Gender at work

In the period after 1850, the French economy continued to exhibit many of the traits which had characterised it in the first half of the nineteenth century. Population growth was sluggish; agriculture retained many of its archaic features; and industrial development was extremely uneven. In 1891, 17.5 million people (46% of the population) still derived their livelihoods from the agricultural sector. Nevertheless, the second half of the nineteenth century was a crucial period of economic change. Agriculture itself underwent a dramatic break with the past, transformed by the new technologies and the application of fertilisers with a resultant increase in productivity. At the same time, the transport revolution opened up new markets and paved the way for the commercialisation of the sector. Subsistence crises became a thing of the past. Industrial growth, having slackened off in the 1870s and 1880s after the impressive progress made under the Second Empire, began to expand once more in the mid-1890s, and especially after 1905, with the most dynamic growth evident in new industries such as chemicals, electricity and car manufacture and in related older industries such as iron and steel. The rapid development of the tertiary sector was further evidence of economic modernisation. ¹ All of these changes impacted on the lives of working women in both town and countryside in ways which are not susceptible to facile generalisation.