Generation Moulinex (Work, consumption and gender in France, 1950s-2010s)

Moulinex is widely known as a brand that brought domestic appliances into many homes during the 1950s and 1960s. Its history also illuminates broader changes in working-class lives and the organisation of work in postwar France. Based in Normandy, the company was central to the transformation of a rural region, creating a network of factories that employed thousands of workers. Most of these sites have since closed, as industrial employment in France declined sharply from its 1970s peak. Generation Moulinex traces this trajectory from the rise of mass production and consumption to the era of globalisation and deindustrialisation. It centres the experiences of a generation of French workers, many of them women, whose lives both shaped and were shaped by these transformations.