Our thesis offers a comparative analysis of the relationships between family building and female labour market behaviour in Europe. A critical survey of micro-economic of female labour supply models stands as a first part. We argue that considering the value of relationships established between the members of a family as purely instrumental, standard utilitarist approaches can not account for the heterogeneity of household family and employment arbitration. As opposed the this line of arguments, we suggest in a second part, that the type of arbitration does vary with the nature of the relationships that are valued by household partners and implies alternative patterns of family and employment coordination. We argue that very different support to these patterns is given by countries through their policies and the institutional framework that is set up to regulate family and employment relationships. Differences in regimes are identified to describe the coherence established between types of policies and the privilege given to one or the other pattern, by adapting ESPING-ANDERSEN typology of Welfare State Regimes. This distinction enables to put forth assumptions about the differences in the configurations according to the effect of family formation process on female labour supply that may be observed in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United-Kingdom, whose relevance empirically examined in a third part using the European Labour Force Surveys from 1992 to 1999. The perspective offered by the European Employment Strategy to promote female labour market participation is finally assessed. ; Notre thèse propose une analyse comparée des comportements féminins adoptés en matière de coordination emploi/famille en Europe. Une revue critique des fondements des modèles micro-économiques d'offre de travail est tout d'abord présentée. On montre que, en considérant que les relations établies entre les membres d'une famille n'ont qu'une valeur instrumentale, les approches utilitaristes « standards » opèrent un ...