Stewart traces the implementation of these laws in factories with an examination of the work of the predominantly bourgeois inspectors and their relations with employers and workers. She shows how employers and workers alike at first evaded, then slowly adjusted to the restrictive legislation. By identifying the curious mixture of reformers involved - including union organizers and enlightened employers, socialists and Social Catholics - and investigating the motives behind their campaign for protective labour legislation in France, Stewart reveals that these laws were conceived as barriers to exclude women from male job monopolies.

Mary Lynn Stewart is a professor and chair of women's studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s–1930s and coauthor of Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914, both published by Johns Hopkins.

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"In all regards this book presents fresh material ... such a detailed presentation of the dual labour market in historical terms - for France at least - has not appeared before." Bonnie Smith, Department of History, University of Rochester