ABSTRACT
Every year the fertility rate published by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) hits the headlines in France, showing how important the issue is in this country. With two children per woman, the country takes the opportunity to boast of this feat through its media. This event reflects the high value given to children in French society beyond what they mean personally to their parents. The fear of a declining fertility rate has preoccupied politicians and demographers for more than a century in France. The increase in women’s labour force participation in the late 1960s was a source of collective anxiety since a link was made with the fertility decline that occurred at that time. The labour force participation of mothers, which is one of the major changes in the second half of the twentieth century, resulted in a silent revolution that changed the way women built their identities. Employment competed with motherhood, partly taking the place of children in women’s self-identities.
