9. Le travail des femmes dans la France du XX e siècle

How did women?s employment evolve in the twentieth century? What is the number of women at work in France in the twentieth century and how telling are these figures, is what the present article means to study. The authors will try, thanks to the existing statistics on women?s work, employment and unemployment from 1901 to 2011, to answer some obvious, but tricky questions such as: do women work more in 2010 than they did back in 1950, 1920 or 1901? Can the discontinued careers of women be explained historically? How has the social division of work between men and women evolved? The authors will try to understand how sociologically significant such statistical evolutions are, how telling the changes in definitions, along the years and according to the different population censuses, in order to show how sceptical people have often been with regards to women?s involvement in the workplace: miscalculated, underrated and sometimes recounted according to how statistics evolved and changed the perspective. The authors question the fact that women have all too often been thought inactive when figures clearly point out that their work has indisputably played a major role in the economy, and that they have never stopped working even in times of crises and recessions, long after the wars and the years immediately following had gone by. There has never been less than one third of women in the workplace in France in the twentieth century and they now account for close to half of the working population.