Les Ouvrières - Grisette

Grisette: The Women Behind the Name

A new class of woman emerged among the soot and noise of the Industrial Revolution. These were the grisettes.

The term grisette, a French diminutive meaning “the grey one,” came from their simple grey dresses. Grisettes left the countryside to find work and start a new life during the great urban migration of the 1700s and 1800s. They were among the first women to seek work outside the home and found it in the rough mining towns of Hainaut, southern Belgium.

These women worked hard as seamstresses, shop assistants, labourers, and servers in the working-class pubs frequented by coal miners. As the first women to work outside the home, and even to live independently from their families, they were controversial figures. Our Grisette, called Les Ouvrières (The Workers), is named after them.

From Working Class Woman to Bohemian Ideal

By the mid-to-late 1800s, the meaning of grisette began to shift…