Feminist Review

Issue 38

The Feminist Review Collective

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134920600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This issue of Feminist Review concentrates on cultural studies: the modernist style of Susan Sontag, fashion and representation, and a very witty look at lesbian photographs.

REVIEWS

Women Assemble: Women

Workers and the New

Industries in Inter-War

Britain

Miriam Glucksmann

Routledge: London 1990

ISBN 415 03196 6

Hbk £30.00

ISBN 415 03197 4

Pbk £10.99

Given the current interest in the processes of restructuring and the feminization of the labour force, Miriam Glucksmann's book is a timely reminder that these processes are not without their historical counterparts where women have been at the centre of innovations in production relations. Women Assem ble is a splendid book packed with empirical material on the processes of restructuring in the inter-war period set alongside the direct experiences of women who were involved in the new industries. It is a book which asks the most difficult questions about the origins of the sexual division of labour in production and how this relates to consumption and reproduction.

The book opens with a discussion of the changing patterns of women's employment, including the growth in the actual numbers of women in employment, from 5.6 million in 1931 to 6.3 million in 1951. This growth was partly accounted for by developments in the service sector but also in the welfare state and in the new industries of electrical engineering, chemicals, the motor industry, food processing, glass and paper. There was massive capital growth in these industries during the inter-war period and, with this, changes to assembly-line production and the introduction of new technologies. Women as workers were crucial to these changes and to the drive for profits within these industries, an often ignored aspect of the inter-war restructuring, hidden in the stereotyping of the assembly-line worker as a male, white worker. Miriam Glucksmann's book makes these changes come alive in the chapters that follow by detailing working practices and organization in a series of case studies and through the reminiscences of women workers in these industries. The relationship between gender and the division of labour is scrutinized through an account of the ideological and material factors which both contribute to, and reproduce the specific position of women in the production processes.

Miriam Glucksmann's account then moves to the domestic scene and the changes in consumption in the inter-war period, emphasizing the ideological construction of the ‘ideal’ home and the ways in which class relations intervened, both in relation to consumer power and in the ways in which the ‘ideal’ home was appropriated by working-class and middle-class women. This had a bearing also upon the fate of domestic service which increased as an employment area for women in the early thirties and then began a decline which was hastened, in part, by the resistance of working-class women to enter this type of employment when factory work offered better wages, more time off and more ‘mates’.

Feminists have long debated the causes of women's subordination in production relations but, as Miriam Glucksmann's work makes clear, the reasons for this subordination are complex and cannot be simply read off from a general notion of ‘patriarchal relations’ or simply re-described via notions of the dual labour market. Equally, Marxist analysis, while providing a basis for understanding changes in capitalist accumulation and industrial production, cannot, of itself, provide answers to the specificities of the role of gendered labour power in these processes. Instead, what is required, to further our understanding of how we arrived at the position we are in now, is precisely the fine, carefully researched and analytically astute work demonstrated in the volume Women Assemble.

Sallie Westwood

Men's Work, Women's Work

Harriet Bradley

Polity Press:

Cambridge 1989

ISBN 0 7456 01626

Pbk £10.95

ISBN 0 7456 01618

Hbk £39.50

Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work

Rosemary Pringle

Verso: London 1989,

ISBN 0 86091 950 1

Pbk £9.95

ISBN 0 86091 234 5

Hbk £29.95

Gendered Jobs and Social Change

Rosemary Crompton and Kay Sanderson

Unwin Hyman:

London 1990

ISBN 0 04 445596 8

Pbk £9.95

ISBN 0 04 445597 6

Hbk £25.00

Office Automation: Labour Process and Women's Work in Britain

Juliet Webster

Harvester: Brighton 1989

ISBN 0 7456 0162 6

Pbk £9.95

ISBN 0 7456 0161 8

Hbk £35.00

Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession 1890–1950

Darlene Clark Hine

Indiana University

Press: Bloomington & Indianapolis 1989

ISBN 0 253 20529 8

Pbk $12.95

ISBN 0 253 32773 3

Hbk $35.00

Feminist research has now produced many accounts of women's paid work. Whilst coming from diverse theoretical perspectives, there is a common portrayal of the conditions and terms of women's employment. The majority of working women are to be found working in low-paid, low-status jobs which are generally constructed as being ‘women's jobs’. Even professional women, who enjoy some relative privilege, can be seen to be marginalized and excluded from organizational decision-making and power. Gender is clearly one, very much alive, dynamic social process within the organization of work which structures women as a subordinate workforce. As we reflect, often bruised and beleaguered, on several years of workplace Equal Opportunities policies, it is apparent that strategies designed to overcome gender segregation have not done so. The bridges between us, especially as black and white women, still have to be built; the intricate mesh of power relations, that keep us in our place, have scarcely been touched. Five recent books, all very different in their approach, address these ongoing issues.

Men's Work, Women's Work and Gendered Jobs and Social Change are two books aimed firmly at the women's studies market. Harriet Bradley takes a wide historical and sociological sweep to analyse why it is that men have different jobs. She argues that gender ideologies rooted in Victorian ideologies of domesticity and separate spheres for men and women are carried over into the sphere of production to divide and exploit women and men at work. Rosemary Crompton's and Kay Sanderson's book sets out to demonstrate that established sociological concepts such as a class and social stratification, the labour process, dual labour markets and so on may be developed to analyse gender segregation in employment. They argue that the problem has been the social sciences’ neglect of gender relations, not that existing concepts cannot be developed to encompass feminist work. Case studies on gender segregation in the hotel and catering industry, building societies, pharmacy and accounting, are used to illustrate their theoretical perspective. Neither of these books may set the world alight, but both provide good, comprehensive overviews of the current debates on gendered job segregation.

Darlene Clark Hine's Black Women in White is a moving, optimistic and inspiring account of black nurses’ struggle, between 1890–1950, to establish their place within the nursing profession in the United States. Nursing was one of the few avenues of occupational mobility open to black women in this period, but this is no ordinary account of enhanced employment opportunity. Black nurses provided a vital health-care service for both rural and urban black communities who were barred or segregated from white hospitals. The cause of black nurses became the cause of the black communities throughout the United States. It is a history of struggle against racism and sexism, against the male medical profession which established its professional autonomy and control of medical practice at the expense of nurses, against the actions of white nurses whose own battle to establish their professional status included the exclusion of black women. The history of the emergence of the trained black nurse is one of black women who were ‘determined to raise hell to get what they wanted’. Denied access to white nursing schools, black nurses created their own autonomous training and professional development. Of necessity, they were forced into challenging and confronting the racism of the profession with which they sought acceptance and integration.

In 1950 black nurses were finally integrated into the American Nurses Association, separate professional development came to an end and the National Association of Coloured Graduate Nurses (NACGN) was disbanded. Whilst this was a key landmark in black nurses’ struggle for recognition and integration, it has not meant the end of black nurses’ marginalization within the profession. As in the UK, a two-tier system of training has existed and many black American nurses are channelled into associate nursing degrees which has continued to structure them into a subordinate role in the profession. In 1971, a group of black nurses formed the National Black Nurses’ Association in response to a felt need for autonomous organization and support.

This is an exceptionally well-researched, well-documented book. It has at its core an analysis of race which is so often absent from accounts of women's work; it documents a history of black women as agents of change. It makes plain that sectional gain, made at the expense of others, is no battle won.

There are two new books on women's office work. Office Automation by Juliet Webster sets out to examine the impact of the microelectronics technology on women's secretarial and clerical work. Will the word processor liberate women from routine work or will it lead to the further deskilling of women's work? Rosemary Pringle's book Secretaries Talk also considers the impact of technology but, above all, she is concerned to examine how male power constructs the meaning of what it is to be a secretary, and this reviewer found herself sloping off to bed earlier and earlier, to read yet another gripping chapter under the bedclothes. It pushes further our understanding of gender relations at work; it opens up for perusal men's strategies for maintaining their power in the workplace. Of late there has been a growing interest in gender relations in the workplace informed, amongst other things, by both black and white feminists’ experience of Equal Opportunities work. It is that daily experience of working in white male organizational hierarchies that does your head in and reminds you that there is a struggle going on.

Secretaries Talk is a study of secretaries, the very epitome of ‘women's work’. It is based on a series of interviews with secretaries (mostly women) and their bosses (mostly men), where each is questioned on their perspective of the secretary/boss relationship. It is also a fascinating study of power. Power is situational and relational and men's superior position in organizations is achieved in relation to women's subordinate one. Men's ability to maintain their power, to maintain their superior position within hierarchical organizations, is crucially dependent on their ability to maintain women in their place. Gender relations, Rosemary Pringle argues, are power relations and she sets about illustrating the repertoire of strategies and discourses that men use to maintain their power over women. Women secretaries are not without power, and they, too, deploy a range of strategies for resistance, but the struggle is not an equal one, women enter into the arena as unequal combatants.

What makes a secretary is not defined by tasks alone. Men trivialize and undervalue women's secretarial skills and knowledge; whether women are seen as ‘office wives’, ‘sexy secretaries’ or ‘career women’, it is clear that women's work is sexualized and that sexuality and femininity are key to constructing the place where women ‘belong’. This book helps us understand why Equal Opportunities policies do not work, why they have not begun to dismantle organizational hierarchies or male power. Feminist research has rightly been concerned to give expression to women's experiences of paid employment but it now seems time to put the spotlight on men's behaviour, on men's strategies for maintaining their power.

Angela Coyle

Women and Industrialization: Gender at Work in Nineteenth-Century England

Judy Lown

Polity Press:

Cambridge 1990

ISBN 0 7456 0202 9

Hbk £27.50

In this remarkable book Judy Lown analyses a key period of historical transformation in Britain during which one system of production was being replaced by another and the boundaries between ‘home’ and ‘work’ were being totally redrawn. She reveals the gendered basis of the developing class structure, showing how elements from the past were used to establish new social relationships, forming the ideological underpinning for new material circumstances. All this is achieved by means of a case study of the mechanized silk factory set up by Samuel Courtauld in rural north Essex in the early nineteenth century (a venture that was incidentally extremely successful for the Courtauld family, culminating in the powerful multinational firm we know today).

Lown's central argument is that the patriarchal relations of the traditional silk industry were reconstructed anew in factory conditions during industrialization. In the earlier system of domestic production, economic and familial authority had been fused in the person of the master/father of the household who was simultaneously the master weaver, controlling the labour of his wife, children and apprentices, and head of the household which often contained domestic servants, relatives and other dependants in addition to his own immediate kin. Here there was already a hierarchical division of labour based on distinctions of age and gender such that women and girls did the preparatory and lower-status work of throwing and winding while the skilled craft work of hand-weaving was increasingly concentrated in the hands of adult men.

Under the impact of industrialization, the domestic production unit disappeared and home and paid work became physically separate. Nevertheless, patriarchal relations were recreated in each new sphere so that men retained a dominant position in both. In the Halstead silk factory, women formed the majority of the workforce (901 women to 114 men in 1861) but they were concentrated in lower-level, routine, unskilled and badly paid jobs. Most of the very young worked as winders while adult women were power-loom weavers. The men, by contrast, acted as overseers, clerical workers, mechanics and machine repairers. There was no overlap between the work of adult men and women; women remained in the same lowly position for the whole of their working lives while men progressed through the hierarchy; women were paid piece rates while men received a flat rate and numerous allowances and other perks.

But Courtauld relied on female labour at a time when women's paid employment and place outside of the home were becoming issues of important national debate and when factory work itself was increasingly being presented as not ‘respectable’. By the end of the century the Victorian middle-class ideal of domesticity had gained precedence and, with it, the model of the ‘angel in the house’ for whom the only appropriate activities in the ‘public’ world were extensions of women's nurturing and caring role in the family. Lown shows how Courtauld overcame the obvious contradiction in this by espousing the ‘new paternalism’, a collection of practices based on the linked ideologies of social improvement, familialism, welfare and male authority. Not only was the factory organized along the lines of the family at work but he also intervened in the daily lives and morals, dress, child-rearing and leisure activities of his employees. Kitchens, nurseries, literacy classes, and tea parties were provided but, as part of an attempt to impose middle-class standards of gentility and femininity, they were vigorously resisted by the women.

Clearly, the process of industrialization was neither neutral nor genderless, but, on the contrary, both relied on and created very definite relations of gender division and subordination. The class relations tha...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Contents
• Copyright
• The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag
• Tantalizing Glimpses of Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs
• Reflections on the Women's Movement in Trinidad: Calypsos, Changes and Sexual Violence
• Fashion, Representation, Femininity
• The European Women's Lobby
• Review Articles
• Reviews
• Letters
• Noticeboard