Categories in Context
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Categories in Context

Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present

Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Olivier Giraud, Léa Renard, Theresa Wobbe, Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Olivier Giraud, Léa Renard, Theresa Wobbe

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eBook - ePub

Categories in Context

Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present

Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Olivier Giraud, Léa Renard, Theresa Wobbe, Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Olivier Giraud, Léa Renard, Theresa Wobbe

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About This Book

Despite the wealth of empirical research currently available on the interrelationships of gender and labor, we still know comparatively little about the forms of classification and categorization that have helped shape these social phenomena over time. Categories in Context seeks to enrich our understanding of how cognitive categories such as status, law, and rights have been produced, comprehended, appropriated, and eventually transformed by relevant actors. By focusing on specific developments in France and Germany through a transnational lens, this volume produces insights that can be applied to a wide variety of political, social, and historical contexts.

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Year
2019
ISBN
9781789201888

I


SHIFTING CATEGORIES FROM A COMPARATIVE RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER 1


MAKING SENSE OF WOMEN’S LABOUR IN THE CONTEXT OF THE FRENCH FAMILY BUSINESS

From Domestic Labour to Recognized Work
Olivier Giraud
In their comprehensive study of the transformation of the petite bourgeoisie in Europe between 1780 and 1914, Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (1995) mention three types of family photographs that artisans and merchants would have taken in order to showcase their family and their business in the early twentieth century. Most artisans liked to pose at the very centre of the picture, relegating wife, children and employees to the background. Sometimes, merchant couples would appear united in the foreground of the picture with their children, in front of their shop and wearing their work clothes. And some artisan or merchant families would ostensibly pose in the residential area of the business, wearing ‘smart clothes’, gazing through the window at the family shop, demonstrating the separation between domestic and work life, and consequently their belonging to the (petite) bourgeoisie of the time (Crossick and Haupt 1995: 96–98). Compared in this manner, such photographs depict the variety of power relations within the couples and families and the tense relations between the domestic/private and the business/public spheres in this time of transition for family businesses. In some cases almost absent from the photo, and in some cases represented as equals, the diverse situation of women in these pictures illustrates the uncertainty of their position in the family business of the early twentieth century. They could play cumulatively the roles of spouses, workers and mothers, or just be proudly displayed at the heart of the private family interior.
In France, the uncertainty of women’s position in the context of the family business is reflected by the long-lasting lack of institutional recognition of the labour they would perform as spouses of self-employed artisans and merchants. In a nutshell, women’s labour in family businesses was at first classified as domestic labour and has only more recently been recognized as regular productive work, subject to collective or public regulations and related to specific social rights. As has been demonstrated for other contexts (Wobbe 2012), the categorization of women’s labour depends more frequently on gender identity than on the nature of the work performed. In this chapter, I will argue that the specific situation of women’s labour in the family business relates both to the situation of the independent business and to the family in the general social and political context of the country. The progressive integration of the family business into the realm of public regulation and the step-by-step individualization of the conception of the family are, at least in the case of France, key transformations in the long-lasting process of recasting the very nature of female labour activities in independent businesses.
In order to follow such an argument, I will argue that women’s positions at the intersection between family and enterprise in both instances are themselves embedded in and revealed by cultural and institutional codes relating to the role of the family and of small businesses in the French society and economy. The trajectory of spousal labour recognition in family businesses in France appears to be characteristic of the political, social and cultural transformations that work was undergoing at the time, combining recognition of fundamental individual rights with the socialization of social functions, the most important being social solidarity and protection.
On a theoretical level, the process of institutional recognition of women’s labour in the context of the family business illustrates the tension between self and group identification on the one hand and social categorization on the other. Distinctly elaborated by Richard Jenkins, this tension is formed by a series of interactions between the individual order producing the ‘point of view of selfhood’, the group or interactional order relating to the ‘co-presence and relationships’ between individuals, and lastly the institutional order relating to the ‘world of patterned, organized and symbolically-templated “ways of doing things”’ (Jenkins 2000: 7).
Three ‘critical junctures’ of the sort described by Kathleen Thelen (1991, 1999) have marked the long-term process of recasting the category attached to women’s labour in the context of the family business. The period following the French Revolution represents a first key step in the making of the status of women’s labour in the case of artisans’ and merchants’ wives. Family business was defined in this period as the cornerstone of French society, both in the economic and political dimensions, but also of social solidarity. The second critical juncture took place between the 1920s and the 1960s. During this time, on the one hand, the fundamental role of the family business in France began to be contested by the development of bigger economical units and by the progressive imposition of public regulation. On the other hand, the conception of the family would start to become progressively more individualized. These transformations would begin to influence the situation of women’s labour in family businesses. However, only the far-reaching structural transformations and important social mobilizations that appeared from the late 1960s have triggered a third and decisive change. This last step eventually led to the formal and institutional recognition of women’s labour in the context of family businesses. These three critical junctures will shape the structure of this chapter.
In order to analyse this multidimensional transformation process, I will first consider, for each time period, the structural dimension of the position of family and the family business in the French national context. Second, I will explore the consequences of these developments for the situation of women working in family businesses by analysing the legal regulation and the statistical categorization of female work in that context. For the last and crucial critical juncture, I will also look at the role of the social mobilization of spouses of artisans and merchants, which began to develop from the early 1970s, as these developed a form of ‘interactional’ group identification that has decisively influenced categorization.

Social Invisibility of Women’s Labour in the Family Business from the Nineteenth to the Mid Twentieth Century

During the ancien régime, the semi-public regulation by the corporations moderated the influence of family regulation of the independent artisan and merchant workshop. Being first and foremost a bourgeois revolution, the French Revolution emancipated the family business from corporative rule and reshuffled the structure of social status in society. The family – marriage strategies, kinship and gender relations – became the key regulator of the family business. Simultaneously, the abolition of serfdom made the cleavage between independent and dependent social positions a key principle of social structuration. In this context, domestic workers became the only population that did not fully benefit from the general emancipation from serfdom. Likewise located in the domestic sphere, women’s labour became partly assimilated to this domestic work.
In the political sphere, women did not benefit from the rights associated with post-revolutionary citizenship. Men held citizenship in the name of their entire family (Verjus 2010). The family was in turn socially and politically recognized both as the elementary unit of society and as the basic economic unit of the time. According to the Civil Code promulgated by Napoleon in 1803, women became a disenfranchised group (Daune-Richard 2004: 69). They could not dispose of their own income or enter into contracts without the consent of their husbands. Finally, the principle of mutual aid within the couple codified in Article 214 of the Napoleonic Code addressed the issue of power relations within the couple in terms that apply equally to the family business: ‘If matrimonial contracts do not address the contributions of spouses to the cost of the household, they [are to] contribute in proportion to their respective skills. If one spouse doesn’t fulfil his obligations, he/she may be compelled by the other in the manner provided in the Code of Civil Procedure’.1
Deemed incapable of entering into contracts or disposing of their own income, consigned to the domestic sphere, considered non-productive, not recognized as ‘active’ on the labour market and, finally, beholden by the duty of spousal support, spouses of artisans and merchants were caught in a web of socially codified principles underlying social, economic and political activities that guaranteed their institutional invisibility.
The first classifications of work in France proposed by physiocrat economists, even before the revolution of 1789, would focus on the nature of personal wealth (property, agriculture, business activity, etc.), and then later, in the nineteenth century, on the business activity conducted by the head of the household. In this general framework, individual positions and work were not originally distinguished. The set of people living off a given productive unit was assimilated with that unit (Chélini 2008). The a priori non-material and intangible character of female activities, as well as their assigned location in the domestic sphere, reduced women’s labour in family businesses to the category of ‘inactivity’. This category would persistently cast a shadow over women’s work and directly affect the status of the women working in family businesses for decades to come.
Progressively, over the course of the nineteenth century, the parties that held an interest in family businesses – bakeries, retails shops and so on – would become distinguished as employers, servants, clerks and so on. Within this increasingly individualized attempt to categorize work, however, the situation of women would remain poorly defined and practically unchanged. Women would have to actively declare an occupation that differed completely from that of the family business in order to be acknowledged as an active worker. In its categories and survey forms, the French bureau of statistics would try, from the late nineteenth century onwards, to differentiate between productive work activities and domestic labour (Topalov 1998). The criterion chosen to that end was the granting of remuneration. Both the declaration of a professional activity by women non-related to the family business and the remuneration of non-domestic female labour supposed that the families would understand and be able to identify themselves with those external categories. This was by this time only occasionally the case (Amossé 2004). In 1906, the first systematic labour statistical analysis of the country transformed the categorization of spousal labour in the family business. Representing 28.5% of the female labour force, women performing labour in the context of the family business were classified together with their husbands in the category of ‘head of the establishment’ (Maruani and Meron 2012: 172).
The social understanding of women’s situation in the family context also began to evolve and to be reflected by public regulation. The law of ‘free wages’ of married women (11 July 1907) recognized the right of the wife to dispose of the ‘products of her own labour and economic gain from it’. Nonetheless, legal commentaries noted that the law did not imply a right to the free choice of occupation for women. The situation of the spouses of the self-employed is in this case the object of a particularly explicit treatment:
Take note beforehand that insofar as the wife takes care of household matters or helps her husband in the course of his business, industrial or commercial, it may not have an effect on the wife’s earnings. This is not a salaried person, an employee or a worker of her spouse. She cannot participate in the profits unless she is associated by pecuniary regime to the enterprise. In the absence of such an association, she contributes freely her assistance to her husband, as a sort of extra dowry. The question about the products of labour of a woman does not arise if she has a separate industry or occupation. (Le Courtois and Surville 1908: 2)

First Developments from the Aftermath of World War I to the 1960s

After World War I, the lines would move further as the alternatives and debates about female labour would take new forms. While women’s growing demands for citizenship continued to go unanswered, the family, and notably the family business, would start to become destabilized by the growing trend towards salaried employment and economic concentration. Increased state intervention in socioeconomic life (including the development of tax regimes and social protection, and later, in the 1930s, the eight-hour day, paid leave, higher wages, etc.) challenged the central and autonomous position of the family business in French society. In the aftermath of World War I, artisans and merchants generally succeeded in avoiding income taxes through the mobilization of their business associations and through the work of parliamentary deputies. In the 1930s, business associations sought to reproduce this success, though more vigorously and with a more extreme political character in order to oppose new state attempts to integrate family businesses into the tax and social security systems (Zalc 2012: 58–59). In general, the interwar period in France witnessed a shift to the right in the politics of family businesses, which sometimes tended towards sympathies with fascist organizations. This points to a general loss of centrality of the world of independent business in the French political landscape.
Until the interwar period, recognition for the work done by spouses of the self-employed remained at a standstill, notably because of the lack of change in the systems of work classification. Spousal work remained confined within its family help (‘aide familial’) status, which was, especially in the case of France, poorly defined and unstable. The work done by women in family businesses was still considered to be an extension, into the economic world, of their spousal role as wives. Long considered as a long-lasting dowry, or as a contribution to household welfare, feminine work in family businesses was not seen as a regular, gainful, recognized and protected work activity.

After World War II: The Marginalization of the Family Business Leaves Women’s Labour on the Wayside

In the aftermath of World War II, France underwent a series of radical and sudden modernizations, which sought to make amends for its delayed evolution. First, women’s right to vote was granted through a simple order issued on 21 April 1944 by the provisional French government in Algiers. This decision did not give rise to any public debate. Second, the construction of the French social security system as part of a compromise between Gaullists, communists and Christian Democrats, before the end of the war, was handled in a similar way. Third, beyond the development of the social security system, the construction of a norm of salaried employment was established via the restoration of collective agreements, the introduction of representatives for working forces, and the nationalization of large companies used by the state as leverage for the enforcement of employment standards or the implementation of minimum wages in 1950 (Lallement 1999).
Mostly aimed at regulating wage labour, these important reforms triggered the resumption of significant tensions and protests in the family business milieu. Furthermore, the 1948 modernization of the tax system resulted in the quasi-cancellation of exemptions enjoyed by merchants and artisans. Tax audits were also modernized and were specifically targeted at these sectors from the early 1950s (Zalc 2012: 61). Organizations representing crafts and small businesses strongly opposed their integration into the national social protection system. They fuelled right-wing protests against new taxation schemes proposed by the government. Pierre Poujade, a populist leader, capitalized on resentment among the members of the Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Artisans (UDCA), and went on to place fifty-two deputies in the National Assembly in 1956. His party had received 2.4 million ballots, more than 11% of the vote. However, in socioeconomic terms, the space occupied by craftsmen and small businesses shrank rapidly. The number of self-employed fell in France from more than 6.6 million in 1954 to less than 2.4 million...

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