TIME-US – ANR Rémunérations et budgets-temps dans le textile en France de la fin du XVIIe siècle à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale

ANR Générique. Défi 8. Sociétés innovantes, intégrantes et adaptatives 2016

Le programme TIME-US Rémunérations et usages du temps des femmes et des hommes en France de la fin du XVIIe au début du XXe siècle a pour but de reconstituer les rémunérations et les budgets temps des travailleuses et des travailleurs du textile dans quatre  villes industrielles françaises  (Lille, Paris, Lyon, Marseille)  dans une perspective européenne et de longue durée. En réunissant  en une seule équipe pluridisciplinaire des historiens des techniques, de l’économie et du travail, des spécialistes du traitement automatique des langues et des sociologues spécialistes des budgets familiaux, il vise à donner des clés pour comprendre le gender gap  en analysant les mutations du travail et la répartition du temps et des tâches au sein des ménages pendant la première industrialisation.

Abstract

The Time-Us project aims to reconstruct the remuneration and time budgets of women and men working in the textile trades in four French industrial regions (Lille, Paris, Lyon, Marseille) in an European and long-term perspective, by bringing together a multidisciplinary team of technology, economic and labour historians, natural language processing (NLP) experts and sociologists specializing in Le Play’s families’ budgets.

The role of women in industrial development is now largely recognized in both sociological and economic studies on developing countries and the historiography of the first industrial revolution in Europe. Yet data on their remuneration, schedules and domestic work and that of men working in the same sectors remain deficient for many regions, especially for France. A full understanding of economic development cannot be achieved without assessing the quantity of women’s paid and unpaid work, and the male/female distribution of time spent on domestic work. The Time-Us project aims to collect missing data for France in a key sector of the first industrial revolution: textiles. The goal is to create comparable series on the remuneration and time allocation of employed men and women through, first, classical sources and company and trade association archives, and second, the piecing together of a series of qualitative sources identifying words and actions associated with work in both domestic and non-domestic activities.     

By proposing an exercise that has never been tackled for France to date, it aims to provide keys to understanding the gender gap by analyzing changes in work and time uses during the first industrialization process, and goes to the core of issues raised in the DEFI 8’s Axe 3. “Transformations in work and employment, organizational change” – and in the sub-areas “Family life/professional life balance and work time /social times” and “Women and men at work: the challenge of professional equality and the role of work”.