ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the varying experiences of women in three French cities – Paris, Lyon and Lille – in the strong hope of identifying features of those experiences that were specific to women's lives, but also with the aim of singling out the particularities of France's capitalism. French industrial capitalism developed later than that of England. The nineteenth century was a time of far-reaching change in French cities. The French experience seems to have varied more decisively among cities than did the English. Married women's work was very common in the nineteenth century, but it was often fragmented – sometimes as a part-time combination with household work, sometimes as an intermittent episode in household experience. Women workers in the city were more likely to work in offices or commerce than in production, just as in Paris. Lille offers a classic example of a city and its region whose manufacturing was transformed by industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century.
