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Abstract
Agriculture in contemporary France is dominated by family businesses. On Cognac wine-grape farms, training for the occupation and taking over the business is the result of parents' efforts to socialize one (or more) of their children. This long-term socialization varies by gender. Farm property, professional skills, and the status of business head are in most cases transmitted to male heirs. Female heirs suffer discrimination in their families. If they have one or more brothers, their families take it as a given that a male heir ought to inherit the farm, and that female heirs are ‘not interested.’ To elucidate these phenomena, I will compare two asymmetrical situations, ‘ordinary cases’ – when a male heir heads the grape-growing business – vs. ‘exceptional cases,’ when a female heir is farm head. For the first, I will show that female domestic partners' off-farm salaried labor does not put an end to on-farm productive or financial cooperation in the couple. For the second situation, I show that male domestic partners, working on or off the farm, are always problematic, presenting another obstacle for women wishing to take over a family grape-growing business. By focusing analysis on the asymmetry of female and male domestic partners in family businesses, this article thus makes an empirical contribution to knowledge of discrimination against female business heads.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Juliette Rogers and Pascal Marichalar for translating this article into English.
Notes
1. The development also concerns other sectors where working as a couple was the overwhelming norm until quite recently, such as bakeries in France (Bertaux-Wiame, Citation1982), which employ fewer wives as artisanal bakeries lose ground to those that purchase their dough frozen for baking on-site (Scala-Riondet, Citation2006).
2. The 2003 Formation et Qualification Professionnelle [Training and Professional Qualifications] study by INSEE [National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies] and the French Ministry of Agriculture's 2010 Recencement agricole [Farm census].
3. We retain the French word for ‘interested’ here to underscore its double meanings, signifying both that they don't find the farm appealing (‘aren't interested in’) and that it doesn't concern them (‘don't have an interest in’). Future use of ‘interested’ in the paper should be understood to have this dual meaning.
4. The Provisional Installation Study (Etude prévisionnelle d'installation; EPI) is the basis for Departmental Agricultural Orientation Commissions’ (CDOA) evaluations for attributing Young Farmer Allocations (Dotations Jeunes Agriculteurs; DJA) as well as subsidized loans, production quotas for dairy farmers, subsidies for particular crops, and the like.
5. A two-year technical degree following the baccalauréat post-secondary exam.
6. For example, ‘Les femmes parlent de la crise [Women talk about the crisis].’ Le Paysan Français, Revue régionale viti-vinicole des Charentes et du Bordelais [The French peasant: The regional winemaking magazine of the Charentes and the Bordelais], n°967, September 1998.
7. The term ‘household’ is the translation of the term maisonnée, which I use in following Gollac (Citation2003) and Weber (Citation2002). It designates a unit of cooperative production assembling several more or less related people, sometimes living together. Households are, by definition, groups that are unstable over time: there are moments of practical organization of the family around common causes. In the case of farming households, the common cause in question is the upkeep of the family farm, at once domestically and professionally.
8. Reliance on grandparents as a form of childcare for pre-school-aged children is not specific to farming families. A study conducted by the Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse (National Age Insurance Fund) shows that 85% of grandmothers and 75% of grandfathers at least occasionally look after their preschooler grandchildren. When both members of the young couple work, the children are even more likely to benefit from regular care (weekly) if parents have a low income (Attias-Donfut & Ségalen, Citation1998).
9. In France, public schooling begins at the age of three, so this in-family childcare mainly only concerns children up to that age.
10. In the service sector, women frequently have to work part time even when they would rather work full time (Angeloff, Citation2000).
11. With the creation of the status of ‘spouse collaborator’ (conjointe collaboratrice), the 1999 Agricultural Orientation Law improved the social benefits available to spouses who participate in farm work by making them eligible for proportional retirement, representing the percentage of time they worked on the farm. If this status affords better security, it doesn't represent a professionalization of female farmers. They remain supplementary family help, as attested to by the absence of individual remuneration or the limits to the extent to which their work-related injuries are taken in charge (Comer, Citation2011, pp. 37–53).
12. In 2007, 20% of professional female farmers under 40 had studied at the university level (as opposed to 10% of male farmers of the same age bracket); half of them had completed general (non-vocational) schooling up through the baccalauréat exam capping the end of secondary studies (compared to a third of their male counterparts). In addition, a quarter of them had pursued a BTS degree in agriculture the same level as their male counterparts, who are more likely to have taken the vocational track since secondary school (Bisault, Citation2009).
13. It is exceptional for women to take over their family's farm while single. In this case, all aforementioned difficulties are even more severe (Author, 2010, pp. 104–108).
This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2014.950050).