ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the concepts discussed in part 1 of this book. Drawing primarily on the French case, but locating it within the international literature, the part recounts the history of conceptualisations of women’s labour force participation, from the 19th century to the present era of flexible labour markets. It describes the ways in which the new categories of the labour market still sometimes ignore the gender relations upon which they depend. The part is a useful corrective to our tendency to be sometimes less crisp than we should be in defining our concepts, adopting ones that seem most popular, rather than those that best reflect the theoretical tradition within which one is working. A happy exception is Francoise Gaspard’s “Immigrant Women and their Daughters: Intersections of Race, Class and Gender”. The part explicitly addresses the action of categorisation, dealt with in a perhaps more veiled ways.
