ABSTRACT
This chapter first establishes that France, like other contemporary Western industrial nations, has a labor force that is segregated by sex. It reviews how large-scale structural change shaped the overall gender configuration of occupations in industrializing and industrial France. Industrialized textile production, garment making, and domestic service, all industries transformed indirectly or directly by industrialization, were the largest employers of females in nineteenth-century France. The chapter then turns to occupational structure and family strategies in French cities. Urban industrial economies differed in striking ways, as can be seen in the comparison of two cities, Roubaix and Amiens. The chapter examines the behavior of employers and families both through their own statements of what they were about and in the ensuing patterns of labor-force distribution. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this historical evidence for understanding occupational segregation.
