At a time when urban policies are calling for ever greater involvement and participation on the part of local residents, we took an interest in voluntary care work carried out by women in community centers in French-speaking Switzerland – an activity that has historically been invisible, for a number of reasons. Putting care into an ethical perspective makes it possible to rethink participatory models, and to take a close look at the transition between taking care of someone close to you and forms of commitment in public. This approach opens up an interesting avenue of intervention, based on what the women with whom we have worked collectively in a socio-cultural center are and are doing, in order to promote and strengthen the processes of participation in public life, but this time ‘from below’, i.e. by the women themselves.

un emploi est réglementée par la loi fédérale sur l'assurance-chômage obligatoire et l'indemnité en cas d'insolvabilité (LACI) adoptée en 1982 et profondément révisée quatre fois depuis.Cette législation repose sur des principes qui se sont imposés au début du XXe siècle.

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The crisis of the 1930s constituted a key moment in the definition of the modern concept of Unemployment when the criteria of sex and marital status became critical. In several countries unemployed married women were partially or totally excluded from aid as they were considered dependents of their husbands; the situation was different for single, widowed or divorced woman. Authorities granted these women state aid and encouraged them to seek paid work. This article analyses the control exerted over "unemployed women without husbands," specifically with regard to their morals and sexuality. It shows how the policies with respect to these unemployed women contributed to a sexual management of the labor market, while promoting the gender norms of the traditional family.

The right to live somewhere is the sign and the condition for local belonging. Since every society helps its own poor, domiciliation constitutes the basis of a lifeline for the poor. This has two obvious consequences. First, this organization establishes a local community supervision upon the poor (their behaviour, their movements, etc.), linking them to their parish or their commune. Second, it excludes the poor who are without domiciliation, thus creating poor vagabonds. It also has a third consequence, which is at the core of this article: the policies of social assistance contribute to defining territorial belonging. The process of designating populations entitled to claim financial assistance thus raises the question of what being a member of a group formally means. If every society helps its own poor, the way in which membership is conceived, handled as a theme and institutionalized within the society proves to be eminently variable between the end of the nineteenth century and today. It moves through three dominant ideal types (stability, mobility, dignity) which do form a sequence but do not thoroughly replace each other.

In democratic societies the legislator holds the power to define and impose legitimate representations of the world. In other words, it institutes society ‘by establishing a common judicial and political sphere, setting the rules that ensure the daily functioning of democratic life and the relations between groups and individuals’. As a body of regulation, arbitration and delimitation it produces norms, as well as discourses on these norms. The analysis of the legislator’s debates (not on the rhetorical level, but on that of the content and ideas employed), in regard to social and archival elements allowing for an understanding of the impact of the developed policies, offers an insight into the changes at play. When it began to legislate on matters of social policy at the end of the nineteenth century, the state (in Switzerland as in other European countries) intervened in a field which up to then had essentially been reserved for private charity and the church. Because of that, the new legislation marked a change in the conception of social assistance: it was no longer a private matter. It was a time of intense exchanges in the social laboratories of the new century: Bismarckian social insurance was an alternative to charitable assistance, allowing for mediation between antagonistic components of the social body. While such social insurance did not appear in Switzerland at that time, debates about it often served as a canvas for parliamentary interventions on welfare, which shows that the alternative was known. Thus, for example, the authorities in the canton of Vaud, during discussion related to the 1888 Loi sur l’assistance des pauvres et les enfants malheureux et abandonnés (Act on Welfare for the Poor and Abandoned and

L’analyse de l’évolution de la législation suisse sur l’assurance chômage, depuis la première loi de 1924 jusqu’à aujourd’hui, montre comment les critères androcentrés d’accès à ce droit social participent au renforcement de la division sexuée du travail. En effet, malgré les réformes législatives, le droit à l’assurance chômage contribue toujours à entériner le système de genre : l’assignation du travail domestique aux femmes et leur intégration dans le marché du travail avec un statut subalterne.

RésuméEn légiférant en matière d’assistance sociale, l’État fixe des règles et de cette manière norme en même temps qu’il produit des statuts et des comportements. Le pauvre qui demande assistance doit non seulement posséder un statut qui officialise son appartenance au cercle des destinataires potentiels, mais, en plus, il est tenu d’être dans une des situations ciblées par l’assistance publique. Mais quels sont les statuts et les situations reconnus ? Cet article tente de répondre à cette question sur la base des débats autour de la législation d’assistance dans deux cantons de Suisse romande vers 1890.