Between 1980 and 1985, a teacher in a town of Nord-Pas-de-Calais that was disrupted by the mining crisis, Olivier Schwartz lived in a working HLM city. Introduced by his inhabitants into the privacy of their families, he proposed to be the subject of an urban ethnography survey. The analysis then becomes a narrative, changing its relationship to history to grasp the constant transformation of the gender of collective life into individual styles, the tragedy of the relationship between the sexes, where women’s freedom does not have the same meaning as that of men. He urged us not to resign to this loss.