Contenu du sommaire : Domestiques d'ici et d'ailleurs

In France, recourse to domestic services is highly differentiated according to household composition and members' ages. In the 1995-2005 decade, recourse to these services has been reintegrated to formal economy, but it has not really progressed. In households counting a woman in age to be professionally active, the choice to recourse to it seems closely related to female professional activity. But activity as such is not the issue : what definitely triggers such a recourse is the combination of children and either a high degree or a manager's job. On the other hand, inequality among partners in terms of money and qualification is less important in households that employ household services than on average. Finally, the male level of qualification can appear to be an important factor in the recourse to household services. However, its impact actually transits through the household's living standards. All things being equal, the woman's level of qualification is more decisive in the decision to recourse to domestic employment than the level of qualification of her spouse.

In contemporary Abidjanese society, most of domestic work is accomplished by female children and young girls less than 20. This ancient phenomenon of working « small maids » in urban households, as old as the origins of the city, has undercome major changes, especially those that derive from the economic recession in the Ivory Coast since the 1980s. In order to retrace the contemporary logics of the contribution of female children and young girls to urban domestic economy, the article retraces history of the market of female juvenile domestic service in Abidjan over the past 30 years. It analyzes the transition from a family-based logic of putting children to work to anonymous and more contractual logics of juvenile domestic salaried work. It stresses the diversity of situations and the complex phenomenon that, although unknown, represents an indicator of social change in Black Africa.

This article explores different forms of domestic employment in Bogotá, Colombia. This article compares migration of young girls and female children to the Colombian capital to seek employment as home maids in the 1960s and 1970s with the integration of people misplaced by violence in domestic service. It seeks to understand how the conditions to enter a recruiting family have evolved. Starting from a professional integration that is guided by parental and proximity links, the “recommendation” phenomenon created trusting relationships between strangers by stretching the family circle beyond its formal limits. However, these trusting relationships will be most difficult to obtain for misplaced people, who are stigmatized and rejected by urban populations.

Statistical taboos have always existed, but vary according to the country and the time. In France, the controversy around so-called “ethnical” statistics is particularly intense. Revived by the set-up of a study by the Ined, “trajectories and origins”, about life paths of immigrants and immigrants' children, debates also gained strength as a law was prepared by the ministry in charge of immigration and became very harsh. On the one hand, some are persuaded that measuring and identifying origins would reveal discriminations and enable to fight unequal treatment linked to these differences (eventually by encouraging positive discrimination). On the other hand, some perceive “ethno-racial” identification to be contrary to the Republican principle of non-discrimination. They highlight the risk of reinforcing racist stereotypes by presenting an ethnical vision of society as banal. Such an approach would furthermore play against an in-depth analysis of social inequalities. Statistical categories remain social constructions that are particularly difficult when it comes to physical or personal criteria, as blurred and disputable as ethnic origin and/or color of skin. Can any question be asked in a statistical enquiry? This is similar to the humorists' dilemma: can one laugh about everything?

As statistical exceptions, women are a good indicator of professional socialization in surgery. What is under study here is the content of professional socialization (what is transmitted) as well as the concrete procedure through which this surgical culture is perpetuated (how it is transmitted). The analysis is centered on the intership stage. Women who enter surgery already have a dispositional patrimony preparing them for it. However, their professional insertion somehow masculinized them. This constant effort to make others forget that one is a woman shows to which extent virile values stick to the profession. Through field observations, I searched the concrete mechanisms through which male domination operates and recrutes candidates. At field level, for example, it has been observed that bawdy, sexist jokes efficiently contributed to women's eviction. The same processes that contribute to evict certain female interns attract others and mold them still. Professional socialization relies on past socializing experiences and re-questions them.

The reformist milieu, which was born in the last decades of the 19th century, takes distance from traditional charity and offers a rationalization of social action in which knowledge and skills are linked. This period is also the golden age of feminist movements. Important works have been published in France about these movements, but gender studies are still scarce. This article studies women in this milieu as well as gender relations that develop therein. It also examines the relations between female social positions and their commitments to philanthropic and feminist institutions, as well as the different implications of such investments for women of various social categories. This research is based on data collected in ngo's, circles' and (mostly co-ed) congresses' archives, as well as on biographical data on actors and actresses. It joins qualitative methods, such as studies, to quantitative ones, such as network analysis and collective biographies.