Industry and Politics in Rural France: Peasants of the Isere, 1870-1914.

In this study of the department of the Isere in southeastern France Raymond A. Jonas argues that peasants' experience of the mid-nineteenth century rural crisis was particularly marked by the presence in the countryside of the Lyonnais silk industry. Rural industry both arrested migration from the countryside and initiated a major social transformation, turning peasants into workers. This conversion exacted a heavy price: the "dissolution of peasant society" and the destabilization of rural gender relations through the creation of a largely female factory labor force in the countryside. Because of this, Jonas argues, women came to control significant parts of public space in the rural Isere, influencing public debate by their presence and skillful manipulation of political symbols. Only the First World War brought men back to the center of public concern.

Jonas' account begins with the development of the silk industry in the Isere from its early nineteenth-century origins as a haven for Lyon silk merchants escaping high urban labor costs and unrest through a mid-century phase of rural putting-out organization to its consolidation as a factory industry at the beginning of this century. These reorganizations occurred in the context of an increasingly competitive world market for silk goods, and declining prices created an impoverished rural labor force. That labor force also became feminized, making women's wage-earning potential so significant that "simple calculation of household interests radically readjusted women's 'worth' and esteem within peasant society and culture." (p. 78)

In contrast to the substantial historiographical literature that has emphasized the importance of cottage industry in changing the behavior of rural populations, Jonas downplays the importance of that phase and instead focuses on the importance of factories and especially the strike of 1906, which rapidly spread throughout the Isere and which featured dramatic moments of women's intervention into public space. His analysis of the 1906 strike movement is carefully drawn, and certainly demonstrates that during that period women were active on the public stage. What seems more problematic is his further conclusion that this reflected a major transformation of public space in the Isere countryside, with women taking possession of "dances and cafes, weddings and boules" even in times when a strike was not occurring. Jonas shows that women participated actively in public meetings during the strike, but is silent on the organization of public space during the elections that occurred in the same year; did women take the same role then? He shows that women's participation horrified numerous outside observers, but suggests that husbands and fathers in the countryside found no reason to object and that they voted socialist because the socialists not only defended small property but also provided organizational and material support for the striking women. Yet, as he notes elsewhere, both the national platform and the local leadership in the Isere supported uniform and equal wage scales so that husbands could support their families and women would return to their "proper" place in the home. Perhaps the Isere's voters also were horrified at the prospect of "women on top." And while he presents women's public roles during the strike as the activity of a modern working class, this comes at the end of an argument that silk work had become a fundamental necessity for the survival of many rural households; could the strike (and its public activities by women) therefore be interpreted as similar to Old Regime food riots, in which the responsibility of women for family nurture justified their (unusual) excursions into public space?

Since the Isere became a socialist bastion, the origins of this pattern are of interest, and the story Jonas tells is a significant one for the history of the constitution of a public space in France. It might, however, better be considered evidence of the occasional permeability of gender boundaries in a public space that remained overwhelmingly masculine, rather than a profound feminization of that space.

James R. Lehning University of Utah