses, medicine, testing) but no daily allowance in the event of illness, nor any income replacement during maternity leave (one of this law's elements that is most unanimously opposed by the spouses of the self-employed, whose exclusion dates back to the origin of these rights in 1913).Footnote 60 Most importantly, collaborating spouses obtain their own rights to retirement if they are covered by their trade's old-age pension scheme, that is, by the same fund to which the head of the company is affiliated.
But all of this hinges on a voluntary, non-compulsory filing of a declaration to the Trade Register and Trade Directory. Until 1985 the company head's consent was also required (in order to protect the business but, as most of the heads were male, it is also clearly reminiscent of the marital power transposed to the business head here). In the event that the spouse was not declared, he or she would remain without a status, with but a few additional rights in terms of social security.
Institutions: social and tax laws, and factual resistance
Figures from various studies conducted since 1982 on the law's reception admittedly trailed the most pessimistic forecasts; in 1986, 20,000 out of around 300,000 collaborating spouses in the crafts, or only 6.6 per cent, were declared. For employed spouses the figures were 1.1 per cent in 1983 and 1.6 per cent in 1989, and for associates 1.3 per cent in 1983 and 1.4 per cent in 1989.Footnote 61 An overwhelming majority of spouses therefore chose no status. Yet, beginning in 1985 for craftsmen and 1986 for merchants, self-declaration was possible. Granted, the business head could contest the declaration in the event of disagreement, but the change was still significant. While the husband was free to oppose, he had to do so actively, rather than express opposition through his passivity and lack of motivation to declare his spouse to the professional association.
Why this resistance in the practical realities of family business management? The reticence of craftsmen and their spouses can undoubtedly be explained on the one hand by sociological and cultural factors and, on the other, as they themselves claim, by serious economic constraints. A third compounding factor is the institutional context, which was shaped by gendered social and cultural constructs. This last explanation is indeed inherent in the way social law and tax law treated family workshops throughout the twentieth century.
The logic of continuity was expressed in views on the nature of moral and economic relations between spouses, but it was also shaped by the definition of family workshops in legislation as exempt from some tax and social constraints. The labour and social regulation that began in 1841 and continued up to 1874, and the 1892 laws on children and women's work exempted these workshops from the requirements that industrial plants had to meet, particularly regarding night work for women and minors, and maternity leave.Footnote 62
The 1892 law protecting children and women in the workplace formally defined family workshops. In addition to the exemption from social legislation, these workshops were granted tax exemptions. The special provisions granted to craftsmen in 1917, and again in 1923, confirmed the state's classification of this occupational grouping, whose union representation had been founded a year earlier, and displayed a close connection between the family character of family craft business and these provisions.Footnote 63 Craftsmen were taxed based on their emoluments and salaries and no longer according to their industrial and commercial profits. Family workshops run by craftsmen and which used unpaid family workers (and apprentices, who, until 1971, did not have the status of employees) were also exempt from a local tax (the patente) payable by every economic trade.
Meanwhile, couples working in the same small enterprise with a salaried collaborating spouse and not married on the basis of separate ownership of property were prohibited from deducting a spouse's salary from industrial and commercial profits. Fearing fraud and the deduction of false salaries (not really being paid to spouses), the state – not just “moral” and social norms – forced spouses to operate as a single productive unit. A small rebate of only 10 per cent was granted in a law enacted in 1938.Footnote 64 As emphasized by feminist economists, tax policy affects economic activity and the gendered status of the economic actors who contribute to it.Footnote 65
Thus, the tax exemption defines a specific form of family business: the family workshop as a collective entity, but one that in this particular vision involves the fusion of its elements and merging with the (male) head of the family.Footnote 66 On the other hand, small but more exogamic family businesses were considered “normal” taxed businesses.Footnote 67 In both cases, the result was the persistently unpaid and unrecognized status of “assisting” spouses.
Besides taxes, there are two more explanations for the lack of recognition of their work. The first was the poor political reception at the national and international levels to proposals from certain groups of feminist reformers.Footnote 68 The second was the particular conception of how family craft businesses function and operate that was shared by a significant number of the reform movement's leaders. With regard to this conception, I would like to analyse the interpretations at the crossroads of business and household rationales that were created and used by some of the activists, themselves assisting spouses, and that led to the first and highly symbolic 1982 law. These interpretations aimed to recognize the occupational contribution of spouses while structuring its form in line with the principles of a traditional gender-oriented division of roles within the workshop. With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that these interpretations nonetheless contributed to modifying the internal hierarchies of the family workshop. Once historicized, this process can be understood as a way of gaining acceptance for change in this kind of conservative milieu.
For sociologists who studied craftsmen in the 1980s and 1990, and particularly Bernard Zarca, who, without a doubt, analysed the most deeply the challenges to relationships between spouses in family businesses starting at the end of the 1980s, the optional nature of the declaration made a failure of what had been considered a victory by the law's proponents.Footnote 69 Thus, the law was not a turning point in the relationships of spouses in family businesses, but rather, more modestly, a very liberal and non-binding law that left the door open to the persistence of informal collaboration.
Was it merely a symbolic victory? Having provided some insights into its contents and limitations in affecting craft household practices we will now try to show how it changed power relations and goals in union organizations and the perception of unpaid work of assisting spouses, to the point where a much more binding law became possible in 2005.
LOBBIES, PROFESSIONAL UNIONS, AND THE 1982 LAW
Given the heavy patriarchal yoke and the entrenched model of craft business managed by a head acting as a good family man, a paterfamilias of a family business, in what way was the 1982 law a victory for its supporters, at the time and forty years later? Turning to one of the innovators in the movement to recognize the status of women, Marie Rozet, now an octogenarian, does not waver forty years later when asked about the date of promulgation and name of the law of 10 July 1982. Rozet, still active in the FENERA National Federation of Craft Retiree Associations, is a key witness to the various and contradictory visions of collaboration between spouses in business (Figure 1). As a collaborating spouse of a construction painter and decorator in Franche-Comté, she served as a leader of local associations within the Construction Craft and Small Business Confederation (CAPEB) and as founder of the National Commission for Craftsmen's Wives, which she presided over for several years. Created in 1979 within the CAPEB as a gender-defined institution, it was integrated into the CAPEB's representative bodies and later became the most important institution for spouses in the Crafts Union (UPA).Footnote
Figure 1 Besançon, 6 May 2011. Marie Rozet, former President of the Commission Nationale Femmes d'Artisan and of the FENARA, the National Federation of Retired Artisans, receives the title of “chevalier de la Légion d'honneur” for her “sixty years of professional and community activity”. At the back, from the left, Claude Rozet, Marie's husband, Bernard Barthod, President of the Trade Chamber of the Doubs, Alain Griset, President of the Permanent Assembly of Trade Chambers (AMPCMA), and Serge Thivenin, President of the FENARA.70
Chambre de métiers et de l'artisanat du Doubs, 2011. Used with permission.
The CAPEB was one of the first trade-union associations to respond, beginning in the mid-1970s, to requests from the top and from the bottom. Requests from the former, in particular, increased after the creation of the Women's Secretariat by Françoise Giroud, while the latter resulted from the spontaneous mobilization of spouses who met among themselves on the margins of national meetings for the departmental federations of construction trade associations. This early embrace in one of the most male-dominated sectors of small business might be surprising. Union politics were likely behind the support of CAPEB leaders for this initiative: to control the spouses’ conduits and then the seats that would be allocated to them, beginning in 1980, in the professional associations (chambres des métiers).
I would argue that this mobilization was based on a sector-specific gender dimension. This statement might seem counterintuitive, because it is well known that the building and public works sector is one where the share of women's paid work is still very small, barely totalling 5 per cent in 1980 and no more than 10 per cent today in all categories combined (3 per cent of workers in 2010).Footnote 71
Moreover, the sector's male dominance plays an important role in self-perceptions of contributions to the family business.Footnote 72 Indeed, collaborating spouses in the construction sector display the least consciousness of their occupational contribution: only half of these women clearly recognized their contribution.Footnote 73 Because they often perform their functions at home or at the headquarters of the business, far from the entirely male worksites, the tasks assigned to the spouses are stripped of some of their symbolic significance. The valorization of production work and technical mastery is greater than that of women's service contributions (accounting, relationships with clients and suppliers). However, a considerable number of women are involved in these activities.
Recalling the statistics estimating the number of spouses assisting business owners in the construction sector, we know that of the 2,346,500 companies employing fewer than 20 people, 950,000 are craft companies (that is, members of professional associations or chambres des métiers), of which one-third are construction companies, totalling 356,000 in 2004. Thus, of 300,000 craftsmen's spouses affected by the 2005 Dutreuil Law, around 100,000 work in the construction trade.
The significance of this female workforce became inescapable in the 1970s, a real turning point not only because of the state's intervention in recognizing spouses, but also because of major changes in the economic and social context. These changes were partly due to the economic crisis and partly to the transformation of gender relationships that noticeably accelerated beginning in the mid-1970s.Footnote 74
The effects of several crises suddenly attuned a priori unresponsive professional organizations to women who were in difficulty and deprived of any social rights (unemployment, retirement, medical insurance) in the aftermath of family business bankruptcies, which became very numerous from the end of the 1970s. The increasingly flexible work practices also threatened unpaid spouses, as communist deputy Muguette Jacquaint emphasized during the 1982 parliamentary debate.Footnote 75 The crisis constituted a double jeopardy for women. Without resources or technical skills certified by official diplomas, they ended up more impoverished than their husbands, who could more easily transition to becoming employees.
As the number and rate of divorces began to soar in 1970, there were more frequent and visible cases of spouses who had worked for decades in a business and found themselves completely destitute after their separation as they were cut off from any social rights linked to the work they had carried out. Indeed, the available divorce statistics broken down by professional group show that craftsmen getting divorced in 1970 had a relatively high average length of marriage: thirteen years (Figure 2).Footnote 76 Their marriages were longer-lasting than those of employees and middle management (eleven years on average), but much shorter than those of large industrialists and farmers (around fifteen years). The family pattern of the business probably played a role in the intermediate position of divorce rates among craftsmen (divorces in 1970 compared with the number of couples married in 1968) when compared with managers and farmers: 4.1 per 1,000 marriages compared with 9 per 1,000 for employees and 9.4 for middle management professionals (2.4 for large industrialists and 0.7 for farmers). Nevertheless, the overall trend was increasing during these years and affected all socioeconomic categories.
Figure 2 Divorces pronounced in France, 1960–2005. INSEE, Résultats. Société, 66, June 2007.
In this context a movement formed and succeeded in bringing together several tens of thousands of spouses (about 2 per cent of the total), a sizeable figure given that in France the proportion of union employees at the beginning of the 1980s was no larger than 7–8 per cent in the SMEs.Footnote 77 Pressured from both the top and the bottom, the CAPEB, followed by the bakers’ federation, one of pillars of the craft and food confederation and a sector where spousal labour plays a major and essential role, organized ways of representing spouses, including at the level of national boards of directors. This was quite a significant achievement.
Acting for collaborating spouses and dealing with conflicting models
Everything went well. You have to get to know the men you're working with. I was able to earn their respect while knowing when to have a sense of humour. I had the same place they did around the table. The advice I would give to the future president is to be feminine without being a feminist.Footnote 78
At the end of her term as president of the National Commission of Craft Women (CNFA) in 2010, Roselyne Lecoultre passed on the torch by recalling the basis for the very existence of her position. Her speech revealed explicitly the double dimension of this public role. On the one hand she had a position of responsibility sitting at the executive table and on the other she represented a feminine approach offering other ways of acting in order to be heard. Far from seeing a possible contradiction between these two attitudes and roles, she implicitly proposed to turn female diversity into a policy tool that was detached from any connection to the feminist movement.Footnote 79
When her senior, Marie Rozet, speaks of the heroic times of the first battles, she insists on the fact that the women who met at the margins of the CAPEB's national conferences were not feminists. The first time she went to Paris as a women's representative on the national board of directors, she was accompanied by her husband since “she was not accustomed to going up to Paris (from her native town of Besançon, Franche-Comté) alone”.Footnote 80 When publishing a book on the laws and norms concerning the status of collaborating spouses in the 1990s, she included Baroness Bertha von Suttner's famous quotation on the first page: “After the verb to love, to help is the most beautiful verb in the world.”Footnote 81 The language they use is identical. All the attributes of a feminine attitude toward the role of a spouse are included in this quotation. But this feminine understatement, without any doubt absolutely genuine, may also hide an undeclared political strategy.
This group of women involved in the defence of spousal rights within trade unions was premised on avoiding any hint of feminism. Until very recently, representatives of the Women's Commission were the only women who participated in the meeting of the national board. In order to be accepted on the entirely male national boards of the CAPEB and of the Union of Artisans (UPA) it was in their great interest to present themselves as the helping angels of the workshop (as well as of the home, des anges du foyer).
The women involved in the direction of the Women's Commission also had to place the institution ahead of themselves: none of the former presidents could be “honoured” and exist autonomously despite their regular and indispensable presence in these bodies. None of the publications that reconstruct the history of the CNFA's achievements mention the names of those who made its history: Marie Rozet, President from 1979 to 1982, Dany Bourdeau from 1982 to 1999, and Roselyne Lecoultre from 1999 to 2010, do not appear anywhere in the annals of the CAPEB.
Moreover, it would have been difficult to imagine a complete transformation of views on the role of women in an environment that sociologists who did fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s described as reliably conservative with regard to gender relations, although not necessarily always politically aligned to the right or extreme right.Footnote 82 Concrete examples of these perspectives abound in the pages of the professional publications of the day. The November 1975 “Women Readers’ Letters”, a section that was regularly featured in the CAPEB's Craft Building journal, included, for example, an article on “the increase in allowances for stay-at-home mothers”, “a list of school holidays 1975–1976”, a note from the association for the professional training of adults, as well as a piece on the creation of a “women's focus group by M. Galley, Minister for Infrastructure”, “to obtain feedback from women on daily life”, where questions about urbanism, housing, and their environments seemed secondary.Footnote 83
Yet in 1974 a previous issue had reported on a general assembly of craftsmen's wives that had taken place in Dordogne alongside the assembly of the union committee for local craftsmen and small businesses in the construction sector.Footnote 84 The assembly brought together close to 100 people to discuss, according to the minutes, management problems concerning treasury issues and the drawing up of estimates in a context of rapid price increases (therefore, they did not only discuss school holidays). The meeting's success generated the idea of creating several working groups that could regularly meet.Footnote 85 The aims of this spontaneous movement – the training and recognition of collaborating spouses – converged with a broader international and national push from European and French institutions in charge of women's labour rights.
In March 1975, International Women's Year, at the time of the CAPEB's general congress an entire page of the CAPEB's journal was dedicated to spouses,Footnote 86 who evidently did not just discuss management problems this time: “Gathered in Paris for the CAPEB's national conference, the wives of craftsmen requested that their work in the company be recognized. The federal administrative commission tasked president Marcel Lecoeur to meet with a small group of craftsmen's wives who regularly participate in business management” (this was the case for 70 per cent of craft construction business according to the figures published by several sociologists in the 1980s).Footnote 87 Their demands, shared by their spouses, as the article notes, were presented in a very neutral way: “this interview revealed that craftsmen and their wives working in the business would like spouses to be guaranteed the same social security benefits as the salaried boss and benefit from developments in the social protection of employees”.Footnote 88
This carefully pursued behind-the-scenes approach explains how they were able to achieve some of their claims. Indeed, despite the wives’ careful and anti-feminist positioning, out of conviction or for strategic reasons many would have considered this back-door strategy unacceptable. But most business heads were ready to recognize that their spouses’ claims were not anathema to theirs. Because the craft organizations at the time were much more akin to trade organizations than employer organizations,Footnote 89 they could openly advance some of the claims of craftsmen's wives, especially those regarding equality of treatment with employees in terms of social protection: retirement, the establishment of a health insurance scheme, and income replacement during maternity leave. While these benefit provisions would make spouses more autonomous, by keeping them as a discretionary, non-binding option, without any obligations, they were made more acceptable to moderates.
Furthermore, very modern and novel approaches to the spouse's professional contribution that focused on status recognition could very well be part of a familial model based on complementary roles in the family business. A company could be hierarchical and involve joint economic goals, but it also could – and since 2005 must – leave room for the recognition of individual professional interests, allowing for a spouse's autonomy in the event of a crisis or breakup.
Conclusion
Indispensable to overcome economic constraints and uncertainty for small family businesses, the unpaid work of a spouse became a sensitive issue in the political and juridical changing arena of the 1960s and 1970s. The long-term historical perspective adopted here helps to understand the emergence in the interwar period of a contractual model defining economic relationships within the family. This recognition of an economic contribution, giving the right to compensation or, at least, to social security benefits, coexisted during the second half of the twentieth century with a longstanding one, based on mutual obligations between spouses in a family business. The compromise that gave rise in 1982 to a law recognizing the legal status of collaborating spouses in commercial and craft businesses reflected the deep social and legal resistance that account for the slow embrace of the law. We have traced the path that gradually, step by step, led to the dismantling of institutions that involved tight gender constraints and the economic subordination of the wife to her husband – indispensable preconditions for the development of a status. But the nature of matrimonial relations and the duty to provide mutual aid remained controversial. It is significant that the French Court of Cassation has still not ruled on the nature of “the work provided by one spouse for the other”, or the validity of a work contract between spouses.Footnote 90
Shifting from the legal to the social arena, an analysis of the positions taken by female players in the movement makes it clear that the categorization of spouses in an ancillary role was internalized, especially in some trades. However, it is too drastic a view to reduce the status of these women to that of a dominated person.Footnote 91 For some women it was a positive lifestyle choice that allowed greater freedom in time management, more flexible working relationships, and the pleasure of doing work that involved a certain degree of responsibility. They were often in charge of accounting and therefore the first to cut back on retirement contributions if the business experienced financial difficulties, even if they would later regret it upon retirement or in the event of a divorce.
Defending the non-compulsory character of the declaration of a collaborating spouse, the rapporteur of the 1982 law, the socialist deputy Odile Sicard, was counting on the status recognition to affect mentalities.Footnote 92 The poor statistics concerning declared collaborating spouses in the last few decades of the twentieth century may lead one to conclude that she was too optimistic. However, though there was a reluctance to implement the law in business practices, the law did legitimate a new space of action and claims for spouses’ social rights on the boards of craft and trade unions. Political awareness sufficiently evolved to allow for the 2005 law and the mandatory attribution of a status to a spouse (accompanied by mandatory old-age pension contributions for all collaborating spouses). The uncompensated dedication that one can hardly still ask of a child can still be asked of a spouse in a craft business. At the same time, this spouse can now have her (always more than his) professional qualities recognized through certified and state-recognized training, and can build her own retirement funds for her old age, whether spent alone or with her spouse.
