This dissertation examines female workers in France from 1968 to the near present. It concentrates primarily on two companies, Chantelle and Moulinex, and their factories Saint-Herblain (Loire Atlantique) and Alençon (Basse Normandie), respectively. The dissertation concerns the formation of a generation of female workers, "the generation of 1968." These workers, hired at the beginning of the 1970s, together traversed the historic sequence of "worker insubordination," then aged together before finding themselves fired in the 1990s or 2000s. The development of this generation is inscribed in the context of the changes of the organization of production and of the diffusion of feminisms at the factory, which affected the sexed division of labor - salaried and domestic. In response, the successive governments and the employers developed paradoxical discourses of conciliation between family and professional life on the one hand, and professional equality on the other. The study of worker practices in the factory aims to reveal if, and how, the workers managed to speak out in the public and private spheres, and in what measure. In order to do so, they deployed a particular agency that made possible reconfigurations of norms of class and gender. Whereas the strikes, the common everyday practices, and the emergence of unions at the factory fostered the formation of the figures of girls of Chantelle and the female workers of Moulinex, the closings of the factories brutally interrupted this dynamic and atomized these collective identities. Therefore, each fired worker became no more than an old of, who searched to adapt, exploring different paths (including cultural) as ways to curb the pain of dismissal.
