Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835-1913

The Cotton and Metal Industries in England

Carol E. Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136367960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835 - 1913 examines the experiences of women workers in the cotton and small metals industries and the discourses surrounding their labour. It demonstrates how ideas of womanhood often clashed with the harsh realities of working-class life that forced women into such unfeminine trades as chain-making and brass polishing. Thus discourses constructing women as wives and mothers, or associating women's work with distinctly feminine attributes, were often undercut and subverted.

1 Introductory essay – gender in labor history

In “seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper … and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity,” E. P. Thompson sought to unveil “the making of the English working class.”¹ In so doing, he made explicit that, while class was central to his analysis, it was not to be understood as a structure or even a category of analysis, but as “an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness.”² Through such an approach, he gave life to class, as well as to the people themselves, and thereby moved the fields of labor and social history away from a focus on institutional history to an emphasis on history from the ground up. Despite the fact that women themselves did not emerge center-stage, the importance of this study for women’s history was implicit and its impact profound.

In this chapter we will examine major approaches to the study of women’s history from that time, emphasizing in particular their significance for women’s labor history. Central to this examination is the shift from an emphasis on patriarchy, and its inherent problems for the study of working-class women, to the emphasis on “gender as a category of analysis.” Of especial interest is the “linguistic turn,” its significance and limits for the study of gender identities and gender difference among the working classes. We then set forth the approach to be employed in this study which examines a variety of industrial settings where women and men were engaged in the manufacture of small metal and cotton. In considering primarily women’s experiences and the gendered discourses, or understandings of gender,³ that emerged during periods when gender difference was under negotiation, we point to the fracturing of class by gender and the significance of gender difference in working-class culture. The study further serves to enhance our understanding of class and suggests that, even as its fragmentation by gender is apparent, as gender difference was re-negotiated, a simultaneous process of class formation and extension of class interests across gender lines was often in evidence.

Working-class women and industrialization

In their influential study, entitled Women, Work and Family, Louise Tilly and Joan Scott turned our attention to the experiences of working-class women during the process of industrialization in Europe. In thereby placing women at the center of analysis, they began to raise new questions, emphasizing the importance of breaking down the barrier between work and family in the study of labor history. Further, they effectively challenged the standard interpretation of industrialization which suggested that it was virtually synonymous with women working in textile mills. Such an interpretation, Tilly and Scott declared, was “misleading.”⁴ While industrialization did mean that women increasingly assisted their families financially by earning an individual wage, as textile factories created jobs for women, such employment did not provide the only nor the predominant form of wage-earning activity of women.⁵ Rather, women remained concentrated in “traditional” sectors of the economy while occupations such as domestic service actually expanded as England in particular industrialized.⁶

Furthermore, even in the cotton textile mills of the Northwest, the vast majority of “women workers” were between the ages of 16 and 21 and single.⁷ Married women generally worked at paid labor only if financially necessary, with full-time work confined to the years before marriage and having children. Only in such communities as Stockport and Preston, Tilly and Scott maintained, where demand for female labor was considerable, did large numbers of married women engage in outside employment, especially if married to men in low-paying jobs.⁸ Pointing out that 40 percent of working women in England in 1851 were in domestic service, although in that same year the nation celebrated its industrial progress at the Crystal Palace, the authors declared that “there was no simple or uniform evolution in women’s workforce participation as a result of industrial development.”⁹ Thus, Tilly and Scott concluded, “The impact of industrialization on women’s employment was more varied and far less dramatic then [sic] the standard image of the mill girl implies.”¹⁰

Michael Anderson in his study of Preston further pointed to the importance of the family as a resource during the industrializing period. Rather than breaking down as a result of the stresses and strains of industrialization, it served as an important support system. Women’s employment patterns, it appeared, revolved around family rather than the reverse.¹¹

The importance of these works is twofold. First, they suggested that working-class women’s experience of industrialization was significantly different from men’s. As the family remained of singular importance throughout the industrial period, women’s role within it continued to be of greatest significance as they moved in and out of the workforce, in general, only as family needs dictated. These works thus emphasized the purported continuity in women’s lives from the pre-industrial period. Secondly, they suggested that industrialization was not necessarily liberating for women as Thompson had suggested. Rather, as industrialization proceeded, women remained subordinate within the family and the workforce alike.

Patriarchy and its troubles

At the time of publication of these works, feminist scholars in general were attempting to theorize this apparently pervasive presence of male domination. This discussion had relevance for scholars of labor and labor history since its focus was largely on the interrelationship of the worlds of work and home, an emphasis central to the work of Tilly and Scott as well as Anderson. At its earliest stage, this debate centered on the concept of patriarchy. In an attempt to define this widely used, though rather amorphous, term, Heidi Hartmann and Ann Markusen stated, “Patriarchy is a system of social relations between men and women, governing the production and reproduction of people and their gender identities.” Under this system, men maintain control over the labor of women through the structures of the family and the productive system, as well as the state.¹² Thus, “women function as the property of men,”¹³ declared Joan Kelly, and “Woman’s place is to do women’s work – at home and in the labor force. And it is to experience sex hierarchy – in work relations and personal ones, in our public and our private lives.”¹⁴ Even as the mode of production altered, patriarchal control was evident.

For materialist feminists generally, and Marxist feminists in particular, this concept, of “sex hierarchy” or patriarchy, proved problematic. While recognizing the inadequacy of Marxism in theorizing women’s oppression, they were also aware of the tension between the materialist outlook and the theory of patriarchy.¹⁵ Viewing the mode of production as the central factor in the organization of social relations, materialist feminists recognized the necessity of analyzing the subordination of women in relation to production in different historical contexts. Yet they were constantly forced to confront the pervasive and “apparently transhistorical character of women’s oppression.”¹⁶ Some attempted to face this challenge by suggesting that “patriarchal relations take their particular form from dominant relations of production” and thus are historically specific.¹⁷ Under industrialized capitalism, for instance, according to Roisin McDonough and Rachel Harrison, women’s dependence on men was re-secured by legislative measures, as well as the sexual division of labor and the male breadwinner ideology.¹⁸

To many, then, a dual systems theory appeared to offer the answer to the dilemma they faced, since such a theory sought to incorporate and unite within one framework feminist and Marxist understandings of sex and class oppression. In this vein, Juliet Mitchell theorized that the key structures of production, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialization of children, in combination, have served to give unity to the oppression of women over space and time.¹⁹ While women’s role in reproduction is not necessarily basic to their oppression, Mitchell argued, the form that family organization has taken in western culture, based on monogamous relations, has served to institutionalize the sexual repression of women. At the same time, women’s physical weakness has served to ensure them a subordinate position in the workforce, while increased time spent in the socialization of children has served as a cornerstone of further oppression.²⁰ The liberation of women could only be realized, according to Mitchell, if all four of these structures were radically modified. In other words, emancipation of the working class and the establishment of a socialist-based economy would be insufficient for achieving this end. Since women are victims of existing systems of both class and male domination, their full liberation depends on the demise of both systems of oppression, Mitchell concluded.²¹

Sylvia Walby too, in her study Patriarchy at Work,²² defined patriarchy as “a system of interrelated social structures through which men exploit women,” but she turned her primary attention to the arena of paid labor, arguing that it is the exclusion of women from paid work on the same terms as men that serves to maintain women’s subordinate position within the family. In examining the textile and engineering industries as well as clerical work – economic sectors which have varied widely in terms of their gender patterns of employment – Walby basically argued (1) that every phase of capitalist development has been accompanied by new struggles with patriarchal relations, leading to a new set of gender relations; and (2) that women have not merely acquiesced as gender relations have been redefined but, rather, have been “significant actors in resisting their exploitation.” Thus, in Walby’s model, three players – patriarchal structures, capitalist relations, and women workers – emerge to confront each other at each stage of capitalist development. The first two of these – patriarchal structures and capitalist relations – exist separately, but “articulate” with each other through a process of competition and compromise, while women resist the patriarchal structures which are ultimately put in place.

This analysis appeared to add considerable depth to previous attempts to explain the oppression of women under capitalism in terms of both sex and class. Not only did it serve to suggest how the two systems were interrelated while maintaining their basic autonomy. It also allowed for change and development as well as the agency of women themselves. Yet, as I have shown previously, the analysis ultimately faltered on the assumption of a simple and rigid male/female antagonism inherent in any analysis based on the theory of patriarchy, serving to illustrate a major inadequacy of the theory itself. Thus, in discussing the nineteenth-century Factory Acts and their passage, Walby argued that the Acts as passed represented a compromise between “patriarchal forces” – represented by male operatives, humanitarian employers, and landed interests – and capitalist structures, dependent on female labor. Yet such an analysis, based on the assumption of a cross-class alliance among men, left out the fact that manufacturers generally fought bitterly the passage of factory legislation, at least until 1847. Further, despite Walby’s insistence on the agency of women, she failed to deal adequately with the role of working women themselves in the passage of the Acts. Rather, in attempting to give support to her assumption of a sharp male/female divide, she gave considerable space to the expression of opposition from women, while discounting the support the Acts received, particularly from women in the organized trade-union movement, declaring that such women were simply enveloped in “a patriarchal hegemony.”

Clearly cracks in the theory of patriarchy itself were becoming increasingly evident. With regard to women’s labor history, it was not equipped to deal with expressions of unity between men and women at the workplace or with the complexities of women’s responses to industrialization over space and time. Analyses based on a theory of patriarchy appeared to reduce complex interrelationships to their simplest male/female dimension. The theory of patriarchy was already facing sharp criticism.

The conceptualization of women themselves also proved to be problematic, as did the related notion of a shared oppression. Inherent in the theory of patriarchy, and feminism itself, was an assumption of unity and solidarity among all women. Yet Gerda Lerner, early on in the discussion, pointed to the difficulties involved in conceptualizing women as a group due to their dispersal throughout the population.²³ Further, argued Ann D. Gordon, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nancy Shrom Dye, in an article aptly entitled “The problem of women’s history”:

The nineteenth-century notion that women are bound together by common oppression freezes and levels their enormously diverse experience. That women have suffered oppression is not to be denied…. But oppression … meant different things at different times to different groups and classes of women.²⁴

Lerner specifically warned against seeing women only as victims of oppression, which was inherent in analyses based on a theory of patriarchy. Such an approach, she pointed out, places them in a male-defined conceptual framework whereas, she declared:

The true story of women is the history of their ongoing functioning in that male-defined world, on their own terms. The question of oppression does not elicit that story, and is therefore a tool of limited usefulness to the historian.²⁵

At the same time, the sharp distinction made between women and men and their respective interests began to falter as Nancy Cott noted the need for feminist theory to deal with the fact that women were the same and yet different from men. Further, she pointed out that gender identity is not separable from other shared identities, such as those of race and class, which can serve to unite groups across gender lines.²⁶ As suggested above in relation to Sylvia Walby’s analysis, there emerged a recognition that mutuality between men and women was often pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introductory essay – gender in labor history
• PART I Negotiating gender difference in the cotton district
• PART II Female labor and gender difference in the small metal industries
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index