ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with non-European immigrant women who arrived in France for reasons connected with employment. Our culture has an ambivalent attitude toward these women. The difference in behaviour between immigrant women and men may be seen by observing any suburban neighbourhood. The increasing proportion of women in the immigrant population has gone hand in hand with a regular increase in the labour force participation of foreign women. Immigrant women finally appeared on the public scene in the late 1980s. Two controversies provoked this change. One was over the right to wear the Islamic headscarf in school while the other was about polygamy. The authorities presently tend to view immigrant women as the main agents of integration. There is definitely some basis to the idea that women constitute a strategic group, within which there are some key actors whose fight against deviant behaviour makes them relays, and go-betweens.
