Economic Crisis, the Family Economy, and Women's Work

The comparative comfort and security of Narbonnais working-class households in the early 1880s was short lived. The combined effects of the phylloxera crisis, the depression of the early 1890s, and the turn-of-the-century crisis accentuated the proletarianization of women workers and stressed working-class families to the breaking point. Unable to meet the high costs of treating and reconstituting their vineyards, small owners sold their vines. Working-class households in which men's wages plummeted now needed the income of wives and daughters. According to the crude dénombrement of 1886, some 733 women

worked for wages, over half of them in the vineyards.^[28] A combination of depressed wages, the absence of income from one's own vines, and young children to support (the birth rate remained high—see Table 15) obliged women to work for wages on the large estate vineyards, where reconstitution was in full force.

Although the vineyards gradually lost the dusty yellow and brown look of the 1880s and grew green and lush again, prolonged and repeated depressions continued to have an important impact on gender relations in the vineyards. In particular, the more aggressive "industrial" viticulture that developed in the post-phylloxera years affected women's work, in two ways. First, as we have seen, estate owners imposed team labor as a way of organizing not only labor recruitment but also work. Women were placed in groups of twelve to fifteen and given a group wage, much as occurred with men. Yet in the women's case too, the system functioned ambiguously as a form of discipline, for the work teams facilitated contact between the women and engendered a sense of group solidarity.

Second, the expansion of the industrial vineyard accentuated the gender-based division of labor—another important respect in which women's proletarianization differed from men's. When employers added new skilled and semiskilled procedures to the vinedresser's work routine (especially special methods of planting and grafting), women were not permitted to learn them. This denial of access to skill helped to keep women's wages low and reinforced their inferior position in the labor hierarchy. Occasionally, in an effort to rationalize production and cut costs, vineyard owners abandoned the rigid division of labor and asked women to perform jobs, such as pruning, that were normally considered "men's jobs"; yet still they did not pay them a man's wage.^[29] Male workers ultimately fought against this form of exploitation, which they correctly viewed as a threat to their position. Thus the gender-based division of labor became an issue for workers of both sexes in the labor struggles that shook the Aude after the turn of the century (see Chapter 7).

The depression of the wine industry touched women in other ways as well. Women workers probably experienced less competition from foreign (primarily Spanish and Italian) labor than

did male workers in the phylloxera and post-phylloxera years; in Coursan in 1886, of 143 foreigners in the village, only 45 were women, and those who were in the labor force worked as domestiques on the large estates.^[30] Nonetheless, as Table 13 shows, women's wages fell in the presence of a labor force swollen by impoverished workers and small proprietors. Moreover, although the replanted vineyards reached full productivity in the 1890s, employers, trying to keep down already skyrocketing production costs, did not increase the number of women's workdays.^[31] During the turn-of-the-century market depression, women's wages fell again. Indeed, while the cost of living actually declined in the 1890s and rose only slightly around the turn of the century, both real and nominal wages declined steadily from the late 1880s to the first years of the twentieth century (Table 17). Families lucky enough not to have to send their children out to beg lived on potatoes.

The disastrous material situation of agricultural workers at

the turn of the century did not result from some invisible play of market forces. If anything, the agricultural depression that spread across the wine-producing south meant that prices of food and other consumables remained relatively stable in the rural Aude. The poverty that working-class families experienced at this juncture resulted mainly from declining wages. In certain respects, living conditions at the beginning of the twentieth century differed little from those of the nineteenth. Small proprietors whose sudden wealth in the fabulous golden age of the vine had permitted them to purchase pianos (and singing lessons for their daughters) had by now sold them along with their diseased vines. Working-class families in the Narbonnais still relied on candles or kerosene lamps for light (electricity did not reach the Audois countryside until the 1920s); they cooked and heated their cramped dwellings with vine trimmings, in a region poor in forests and coal. Most dined simply on vegetable stews or potato soup with a bit of meat or salt pork. Bread counted for over one-third of the food consumed by a working-class family in the Narbonnais after 1900, and food counted for the vast majority of the vineyard worker's family budget.^[32] In a family of three, only when all members of the family contributed wages could the family meet expenses (Figure 2).^[33] It is also likely that women bore the brunt of the declining standard of living and smaller food budgets, by saving more nutritious items for men and skimping on themselves. When the Barnum and Bailey Circus came to Narbonne in April 1902, few agricultural families with only one working adult could afford the price of the cheapest ticket—1.50 franc, or a woman's entire day's wages.

Although living standards of French workers as a whole probably improved between 1900 and 1910, vineyard workers in the Aude did not share in this rise.^[34] Indeed, the cost of living in the Narbonnais increased by 36 percent between 1900 and 1912 (see Table 17). Even though nominal wages more than doubled and real wages doubled between 1900 and 1905, vineyard workers' purchasing power had seriously declined since the golden age of the vine. Only the work of women and older children allowed working-class families to adapt to these deteriorating conditions. In fact, by 1911 married women's wages were essential to family

[Full Size]

Figure 2.
Changes in Expenses and Incomes of Vineyard Workers' Families According to Family 
Types, 1900–1912. Sources: Michel Augé-Laribé,  Le problème agraire du socialisme. 
La viticulture industrielle du Midi de la France  (Paris: Giard & Brière, 1907), 76–77, 
238–288, 290; Paul Passama,  La condition des ouvriers viticoles dans le Minervois  
(Paris: Giard & Brière, 1906), 79–80, 100–115; AD Aude 9M78–79, 91, 106, "Mercuriales, 
Etats décadaires des denrées . . . Prix pratiqués sur les marchés, 1880–1905, 1912–1921"; 
"Tableaux généraux récapitulatifs."

survival; almost three-quarters of the women vineyard workers in Coursan were married (see Table 12). Vineyard workers still married somewhat younger than the total population, but the crude birth rate had fallen steadily since the reconstitution years; thus women may not have been constrained to stay at home with young children and infants. Still, women who did have young children could not afford not to work. As earlier, unlike working-class families in industrial towns such as Roubaix, young children only rarely contributed wages to the family economy in Coursan.^[35] In 1911, only five children under fourteen worked in the vines, though a larger proportion of older children between fourteen and thirty resided with their parents and worked as day laborers than sixty years earlier (23 percent in 1911 as compared to 17 percent in 1851).^[36]

Julien Coca's childhood typified that of working-class children in Coursan just after the turn of the century. In 1979 assistant mayor of Coursan, and head of the vineyard workers' union since the early 1950s, Coca grew up on a large estate, where his father worked as an overseer. His parents insisted that he finish school before he began full-time work in the vines. Nevertheless, he worked the harvest every year from the age of ten on to earn extra money. As Coca said, "Child labor was a function of the needs of the time. Economic crises were harder on families in the past than they are today; children had to help out. But it was also a question of duty to one's family. It was an honor for a child to bring his wages into the house, to make a contribution."^[37] This view was echoed by Mme Cendrous, who worked as a day laborer in Coursan until her sixties. Families valued education, and parents expected children at least to receive their secondary school diploma; but after that, the assistance of older children in bringing home income was vital. "You had to work if you wanted to eat; the family was all we had. There was no social security, you know."^[38]

The case of Anastasie Vergnes illustrates another variation in the pattern of children's and young adults' work experiences in hard times. Born in 1890, Anastasie was the sixth child of Louis Cheytion and Marie Bories, both vineyard workers in Coursan. By 1911, Anastasie had left home.

After finishing school, I went to Paris with my sister Marie to work as a cook. When I returned to Coursan before the war, I continued to cook and also to work part-time in the vines. I worked for Madame X, preparing meals for baptisms and weddings. Since everything took place on Sunday, sometimes I didn't get home until four in the morning (by the time everything was cleaned up) and then I'd have to get up a few hours later to work in the vines the same day.^[39]

In this family of seven children, the wage contributions of all family members were essential, especially in the years prior to World War I. As Figure 2 illustrates, only families with two working adults could meet the rising living costs of the prewar years. Those families whose budgets were strained to the breaking point even when wives and older children worked survived by relying on credit with the village grocer and baker. As Paul Passama observed in 1905, workers with no land could be in serious straits when there were illnesses or older family members who had to be cared for: "As soon as their credit with one shopkeeper has run out, they open a second account with another and so on until they find that no one will give them credit any longer."^[40] Indeed, by the turn of the century many of these small shopkeepers were themselves reduced to bankruptcy by clients who had been living off their generosity.^[41] These men and women, who likewise suffered from the turn-of-the-century depression, eventually supported workers' demands of vineyard owners and played a large part in the great winegrowers' revolt of 1907.

Gender differences in the workplace were part and parcel of the proletarianization of the vineyard workers of the Aude. Notions of such difference allocated the "lessen tasks" in the division of labor to women and maintained women's inferior position in labor and wage structures. This situation facilitated the growth of viticultural capitalism by allowing employers to profit from women's cheap labor. At the same time, women made an essential wage contribution to the economy of laboring families—a fact that contemporaries recognized, if only with the flippancy of folk sayings and proverbs. Women's work was key to the prosperity of small landowning and laboring families in

good times and vital to their very survival in hard times. During the booming 1870s and early 1880s, women's labor on family vineyards helped to secure the healthy profits that even small owners could realize. In the depressed late 1880s and 1890s, vineyard workers' families coped with material difficulty by sending adult women and older children into the vines to work. Yet ironically, this situation enabled employers to keep men's wages low, since they knew that women and older children would pick up the slack in hard times.

Women's participation in the labor force as full-fledged workers but second-class citizens meant that they were doubly affected by the economic depression, which touched everyone as both consumers and producers. As we shall see in Chapter 7, this double exploitation, combined with their need to provide for their families, drew women into the labor conflicts and protests of the twentieth century, and ultimately led them to claim their rights in the workplace alongside men. Ironically, neither gender differences in proletarianization nor the process of proletarianization overall caught the attention of left-wing political movements in the Aude. Given the difficulties that Audois wage-earning families faced, it is all the more notable that radicals and socialists active in the department in the 1880s and 1890s made little effort to address the vineyard working class, even if their ideas ultimately influenced rural workers' class identity. The following chapter explores how radicals and then socialists developed a constituency, not among agricultural workers, but among rural artisans and small vinedressers in the Narbonnais.