“I’m lucky, I’m super free in my schedule. It’s 4 p.m., and I can stop work to talk to you.”, welcomes Céline Bourgoin, 40, from the basement of her house in Marseille. This morning, she got up at 6:30 a.m., dropped off her two children at school, before tackling her sewing projects. Since she created her business of textile products in 2014, she has tripled her working hours and reduced her salary by nearly 1,000 euros per month. “There are months when I only earn 800 euros, I have knots in my stomach”sighs Céline Bourgoin, even if she repeats that she has “never regretted” his conversion. “Until 2010, I was a special education teacher, I worked a lot, I arrived late at daycare, I ticked all the boxes of the unworthy mother. It was becoming very hard morally, I absolutely had to change my life.she insists.
Like Céline Bourgoin, hundreds of young French mothers decide to leave the workforce to create their own business. They are called “mompreneures”, or “mampreneuses”, after a term born in the United States in the early 1990s and imported to France in the late 2000s, in a period when the public authorities seek to promote the entrepreneurship for all, with the creation of the self-employed status in 2008. The majority of mompreneurs create micro-enterprises, in sectors close to their previous employment or in areas related to parenting, coaching or self-expression . “These women are between 30 and 40 years old, have young children and have until then held responsible salaried jobs in which they were very committed. Because they are also very involved in parenthood, they quickly feel overwhelmed. They tell themselves that the self-employed status will give them greater flexibility »details Julie Landour, lecturer at Paris Dauphine-PSL and author of a survey of four hundred mompreneurs.
In fact, this new status often requires careful organization: at Céline Bourgoin, there are two Velleda tables to plan the distribution of domestic tasks, “batch cooking” sessions to prepare meals for the week every Sunday, shopping lists and a budget drawn up to the nearest euro. Her husband, a research engineer at the CNRS, takes care of the homework and takes care of the children on Wednesdays, but Céline considers herself the “conductor” daily family organization.
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