ABSTRACT
Tasks, trades, and more recently professions are defined and allotted on the basis of a binary split between male and female domains in every culture. Early research in history and sociology began by investigating that divide, an approach that led researchers to study women’s and men’s work separately. This chapter seeks to understand the sexual division of work as a system of relations susceptible to change over time, following alterations in work contexts and of groups of women and men. It aims to take stock of the situations experienced by women today, at the close of the 1990s, in the face of all of the recent changes. The sphere of work must be viewed as constituted by both sexes, irrespective of the place occupied by women and men. The stakes here are considerable, since society as a whole is questioned afresh when work done by women is classed under the heading of domestic work or as a trade or profession.
