Résumé : Women Have Always Worked is the title of an amazing book written in 1981 by the American historian Alice Kessler-Harris, on the role of work in women's lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century US. In particular, Kessler-Harris focused on the social regulation of women's exclusion from paid work and their relegation to a "separate sphere." The private, the domestic sphere, its boundaries and its extension, becomes essential to understand women's inclusion and exclusion in/from the public sphere. [premières lignes]