From Muscles to Nerves: Gender, “Race” and the Body at Work in France 1919–1939

International Review of Social History

Volumn 44, Issue S7, 1999, Pages 123-147

  Frader, Laura Levine ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033263631     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: 1469512X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859000115226     Document Type: Article

References (172)

1. Gendered bodies were already the site of considerable debate throughout the nineteenth century in discussions about the right to work, social and family policies, the qualifications of citizenship and the problem of male military preparedness. See, for example, Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ, 1984)
2. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modem Europe (New York, 1985)
3. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990), pp. 224–228.
4. Rabinbach's work is the most extensive study of work science in English, although the book is not designed to focus on the gender or race dimensions of work science. See also, Mary Lynn Stewart, Women, Work, and the French State (Montreal, 1991)
5. L.R. Villermé, Tableau de L Etat physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine, et de sole (Paris, 1971)
6. Leora Auslander and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds), Différence des sexes et protection sociale. xié-xé siècles (St Denis, 1995)
7. Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993)
8. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds), Mothers of A New World (New York and London, 1995)
9. Rachel Fuchs, Eleanor Accampo et al, Family, the State, and Welfare in Modem France (Baltimore, MD, 1996)
10. Kathleen Canning, Languages of Gender and Labor. Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1996)
11. Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality (Ithaca, NY, 1995)
12. Laura Levine Frader, “Social Citizens Without Citizenship: Working-Class Women and Social Policy in Interwar France”, Social Politics, 3 (1996), pp. 111–135.
13. On the the way in which this collaboration constructed “a new image of class relationships”, see Charles Maier, “Between Taylor-ism and Technocracy”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5 (1970), p. 29.
14. For examples of the naturalizing discourses addressed to the “inherent qualities” of women, see, for example, Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor, “Sex and Skill: Notes Towards a Feminist Economics”, Feminist Review, 6 (1980), pp. 79–88
15. Harriet Bradley, Men's Work, Women's Work (Minneapolis, MN, 1989)
16. Helen Harden Chenut, “The Gendering of Skill as Historical Process: the Case of French Knitters in Industrial Troyes, 1880–1939”, in Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 77–107
17. Downs, Manufacturing Inequality.
18. See B. Nogaro and Lucien Weil, La main d'oeuvre etrangère et coloniale pendant la guerre (New Haven, CT and Paris, 1926)
19. Tyler Stovall, “Color-blind France? Colonial Workers During the First World War”, Race and Class, 35 (1993), pp. 35–55
20. Stovall, “The Color Line Behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War”, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), PP- 737–769, which analyses the different responses of the French to North African immigrant labor versus European immigrant labor. Stovall argues that the war lessened tensions between the French and European immigrants whereas it heightened hostility towards colonial workers of color.
21. On immigrant workers, see Gary S. Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France. The Making of a New Working Class (Philadelphia, PA, 1983)
22. John Home, “Immigrant Workers in France During World War I”, French Historical Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 57–88
23. Home, Labour at War: France and Britain 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1991).
24. See Rabinbach's discussion of cultural and social modernity with reference to the science of work in The Human Motor.
25. On the mutually constitutive character of these categories, see introduction in Sandra Harding, The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Towards A Democratic Future (Bloomington, IN, 1993). As Harding writes, “[…] it is clear that “race” and gendet, racism and sexism, construct and maintain each other […]. Class and gender policies have constructed and maintained racial hierarchies just as race policies have done for class and gender hierarchies”(p. 11).
26. See also Carole Turbin, Laura L. Frader, Sonya O. Rose and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “A Roundtable on Gender, Race, Class, Culture and Politics: Where Do We Go From Here?”, Social Science History, 22 (1998), pp. 1–45.
27. I am grateful to Rayna Rapp and to Ann Laura Stoler for conversations on this subject. See Stoler, “Racial Histories and Regimes of Truth”, Political Power and Social Theory, 11 (1977), pp. 183–206.
28. See also Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony”, in Cooper and Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997). As Stoler and Cooper write, citing George Stocking and others, “the concepts of culture and race have long served to buttress one another in crucial ways […] [racism] has long depended on hierarchies of civility, on cultural distinctions of breeding, character, and psychological disposition, on the relationship between the hidden essence of race and what were claimed to be its visual markers” (p. 34).
29. On the links between notions of racial difference and the nation, see Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race. Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York, 1996), pp. 128–148
30. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY, 1992).
31. On the cultural distinctions of “civility” and their links to concepts of the nation, and to class, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford and Cambridge, 1994), especially part 1, ch. 2.
32. See Harding, “Racial” Economy of Science. As Harding points out, science itself is laden with conflicting tendencies: regressive collaboration with racist and eurocentric beliefs on the one hand; and on the other hand, the progressive effects of “scientific procedures that have proved effective in identfying racist and imperialist tendencies in the sciences […]”, (p. 14).
33. In the words of Roy Porter, “the body must be regarded as mediated through cultural sign systems”. See Porter, “History of the Body” in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, PA, 1992), p. 215.
34. On these two approaches and their policy consequences in France and Britain, see Gary Cross, A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1914 (Berkeley, QA., 1989), chapter 5.
35. See Rabinbach, The Human Motor, which examines the important German (as well as French) contributions of this movement.
36. Taylor's first work published in France in 1907, Etude sur Torganisation du Travail dans les Usines was published by the Revue de la Métallurgie; subsequent works were published in French within a year of their appearance in the United States. There is a voluminous literature on Taylorism apart from Taylor's own published work. For a sampling of the literature on the reception of Taylorism in France, see Patrick Fridenson, “Un Tournant Taylorien de la Société française (1904–1918)” in Annates ESC, 5 (1987),pp. 1031–1060
37. Yves Cohen, “Ernest Mattern chez Peugeot (1906–1918) ou comment peut-on être taylorien?”, in Maurice de Montmollin and Olivier Pastre (eds), Le taylorisme (Paris, 1984)
38. Aimée Moutet, Les logiques de Tentreprise (Paris, 1997)
39. O. Christin, “Les Enjeux de la rationalisation industrielle (1901–1929)”, Mémoire de Maîtrise, Universi-té de Paris I, 1982.
40. See also Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy”, on the cultural and political appeal of Taylorism
41. Rabinbach, “The European Science of Work: the Economy of the Body at the End of the Nineteenth Century”, in Stephen Laurence Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp (eds), Work in France. Representations, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, NY, 1986), p. 475, n.1.
42. See also Cross, “Redefining Workers' Control: Rationalization, Labor Time, and Union Politics in France, 1900–1918”, in James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (eds), Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–192; (Philadelphia, PA, 1983), pp. 143–172
43. Aimée Moutet, “Patrons du Progrès ou Patrons de Combat? La politique de rationalisation de l'industrie française au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale”, in Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman (eds), Le Soldat du Travail. Guerre, fascisme, et taylorisme (Paris, 1978), pp. 449–489.
44. See also Georges Ribeill “Les Organisations du mouvement ouvrier en France face a la rationalisation (1926–1932)”, in de Montmollin and Pastré, Le taylorisme.
45. Cross, “Redefining Workers' Control”.
46. Hirata, “Division internationale du travail et taylorisme: Brésil, France, et Japon”, in de Montmollin and Pastré, Le taylorisme.
47. Edward P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, Past and Present, 38 (1969), pp. 56–97.
48. Rabinbach, “The European Science of Work”, p. 506, n. 111.
49. The first stage “represented the creation of a disciplined workforce; the second was characterized by the struggle over the duration and value of labor time”, “The European Science of Work”.
50. Jean-Marie Lahy, Le Système Taylor et la Physiologie du Travail Professionnel (Paris, 1921), Préface, p.v.
51. On Lahy's critique of Taylor, see also Rabinbach, The Human Motor, pp. 250–252.
52. See Lahy, Le Système Taylor, pp. 156–157. Taylorism and work science both shared productivist goals
53. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 253.
54. As Rabinbach points out, the science of labor had to take account of changes in the labor process going on outside the laboratories in which it was first conceived. “Concern with fatigue, time, and motion, reflected deep social changes in the nature of the factory and the emergence of a workforce that no longer had to be subjected to the moral economy of industrial discipline outside the workplace. Instead, workers had to be taught to internalize the tegularity imposed by machine technology and adapt to newly intensified work norms”, Rabinbach, “European Science of Work”, p. 507.
55. See also Ribeill, “Les débuts de l'ergonomie en France à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale”, Le Mouvement Social, 113 (1980), pp. 3–36
56. Claudine Fontanon and Andre Grelon (eds), Lei Professeurs du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers. Dictionnaire biographique, 1794–1955, 2 vols (Paris, 1994). It is quite possible that in measuring the efforts of the white male body these scientists were also struggling with their own definitions of masculinity. I am grateful to Antoinette Burton for this suggestion.
57. Ribeill, “Les débuts de l'ergonomie en France”, p. 21.
58. The attention to race in the works of work science experts such as Jules Amar was partly based on early anthropological attempts to classify and evaluate the capacities of humans according to anthropometrics. See Jules Amar, Le Moteur humain et les bases scientifiques du travail professionnel, 2nd edition (Paris, 1923), p. 151.
59. On race in the science of work, see also Elisa Camiscioli, “Labor Power and the Racial Economy: the Selection of Foreign Workers in France in the Late Third Republic”, paper presented to the conference, “Blurring the Boundaries: Politics and Culture in the French Third Republic”, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1997.
60. The law of 27 January 1880 required gymnastics training for boys in lycees; Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 224.
61. According to Amar, the physiologist Mosso wrote that “the catastrophe of Sedan will go down in history as the victory of German legs”; Amar, Le Moteur humain, p. 673.
62. Rabinbach, “The European Science of Work”, p. 492
63. The Human Motor, pp. 130–131, 22.4–227, 265–270.
64. See also Alain Ehrenberg, Le corps militaire: politique et pedagogic en democratic (Paris, 1983).
65. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 265. During the war, work scientists investigated the possibilities of rehabilitating wounded soldiers. Amar in particular worked on the re-education of wounded men and on the development of prostheses that would enable war cripples to return to work. His work concerned exclusively white French soldiers.
66. See Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization and the Re-Employment of the Disabled (New York, 1919), pp. 227–358.
67. See also Hugues Monod, “Jules Amar”, in Fontanon and Grelon, Les Professeurs du Conservatoire national, vol. 2, pp. 102–103.
68. See Downs, Manufacturing Inequality
69. Annie Fourcaut, Femmes à Tusine: ouvrières et surinten-dantes dans les enterprises françaises de Ventre-deux-guerres (Paris, 1982)
70. Simone Weil, La condition ouvriere (Paris, 1951).
71. Downs, Manufacturing Inequality, pp. 83–84.
72. Manufacturing Inequality., p. 84
73. Marcel Frois, La Santé et le travail des Femmes Pendant la Guerre (Paris and New Haven, CT, 1926), p. 62.
74. Frois' concerns about the white female working body were echoed by British investigations into munitions workers for the Health of Munitions Workers' Committee in 1917 and 1918. See Cross, A Quest for Time, p. 117. Not all work scientists agreed about the employability of white women in “male” jobs. Jules Amar reviewed differences in the cardiograms of French men and women responding to the sound of the fall of a two kilogram weight. He found that the cardiograms showed strong changes in the women tested, but a negligable changes or none at all in the men - the difference attributable ro women's sensation of fear and power-lessness and their greater emotional susceptibility
75. Mathilde Dubesset, Françoise Thebaud and Catherine Vincent, “Les munitionettes de la Seine”, in Patrick Fridenson (ed.), 1914–1918: l'autre front (Cahiers du Mouvement Social, 2) (Paris, 1977), pp. 189–219, 196, fn. 34. Amar's conclusions were bolstered by anthropometric data from the 1860s and 1870s that demonstrated women's inferiority to men in measures of height, weight, lung displacement (capacité vitale), thoracic volume, and muscular strength. Amar argued that in general “the shape of the body […] provides a guide for the workers' choice of one form of work over another […] normally, men are organized and constructed to work in a certain way because this is the way their work is most economical”
76. Amar, Le Moteur humain, pp. 148 and 148–178.
77. Amar argued that as a general rule physical proportions determined professional aptitides. See also pp. 323–324 for Amar's attempt to classify men according to morphology or the “architecture of their bodies”. Thus, he argued that “in the vast majority of work requiring great effort and sustained attention [une attention puissante], there is no place for women workers. They are more appropriate for office occupations”. Le Moteur humain., p. 606.
78. As Downs notes, the original intentions of the founders of the system, organized around republican feminist Cecile Brunschvicg, were to promote wage parity for women with men, over see their working conditions, and ultimately to protect “women's maternal capacity through careful administration of the factory's welfare and maternal services”; Downs, Manufacturing Inequality, p. 177. Downs makes the important point that this system, managed by a corps of women factory superintendents, functioned as one additional component of the rationalizing impulse of the war and interwar years.
79. Manufacturing Inequality., on the wartime activities of the superintendents, pp. 166–185, and pp. 233–275 on the interwar years
80. see also Fourcaut, Femmes à l'usine, pp. 200–207.
81. Stovall, “The Color Line”.
82. Of course, these intersections occurred also in practice as Tyler Stovall demonstrates in “The Color Line”.
83. See Stovall, “The Color Line”, p. 747.
84. Nogaro and Weil, La main d'oeuvre etrangere, p. 26. There were approximately 30,000 North African workers already in France prior to the war, most of whom worked as unskilled laborers in mining and industry (p. 5). In 1915, the Undersecretary of State for Artillery and Munitions in the Ministry of War hired several hundred Kabyle workers for artillery manufacture and the Minister of Agriculture hired several hundred for agricultural work in the region south of Paris. A more systematic mobilization of colonial labor began in 1916.
85. On the differences in treatment of European and colonial labor, see Stovall, “Color-blind France?”.
86. Stovall, “Color Blind France?”, p. 48. Stovall observes that during the war, such supposed physical characteristics came to be viewed as a moral deficiency: laziness. Dexterity was the skill most often associated with women, usually because of cultural beliefs about women's superior fine-motor coordination and their “nimble fingers”.
87. See, for example, Downs, Manufacturing Inequality, pp. 83–84.
88. Nogaro and Weil, La main d'oeuvre etrangere, pp. 49–50, 54.
89. Lahy, Le Systeme Taylor, p. ix.
90. Ribeill, “Les debuts de 1'ergonomie en France”, p. 24.
91. See also William H. Schneider, “The Scientific Study of Labor in Interwar France”, French Historical Studies, 17 (1991), p. 418.
92. Amar, Le Moteur humain, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1923), p. 43.
93. Le Moteur humain., p. 116.
94. On Amar's study of racialized bodies at work, see also Ribeill, “Les debuts de l'ergonomie en France”, pp. 14–16
95. Camiscioli, “Labor Power and the Racial Economy”, pp. 4–6.
96. Amar, Le Moteur humain, p. x.
97. Le Moteur humain., pp. 43–44.
98. Le Moteur humain., pp. 219–220. This observation also revealed how white French workers' characteristics were defined. I am grateful to James Cronin for pointing this out.
99. Le Moteur humain., p. 220.
100. Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization, p. 204.
101. See also Camiscioli, “Labor Power and the Racial Economy”, p. 6. The only defect of the French laborer was that “his temperament is impulsive”. Amar believed French workers needed better vocational training and better hygiene at work. He also believed that well-trained French workers should travel to the colonies to train native craftsmen. “Moreover, it is the duty of the European worker to direct native labor which is naturally adapted to fatiguing kinds of work which would not tax the native's endurance as greatly as it would ours […]∗ (p. 210)[emphasis is mine - LLF].
102. See Schneider, “The Scientific Study of Labor”.
103. On how the arguments of these men transcended solidaristic arguments for marrying the interests of labor and capital, see Cross, A Quest for Time, pp. 120–122. As Cross also points out, in Britain work scientists believed that the increased leisure that would result from a shorter, more efficient working day and higher productivity would allow Britain to “build an improved race […]” (p. 120). This is a not atypical example of the looseness with which the notion of race was used to reflect both whiteness and nationality.
104. On the vocational guidance applications of work science, see also Mary Louise Robens, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, IL, 1994), pp. 183–196 and 206–211.
105. Much of the research of these laboratories was specifically directed towards the prevention of industrial accidents and focused on masculine jobs such as those of railway switchmen, tramway and bus drivers, welders, and mine workers. See, for instance, Lahy, La Sélection psychophysiologique des travailleurs: conducteurs de tramways et d'autobus (Paris, 1927) and articles in the review Travail humain founded by Lahy and Laugier in 1933.
106. See also Schneider, “The Scientific Study of Labor”.
107. See Delphine Gardey, “Un Monde en Mutation. Les Employés de Bureau en France, 1890–1930. Féminisation, Mécanisation, Rationalisation”; Thèse de Doctorat nouvelle régime. Université de Paris VII, 1995, pp. 824–833.
108. See also Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 306–326.
109. See “L'organisation méthodique du Travail et son Application aux Postes et Télégraphes”, Annales des PTT, 8 (1923), pp. 835–976
110. “Le Téléphone en France et à l'Etranger. Progrès technique, organisation rationnelle”, Annales des PTT, 8 (1923), pp. 565–598
111. “Administration industrielle”, Annales des PTT, 2 (1917), pp. 356–386.
112. This story of the feminization of the French postal and telephone service is well told by Susan Bachrach in Dames employées: The Feminization of Postal Work in Nineteenth Century France (New York, 1984), pp. 30–50.
113. See also Jeanne Bouvier, Histoire des dames employées dans les Postes, Télégraphes, et Téléphones (Paris, 1930)
114. Dominique Bertinotti, “Carrières féminines et carrières masculines dans l'administration des postes et télégraphes à la fin du XIXe siècle”, Annales. ESC, 3 (1985), pp. 625–640.
115. The grade, “dame employée”, actually included all women working in the postal, telegraph and telephone (PTT) service; Bachrach, Dames employées, p. 42.
116. On differential wages, see Bachrach, Dames employées
117. Pierrette Pezerat and Danielle Poublan, “Femmes sans maris. Les employées des postes”, in Arlette Farge et Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (eds), Madame ou Mademoiselle? Itineraires de la solitude feminine, 18e-2oe siècle (Paris, 1984), p. 123.
118. Madeleine Vignes, Les téléphonistes des PTT (preface de Madeleine Rébérioux) (Paris, 1984), p. 12
119. Bachrach, Dames employées, p. 69. Figures on the interwar period are not disaggregated by service, see République française. Ministere du Travail, de l'Hygiène, de 1'Assistance et de la Prévoyance sociale, Statistique générate de France. Résultats statistiques du Recensement générate de la Population (1921, 1926, 1936) (Paris, 1922, 1928, 1937). Women counted for 22.5 per cent of PTT workers in 1906, 30.3 per cent in 1926 and 32.8 per cent in 1936.
120. Bachrach, Dames employées, p. 51
121. Bertinotti, “Carrières féminines”, p. 637.
122. République française. Ministère des PTT, Bulletin mensuel des PTT Janvier 1890 (Paris, 1890), pp. 315–316
123. Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), pp. 411–415.
124. See Pezerat et Poublan, “Femmes sans maris”, pp. 129–130, who report that in 1921, fifty per cent of all female postal workers were widowed, divorced, or unmarried. Although this figure incorporated the effects of male mortality during the war, it was consistent with low marriage rates among women postal workers before the war. The vast majority of male workers, on the other hand, tended to be married.
125. Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), p. 411
126. République française. Ministère des PTT, Bulletin ojficiel du Ministère des PTT, 17 (1930), p. 694.
127. The phrase is Rayna Rapp's, (personal communication to the author). On the requirements for admission to the competency examinations where these criteria were spelled out, see, for example, Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), pp. 411–415.
128. Cultural competence also incorporated “civility”, and itself contributed to the construction of Frenchness within the public service. See Elias, The Civilizing Process.
129. See Alice Conklin, “Redefining ‘Frenchness’: France and West Africa”, in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA and London, 1998), pp. 76–83.
130. Janet Home places somewhat more emphasis on white French women's “civilizing” work among Muslim women in North Africa whose wearing of the veil was considered a form of dissimulation and whose hygiene was by implication not up to French standards; Home, “In Pursuit of Greater France: Visions of Empire Among Musée Social Reformers, 1894–1931”, Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism., pp. 37–41.
131. A somewhat different picture was painted by Hubertine Auclert in her Femmes arabes en Algérie (1900).
132. See Julia Clancy-Smith, “Islam, Gender, and Identities in the Making of French Algeria, 1830–1962”, in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, pp. 168–172.
133. This difference suggests that nineteenth-century suspicions of the woman worker and especially the single woman worker remained alive in the period after the Great War. On those nineteenth-century suspicions, see Scott, “ ‘L'Ouvrière, mot impie, sordide’, […]” and “A Statistical Representation of Work”, in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).
134. Thus, “race” was also complicated by regionality — an employee who spoke with a thick regional accent was not acceptable unless her pronunciation could be “corrected”. Moreover, “Frenchness” was still a category that distinguished among and between French women of different social, regional, and educational - as well as racial - backgrounds. I am grateful to James Cronin for raising this point. See République française. Ministère des PTT, Bulletin mensuel des PTT, 18 (1922), p. 412
135. Bulletin officiel du Ministère des PTT, 17 (1930), p. 695.
136. See also Michele Martin, “Hello Central”: Gender Technology and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems. (Montréal, 1991), pp. 58–60
137. Bachrach, Dames employées.
138. See also Julien Fontègne and Emilio Solari, “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste. Essai de psychologie professionnelle”, Archives de psychologie, 17 (1918), p. 92.
139. See Fontègne and Solari, “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste”. Roberts argues that in debates about vocational guidance, the French attempted to “reconcile the ongoing modernization of economic and social life with time-honored cultural traditions”
140. Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, p. 187. I am not so sure there was that much reconciliation to be done in matters of gender. The points of departure for both modernization and “cultural tradition” were the same: both already incorporated cultural notions of gendered bodies.
141. Fontègne et Solari, “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste”, pp. 85–86 and 95.
142. “Le Travail de la Téléphoniste”., pp. 93–95. Work science was applied to telephone operators even more aggressively in the Netherlands.
143. See Robert Korving and Gerard Hogesteeger, “Psychotechnik bei der PTT Niederlande”, in Helmut Gold and Annette Koch (eds), Fräulein vom Amt (Munich, 1993), pp. 120–134.
144. On male opetators, see Bouvier, Histoire des dames employées, p. 179.
145. E. Rougier, Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste (Paris, 1927).
146. Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste., p. 7.
147. Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste., pp. 10–11.
148. Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste., pp. 12–13 and 17.
149. Catherine Bertho, Histoire des télécommunications en France (Toulouse, 1984), p. 75.
150. See Vignes, Les téléphonistes des PTT, p. 23
151. Dominique Bertinotti, Artisans d'hier et communications d'aujourd'hui, 1850–1950 (Paris, 1981), p. 14.
152. Bouvier, Histoire des dames employées, p. 182. Women did resist some of these practices, although the majority of the labor struggles were directed not at the constraints of rationalization and work discipline, but at pay scales, poor opportunities for advancement and the elimination of the dame employée as a separate category with assimilation of women into the categories reserved for men.
153. See Republique française. Ministère de Commerce, de l'lndustrie et des Colonies, Bulletin mensuel de Ministere de Commerce, de l'lndustrie et des Colonies, 1 (1890), p. 315. This requirement remained in effect through the 1930s. It was based on the principle of incompatibity of certain public services (operators could not obtain authorization to marry policemen or mayors or assistant mayors, for example) and operated as another element of regulation.
154. See Bouvier, Histoire des dames employees, pp. 204–205.
155. Rougier, Le vade-Mecum de la téléphoniste, p. 24. The focus of these activities as well as of the housing arrangements for operators was the single women who made up the majority of telephone operators. Telephone operators, along with other postal workers, were awarded paid maternity leave in 1911.
156. See (anonymous) “La Poste au Féminin”, Réference, 7 (1984), p. 17.
157. Dr Clapart (fils), Maladies et Accidents professionals des téléphonistes à Paris (Paris, 1911), p. 12–17. This was very likely because of the fact that the vast majority of operators were women who worked on the busy daytime shifts.
158. Maladies et Accidents professionals des téléphonistes à Paris., p. 19.
159. This is probably why Alexander Millerand, Minister of Public Works and the PTT in 1910, had proposed creating a revolving recruitment of young operators who would be encouraged by a system of bonuses to leave the administration at age twenty-five and who, in any case could work no longer than age thirty-five. See “Le Nouveau recrutement des téléphonistes”, L'Action, 23 February 1910. The rationale was to replace an ageing corps of operators with fresh blood. Since they were considered “floating personnel” they could be easily let go, permitting the administration to save money or adopt new technologies without worrying about the seniority of public service workers.
160. The project was never adopted. On the concern with “nervous fatigue”, see Cross, A Quest for Time, p. 113.
161. Syndicat national des Agents des PTT (CGT), PVe Congrès des Agents des PTT tenu à Paris les 19–22 avril 1922 (Limoges, 1922).
162. See especially the intervention of Mme Stanko, delegate for the operators, pp. 130–132. On labor's reaction to Taylorism, see Cross, “Redefining Workers' Control”, and A Quest for Time
163. Ribeill, “Les Organisations du Mouvement”, pp. 127–140
164. Fridenson, “Un tournant taylorien”.
165. IVe Congrès des Agents des PTT, pp. 107, 140. See also discussions in this congress on specialization and the scientific organization of labor.
166. Syndicat national des Agents des Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (confédéré), Vllième Congrès national tenu à Toulouse les 10–13 juin 1925 (Epernay, 1925), pp. 268–283.
167. One delegate's suggestion that a solution to the problem of operators' fatigue would be to introduce men into the telephone exchanges was laughed off. On the German use of psychotechnics, see Horst Gundlach, “Psychotechnische Untersuchungen bei der Deutschen Reichspost”, in Gold and Koch, Fraulein vom Amt.
168. Dr D.P. Begoin, Le Travail et la Fatigue. Le Névrose des Téléphonistes et des mécanographes, special number of La Raison, 20/21 (1958).
169. See, for example, the essays in Frader and Rose, Gender and Class in Modern Europe
170. Downs, Manufacturing Inequality
171. Tyler Stovall's excellent work, cited above, is an important exception. There has been much work, of course, on the subject of racism in post-World-War-II France. An abundant literature has examined immigration and the salience of cultural and edinic difference in shaping working class identities in the interwar and post-World-War-II periods (see, for instance, Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear, Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC and London, 1997) especially pp. 188–218 and 251–279). However, most historical work on immigration does not address the category of race nor does it attempt to theorize the meanings of racial difference in France, particularly in relation to France's colonial empire. This work remains to be done.
172. See Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, p. 210, who cites Marjorie BeaJe, that the French adopted “techniques of social management […] in order to preserve what they saw as traditional social relations and cultural traditions”.