4
Gender, Work, and the Household Economy of Vineyard Workers

On connaît la femme au pied et à la tête.
(You can tell a woman by her head and her feet.)

Brave femme dans une maison vaut plus que métairie avec cheval.
(A strong woman in the house is worth more than a horse in the stable.)

Une femme et un baril, plus qu'ils travaillent, mieux ils valent.
(A woman and a barrel: the more they work, the more they're worth.)^[1]

Proverbs from Languedoc such as these attest to the real value placed on women's work in rural France, even if it was ironically expressed. In the nineteenth century as earlier, the labor of a farm wife could make or break the family economy. Likewise, contemporaries praised the moral and physical benefits of agricultural work for women over the perils of industrial labor. Thus Jules Rivals, an Audois economist, wrote that the real advantage of farming for women lay in the fact that it allowed "women and children to work without moral or physical danger. Care of the home, a fixed and regular workday, care of farm animals, raising chickens, are, for women and children, the sort of work whose main advantage is that they take place under the invigorating influence of fresh air and daylight."^[2]

Most of Rivals's contemporaries probably shared this idealistic picture of women's agricultural work, with its underlying assumptions about a gender-based division of labor. But for most

of the 43–48 percent of women in the French labor force who worked in agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century, labor on farms and vineyards from sunrise to sunset differed little from factory work.^[3] Moreover, whereas contemporaries certainly valued women's economic contribution, they operated from masculine definitions of work as activity performed outside the household for a wage. They often did not view women's productive activities in the home as work, because no wage was generated. And women themselves often did not distinguish between domestic tasks (performed in the household) and agricultural labor (performed in field or barn).^[4] The overlap between women's domestic and nondomestic work meant that even when rural women did perform wage labor, contemporaries viewed their work as worth less than men's. Contemporaries' gendered definitions of work and skill meant that despite their praise for women's hard work and the benefits of fresh air and exercise, they had no doubt about women's secondary place in both the labor hierarchy and the wage structure of the vineyards.

Women effectively assisted the expansion of vineyard capitalism by providing cheap labor. As the vineyard economy of the Aude developed, a more formal gender-based division of labor appeared. But the crises of vineyard capitalism—all of which ultimately became crises of the family economy—changed the labor demands of men and women in important ways. Living standards for vineyard workers, which had dramatically improved during the age of expansion, fell sharply, and workers now mobilized the resources of their household economy to limit the effects of depression. An examination of gender relations in the vineyards is essential to understanding not only how workers dealt with the long period of economic difficulty that followed the golden age of the vines, but also how definitions of gender difference in the workplace contributed to proletarianization, and in ways different for women than for men.

Gender and the Making of Vineyard Capitalism

Prior to the great agricultural revolution in the Aude, women engaged in a diverse array of economic activities, growing, pre-

paring, and selling food.^[5] Most women worked as wage earners along with other family members or on small family farms. Some combined work as day laborers with their activities on household plots: in the 1851 census in Coursan, ninety-five women were listed as journalières-propriétaires . The domestic activities of small vineyard owners' wives spilled into the public arena when they sold their chickens, rabbits, and eggs in weekly markets in Carcassonne or Narbonne or rented stalls in villages like Cuxac d'Aude, Lézignan, or Coursan. Thus domestic production and associated entrepreneurial activity drew women into the larger world of market relations. Some migrated long distances to harvest so as to bring in cash.^[6] Others worked as seamstresses, laundresses, grocers, dressmakers, and midwives. As revendeuses they purchased fruit and vegetables in bulk and hawked them in local markets, and some sold secondhand goods. The expansion of vineyards also brought women onto estate vineyards as overseers (ramonettes ). Finally, as property owners some (mostly widows) sustained themselves on income from their land as rentiers.^[7]

Around midcentury this kaleidoscope of activity changed. The combination of vineyard expansion and large wheat harvests in the 1850s created a demand for women's labor. In addition, the industrial depression of 1847–1852 and declining employment for women in the rural textile industry brought about a shift from industrial to agricultural work. The vast majority of women in Coursan now worked primarily as day laborers or estate workers (Table 12), sowing grain and harvesting, tending vines and cutting grapes, picking olives, and working vegetable gardens on small family plots, thus combining domestic, productive, and wage-earning activity. As vineyards came to dominate the economy of the Aude, women's position in that economy changed. The separation between public and private, between farm/vineyard and domestic space, became more acute, as did definitions of gender roles.

We have already seen how the agricultural revolution in the Aude brought about a more complex differentiation of vineyard tasks. Although women undoubtedly performed numerous procedures in the vines prior to the development of viticultural capitalism, vineyard "industrialization" led to a more formal

division of labor based on gender. Employers increasingly allocated certain tasks exclusively to men, while reserving others for women. Thus, in the Audois vineyards skilled work was by definition male: men performed all skilled and semiskilled work, such as pruning, cultivating, and winemaking. Most unskilled work was defined as female.

In the twentieth century the idea that men and women have different capabilities for work has led to forms of occupational segregation. For example, the notion that women have "nimble fingers" has been used to justify the employment of women as typists and clerical workers. In the nineteenth century the same

concept justified the employment of women in certain types of vineyard work, such as pinching buds in the spring to encourage the formation of fewer but more resilient flowers or cutting grapes during the harvest. Ironically, vineyard owners did not invoke this idea to allow women to perform other jobs requiring manual dexterity, such as pruning or grafting; these tasks were considered "men's work," in that they required skill and some technical training. As we shall see, this situation sustained men's superior position in the vineyard labor hierarchy and wage structure by allowing them to exercise control over definitions of skill.^[8]

Nonetheless, women performed a wide variety of tasks. Following pruning (performed by men), women gathered the stems and branches that fell to the ground and tied them in five-kilogram bundles to be sold as kindling. Vineyard owners often paid women partly in kind for this work by allowing them to take some portion of the kindling home for use as cooking and heating fuel. But this method of payment also corresponded to a reduced monetary wage. Otherwise women earned a piece rate for gathering wood, which forced them to work fast in order to earn a minimum wage. Women's work also included spreading insecticides and fertilizer and sulphuring the vines to prevent mildew. During sulphuring they carried an eight-liter tank and sprayer on their backs, scarcely an enviable task, since the tank weighed twenty-five kilos when full, and the smell of sulphur lingered in the hair and clothing for hours afterward. At harvesttime women cut the grapes; men then carried the heavy baskets filled with freshly picked fruit to wagons, which they drove to the wine cellar.^[9]

Consistent with their definitions of work and skill as gender-based, contemporaries supported the division of labor in the harvest, and more generally, on the grounds that women's work permitted men to perform "more important" skilled jobs. One vineyard owner gave women the responsibility for certain chemical treatments "so as not to distract the men from their ordinary tasks."^[10] Despite women's essential place in the labor structure of the vineyard, they were seen as merely secondary actors in the drama of production, their work but supplementary to that of men. How ironic, then, that workers later used the gender-based

division of labor to promote solidarity in the labor conflicts that broke out after the turn of the century.

The tension between women's economic contribution and their subordinate role in the economy characterized the social relations of the sexes in other spheres of domestic and community life. Alphonse Daudet provides a telling description in his Letters from My Windmill, where he tells of a lunch with the Provençal poet and founder of the Félibrige,^[11] Frédéric Mistral. Mistral's aged mother arrives from the market and immediately sets about preparing a sumptuous lunch. "In no time at all the table is laid; a beautiful white cloth and two place settings. I know the customs of the house; I know that when Mistral has visitors his mother does not sit at the table with them. . . . The dear old lady speaks only the Provençal tongue, and would not feel at ease talking to Frenchmen. . . . Besides, she is needed in the kitchen."^[12] Similarly, when Léon Jouhaux, leader of the Confédération générale du travail, came to dine at the home of François Cheytion, leader of the vineyard workers' union in Coursan, and his sister, Anastasie Vergnes, who herself participated actively in strikes before and after the First World War, Anastasie and her mother, having served the meal, remained standing in the small kitchen cum living room-dining room while the men ate and discussed union affairs.^[13]

In the rituals of harvest the ambiguity of gender relations again came into view. Apart from the "deplorable promiscuity" that one observer decried, there were practices such as the fardage . Male workers would chase a young female picker (coupeuse ) unfortunate enough to have left a bunch of grapes on the vine and, when they caught her, would crush the grapes on her forehead or, more commonly, buttocks. In some cases a woman who experienced this indignity was able to get her revenge with the aid of friends, by grabbing a male harvester and stuffing his shirt with leaves. In such sexual horseplay men symbolically asserted their power over women in the rural community, and women simultaneously challenged them.^[14]

As in industrial society, assumptions about gender-based differences in the workplace and social life governed women's material condition in the rural Aude. Women's wages in vineyard work (as in most other paid employment) were generally half

and sometimes less than half those of men. In 1862 journalières earned on average 90 centimes a day. (To put that sum into perspective, a kilo of bread cost from 32 to 36 centimes.)^[15] Employers, in calculating wages, made no distinction between the various types of work women performed, except during the harvest, when they paid women more in order to attract harvesters (Table 13). Nor did they take physical effort into account, even though journalières spent much of the day bent over, if they were gathering branches or cutting grapes, or sweating under the weight of the sulphur tank.

In terms of wages, women workers, like men, profited from the expansion of viticulture, as Table 13 shows; by 1882, in the vineyards' golden age, their wages had doubled. Yet while women vineyard workers in the Aude made more than the

average for women agricultural workers nationally, it would have been impossible for one to support a family on her own, or even to sustain herself on her own wages. It is therefore not surprising that few women in the protourban villages of the Narbonnais lived alone.^[16] Nor did women have an opportunity to improve their skills; the gender-based division of labor flatly denied them access to skilled "men's work." In addition, estate vineyard owners saved money not only from the lower wages they paid women, but also by feeding women workers less than men. Whereas men had the right to meat at all meals, women had to make do with cooked beans and whatever meat was left over when the men were through. For the vineyard owner, this practice could mean a small but significant monthly savings, depending on the number of women employed.^[17] Mme. Marie Garrigues, for instance, ramonette on the estate of Canague-Neuve in Capestang, not far from Coursan, received one franc a day per man to feed the male domestiques on the estate, and only fifty centimes a day per woman. A typical "women's meal" consisted of a bowl of vegetable stew, to which a small piece of meat might be parsimoniously added.^[18] In the wage settlements just before World War I, where workers won the right to some wine as part of their daily wage, women generally were allotted half as much wine as men (see below, especially Chapter 7). Of course, the assumption that men and women had different food requirements was not unique to the vineyards; it has been true of peasant and working-class families not just in France but all over the world.^[19] Here as elsewhere, it underscored women's secondary status in both the family and the workplace, and illustrates how the proletarianization of women differed from that of men.

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

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.

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

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.