Representations of the ouvrière

Women’s work was not new in the nineteenth century. What was new was that over the course of the century women’s work came to be regarded as a social problem and gave rise to an extensive debate on the role of women in the workplace. For bourgeois commentators, l’ouvrière was manifestly a woman who failed to correspond with the idealised image of the ‘angel of the hearth’: and to flout the gender order constructed around the ideology of domesticity and la femme au foyer was to challenge the social order itself. The discourse on female labour thus has to be regarded in its own right, not merely as a source of information about working-class conditions but more importantly as a reflection of the attitudes and outlook of the protagonists in the debate, who were preoccupied by larger questions of identity, power relations and social change. ¹ The purpose of the present chapter is to examine representations of the working-class woman in nineteenth-century France for the light which they shed on cultural constructions of womanhood and contemporary notions of femininity and sexuality. These in turn reveal much about the ideological context in which real nineteenth-century French women lived their lives.