Women, Work, and Family

The experience of women in rural working-class families of the Aude was influenced not only by the material forces of production, but also by a culture that assigned them specific capabilities and roles in the dual worlds of work and home. Women's decisions to work or not to work were thus determined by a delicate balance between economic survival and the demands of reproduction and child care. Over a period of nearly sixty-five years,

the timing and patterning of important life events such as marriage, childbearing, and work closely followed the boom-and-bust rhythm of the vineyards. Both women and men who worked in the vineyards in Coursan married earlier than men and women in France overall (see Table 14).^[20] Even so, male agricultural workers in 1850s Coursan had to acquire some savings to begin a new household, and often did not marry until they were as old as twenty-seven. Even after they formed their own households, life was not easy. Poor harvests in the early 1860s and rising prices caused local officials to wonder how workers could survive the increasing cost of living.^[21] A family of three in 1862 in which only the husband worked could just about make ends meet, and would benefit considerably from a small plot of vines or a soup garden (Figure 1). Even when a wife worked and a child was young, the family could barely meet basic expenses. Later, the consumption needs of a growing adolescent could impose additional burdens on the family economy.

Working-class families in 1882, at the height of the prosperous years of vineyard expansion, lived vastly more comfortably than twenty years earlier. As workers' wages rose and as more vineyard workers acquired land, they married earlier—the men about four years earlier than men in France generally—which also meant higher birth rates in this booming protourban village than in the population at large (Table 15). In this period, workers most often lived in single-family households. In Coursan, for example, less than 5 percent of the households consisted of a married couple living with the parents of one spouse. Even though rents and the prices of meat, wine, and bread increased steadily between 1860 and 1880,^[22] contemporaries noted the great improvement in the standard of living of vineyard workers in the Narbonnais and pointed out that now these rural workers lived much better than urban artisans, whose incomes barely met expenses.^[23] As Table 16 shows, income from landownership around 1881 meant real prosperity. A family that aggressively worked one hectare of vines could realize over 5,000 francs from sale of their wine, and even families who owned no land could be well off. At all stages of a family's development, as Figure 1 shows, working-class families could easily meet expenses.

The pattern of women's wage earning closely followed both

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Figure 1.
Changes in Expenses and Incomes of Vineyard Workers' families According to 
Family Types, 1862–1882. Sources: AN F¹¹ 2698, "Enquête agricole de 1862"; AD 
Aude 13M300, "Statistique agricole décennale des communes, 1882"; France, 
Ministère de l'agriculture, Statistique agricole de la France,  Résultats généraux de 
l'enquête décennale de 1882  (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1887), pt. 1, 382–396; pt. 2, 183.

the overall economic conjuncture and the demands of child care at home. In the depression years of the 1840s and 1850s, many men did not earn enough to permit them to support a family on their own, and so their wives went to work as well: 56 percent of women wage earners during this period were married (see Table 12). This level of married women's labor force participation was much higher than the national aggregate level. In France as a whole, 40 percent of married women worked in 1851; in England, 25 percent.^[24] A low crude birth rate in these years (see Table 15) also suggests that many married women, not having the responsibility of young children, were comparatively free to work for wages. Even the presence of a child under five at home did not prevent women from working, however. Many a young mother bundled her baby into a basket and took it to the vines or fields where she could nurse it; a child of three or four might be left to play.

Women's contribution to the working-class family economy was complemented and sometimes spelled by the labor of children. But if Coursan can be taken as a reliable example, child labor (that is, of children under fourteen), was relatively uncommon. Rural working-class families in the Aude relied more heavily on the wage contributions of adult children living at home than on the labor of youngsters. To be sure, before the Third Republic's compulsory education laws (beginning in 1881), chil-

dren joined their mothers in the vineyards from the age of seven or eight on, gathering branches and cutting grapes during harvest, for which they earned the same as or somewhat less than women's wages. In 1862, a child could contribute as much as 264 francs annually to the family purse. Twenty years later, that contribution might be 460 francs. These sums could add significantly to the total income of a vineyard worker's family. Even so, few children under fourteen (normal school-leaving age) actually left school to work full-time. In 1851 in Coursan, only sixty-two children under fourteen worked, and of these only three worked in the vines. More commonly, young unmarried adult sons and daughters (fourteen to thirty years old) continued to reside with parents and contributed to the family income—a situation similar to that of nineteenth-century working-class

families in industrial centers like Roubaix.^[25] In the period before the expansion of vineyard capitalism, the presence of multiple adult wage earners in rural working-class families could occasionally relieve married women from wage work. Thus Justine Canguilhem, fifty-six, wife of François Canguilhem, sixty-nine, a farmer, did not need to work for wages as long as her three older daughters, aged twenty, twenty-three, and thirty-five, brought in income as a day laborer, seamstress, and laundry worker, respectively.^[26]

During the golden age of vineyard prosperity, women's work patterns changed. In 1876, many fewer women appeared in the census as wage earners and only 27 percent as day laborers or as cultivateurs (see Table 12). Moreover, considerably fewer married women were recorded as working. However, the census may not accurately reflect women's real occupational activity, for in this period of expanding landownership the wives of artisans and vinedressers most likely worked their families' vines rather than as wage workers.^[27] While it is tempting to argue that increasing birth rates provided an incentive for women to remain at home, the need for women's labor on family vineyards probably had the stronger effect in determining their work patterns at this point. Once the phylloxera struck the Aude, however, the devastation to family property and the near destitution of small vignerons caused yet another redistribution of economic responsibility in the family.