ABSTRACT
The plight of the working-class woman was perhaps the dimension of the ‘woman question’ which attracted most attention from nineteenth-century commentators. Women had always worked in European society, but it was only in the nineteenth century that women’s work became an issue of public concern. The ostensible reason was that, in the eyes of many contemporary social critics, who ranged from Catholics with a social conscience to the likes of Marx and Engels, the working-class family had become the main casualty of the coming of a new industrial civilisation in which women were obliged to leave their homes to toil in appalling conditions in factories. Outraged by the findings of investigators such as Villermé, Buret and Blanqui, Michelet denounced the very term ouvrière as an ‘impious and sordid word, which no language has ever, and no epoch could ever, have understood before this iron age’. 1 For Michelet as for the moderate republican politician Jules Simon, author of a widely read treatise on the condition of working women in mid-nineteenthcentury France, work was a profanation of the ideal of femininity and incompatible with women’s primary role of wife and mother. As Simon put it in a subsequent work, a woman who worked ceased to be a woman. 2
