1 This theoretical argument comes in part from my elaboration of notions developed within the French regulation approach. For sociological versions, see Lipietz, Alain, Mirages and Miracles (London: Verso, 1987)Google Scholar; Lipietz, Alain, “Rebel Sons: The Regulation Approach,” French Politics and Society 5 (1987), 3–17Google Scholar; and Lipietz, Alain, “Building an Alternative Movement in France,” Rethinking Marxism 1 (1988), 2–17.Google Scholar

2 Three fallacies which derive from not acknowledging this simultaneity have plagued social theory. The first fallacy is the denial of any dilemma by arguing that structures create subjects or subjects create structures. Advocates of both positions have been hegemonic at different points in time. A second fallacy involves admitting both structural effects and agency, but then seeking actors capable of recognizing the effects of structures and “escaping” to become the agents of historical change. From this perspective, only some actors are capable of imagining change while others are destined to be no more than unconscious, albeit perhaps unwilling, supporters of existing structures. Accepting that all actors are capable of being acting subjects—but only sometimes—is the third fallacy. The argument of this article rejects all three positions.

3 This distinction can be called one between two worlds, the esoteric world of structures and the exoteric realm of everyday life, or Marx's “enchanted world.” See Lipietz, Alain, The Enchanted World: Inflation, Credit and the World Crisis (London: Verso, 1985)Google Scholar, especially chap. 1.

4 The term derives from grammar, where a paradigm links different forms of the same root, thereby ordering diffference and demonstrating connections across forms which might not otherwise appear linked. The best-known use of the concept in social science is by T. S. Kuhn who suggests that paradigms are historical constructs, whose selection from a range of possible paradigms is based on struggle for allegiances. Paradigms illuminate the world until the contradictions which they can no longer absorb permit other scientists to imagine an alternative and gain support for that vision. See Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar

5 Jenson, Jane, “‘Different’ but not ‘Exceptional': Canada's Permeable Fordism,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (1989), 69–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explores such variations for Canadian politics.

6 Nelson, Barbara, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen's Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” paper presented to the Colloquium on Gender and the Origins of the Welfare State, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, November 1987.Google Scholar

7 McDougall, Mary Lynn, “Protecting Infants: The French Campaign for Maternity Leaves, 1890s–1913,” French Historical Studies 13 (1983), 79–105CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Thébaud, Françoise, “Donner la vie: Histoire de la maternité en France entre les deux guerres” (unpublished Thèse de Troisième cycle, Paris VII, 1982).Google Scholar

8 For details of this analysis see Jenson, Jane, “Gender and Reproduction: Or, Babies and the State,” Studies in Political Economy 20 (1986), 17–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 McDougall, “Protecting Infants,” 92.

10 In the Department of the Seine (Paris) by the late 1880s, municipal officials were willing to pay a poor mother the entire cost of a wet nurse (the same amount as the average weekly wage of an unskilled working woman) in order to discourage unmarried mothers from giving up their babies. The remainder of the costs of maintaining the mother and child were to be paid for by the earned income of the mother, however. See Fuchs, Rachel, “Morality and Poverty: Public Welfare for Mothers in Paris, 1870–1900,” French History 2 (1988), 290–94, 304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Blake, John B., “Origins of Maternal and Child Health Programs,” in Rosencrantz, Barbara G. (ed.), The Health of Women and Children (New York: Arno, 1977), 21.Google Scholar

12 For a detailed description of these regulations, see Boxer, Marilyn, “Protective Legislation and Home Industry: The Marginalization of Women Workers in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century France,” Journal of Social History 20 (1986), 46–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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14 McDougall, Mary Lynn, “Paternalism, Patriarchy and Protection: The Rhetoric of Labor Reform, 1880s and 1890s,” paper presented to the Annual Meeting of French Historical Studies, Columbia, South Carolina, March 1988, 4–5.Google Scholar

15 This citation from a subsequent union campaign to protect the eight-hour day captures the theme of the movement: “… if the eight-hour day was lost, not only would wages decrease but the worker would ‘lose dignity,’ would not be able to educate himself or his family and women would have ‘to return to the slavery of housework after a longer workday.’” See Cross, “The Quest for Leisure,” 202.

16 Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412.

17 Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45.

18 Lehrer, Susan, Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 20, 34.Google Scholar

19 Hill, Ann Corinne, “Protection of Women Workers and the Courts: A Legal Case History,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979), 253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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21 Wertz, Richard W. and Wertz, Dorothy C., Lying-in: A History of Childbirth in America (New York: Free Press, 1977), 224.Google Scholar In 1916, the American Association for Labor Legislation proposed federal maternity benefits modelled on northern European examples. Any woman earning less than $100 a month (that is, most women working for wages) would have received two-thirds of her wages plus free medical care for two weeks before and six weeks after delivery, on the condition that she did not work in that period. The law did not pass.

22 Blake, “Origins of Maternal and Child Health Programs,” 13–18; and Wertz and Wertz, Lying-in, 202.

23 Mothers’ Aid pensions, which some states began by 1911, marked a shift in anti-poverty policy away from day nurseries and other programmes which permitted mothers to work and toward programmes which foreclosed the category of working mother. See Michel, Sonya, “From Civic Usefulness to Federal Maternalism,” paper presented to the Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians, Wellesley College, June 1987.Google Scholar

24 For half a century the 1791 Loi de Chapelier by codifying an “atomistic” labour market prevented wage-earners from defending their interests. By the end of the century it was replaced by a set of institutions and actors representing a more collectively-determined wage relation. See Boyer, Robert, “Wage Formation in Historical Perspective: The French Experience,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (1979), 106.Google Scholar

25 In the debates about pauperism and pauperization in the nineteenth century, three issues were intertwined: the inevitable growth of wage labour, the inadequacy of workers’ wages and their aleatory character which maintained workers in a situation of uncertainty. See Hatzfeld, Henri, Dn Paupérisme à la sécurité sociale: Essai sur les origines de la sécurité sociale en France, 1850–1940 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), 25.Google Scholar

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29 One testimony to economic stabilization is the synchronization of wage levels and cost of living which developed by the end of the nineteenth century. See Boyer, “Wage Formation in Historical Perspective,” 107. On the stabilizing effects of social policies see Weiss, John, “Origins of the French Welfare System: Poor Relief in the Third Republic, 1871–1914,” French Historical Studies 13 (1983), 47–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Rebérioux et al., “Hubertine Auclert et la question des femmes,” 133.

31 Hubertine Auclert represented this strand. Her socialist feminism advocating complete equality including suffrage failed because republicans feared female suffrage would reinforce the church and thus bring about the political defeat of republican forces. See Ibid.

32 Sowerwine, Charles, “Workers and Women in France before 1914: The Debate over the Couriau Affair,” Journal of Modem History 55 (1983), 411–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zylberberg-Hocquard, Marie-Hélène, Féminisme et syndicalisme en France (Paris: Anthropos, 1978).Google Scholar

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35 Feminists did insist that women's rights had to be expanded if women were to perform their duties; as well, they demanded improvements in the conditions of maternity, women's education and working conditions. See Offen, Karen, “Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (1984), 652.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

36 Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 39–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Ibid., 166.

38 Shefter, Martin, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide (eds.), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 197–276.Google Scholar

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41 Ibid., xv.

42 Ibid., chap. 6.

43 Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984), 628, 640.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Nancy Cott argues that the link between Progressive politics and the woman's movement was around the discourse of difference. See Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 21.

45 Schefter, “Trade Unions and Political Machines.”

46 Lehrer, Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 126, 142. The labour movement led demands for protective legislation for women until 1890, after which middle-class reformers directed the campaign. See Baer, The Chains of Protection, 33.

47 This analysis of the WTUL is primarily from Dye, Nancy Schrom, “Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women's Trade Union League and the Labor Movement,” Signs 3 (1975), 111–25Google Scholar; and Lehrer, The Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, chap. 6.

48 Jacoby, Robin Mille, “The Women's Trade Union League and American Feminism,” Signs 3 (1975), 126–40.Google Scholar

49 For a consideration of how these notions affected interwar politics, see Jenson, Jane, “Both Friend and Foe: Women and State Welfare,” in Koontz, Claudia, Bridenthal, Renate and Stuard, Susan Mosher (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (2nd ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 535–56.Google Scholar