Amandine Tabutaud holds a PhD in contemporary history and teaches in secondary schools. Author of the thesis, Gender in the Face of Deindustrialization: Female Workers in Seine Saint-Denis and Haute-Vienne (1950s-2000s), defended at Paris Saclay University. She studies the effects of deindustrialization on workers’ trajectories from a gender perspective. She has published “At the crossroads of Seine-Saint-Denis and Haute-Vienne. Women workers grappling with deindustrialization (1970-1980),” 20 & 21. Revue d’histoire, vol. 144, no. 4, 2019, pp. 131-144. (with Fanny Gallot) “The revival of the history of women at work: a critical note on some recent works,” Sociologie du travail, vol. 61, no. 3, 2019. (with Fanny Gallot) “Capturing the voices of female workers. What are the historiographical challenges?”, Claire Oger, Emilie Nee, and Benjamin Ferron (eds.), Giving a voice to the “voiceless”? Social construction and discourse of a public issue, PUR, 2022. Starting in November 2025, she will co-organize with Romain Castellesi the seminar “Gender and Deindustrialization” at the University of Evry Paris Saclay.

Drawing on a body of archives from labor inspections, reports produced by the health and safety committees of the companies studied, union sources, and testimonies collected from former workers, the aim is to highlight the physical and psychological suffering that occurred following factory closures. The loss of employment has consequences that go beyond the workers’ professional status, affecting their mental and physical health and leaving their bodies scarred by illness and the inability to work again. We can identify various forms of physical and mental suffering with multiple causes and different time frames: the shock of dismissal, the aftermath of the struggle against factory closure, the absence of work, and occupational illnesses.