ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1882, Yvonne Yven boarded the third-class train car that would take her from her native Brittany and Brest-the westernmost city in France-to Paris, where her friend Françoise le Bec had arranged work for the two of them as servants for a bourgeois family. There she would work as a domestic, marry, and raise a son.1 Were her migration and her life in Paris different from those of her male compatriots, and of newcomers to other cities? If so, how? We shall see. This chapter analyses internal migration as a gendered process in France; it constitutes part of ‘the ongoing struggle of bringing gender into the study of migration’ and it does so with a specifi c focus on the networks, sexualisation, employment, and marriage patterns of newcomers in urbanising France around the turn of the century-in the context of what is known about the same aspects of migration elsewhere.2
