(Heidi
Hartmann)
In
a foundational theoretical statement on patriarchal segregation in the labour
market, Heidi Hartmann argues that organised male labour actively worked to
confine women to low paid unskilled jobs or to unpaid work in the home. Using historical data from the nineteenth
century onwards, she argues that job segregation by sex is the root of women’s
low status in the labour market.
The division of labour by sex
appears to have been universal throughout human history. In our society the sexual division of labour
is hierarchical, with men on top and women on the bottom. Anthropology and history suggest, however,
that this division was not always a hierarchical one. The development and importance of a sex-ordered division of
labour is the subject of this paper. It
is my contention that the roots of women’s present social status lie in this
sex-ordered division of labour. It is
my belief that not only must the hierarchical nature of the division of labour
between the sexes be eliminated, but also the very division of labour between
the sexes must be eliminated if women are to attain equal social status with
men and if women and men are to attain the full development of their human
potentials.
The
primary questions of investigation would seem to be, then, first, how a more
sexually egalitarian division became a less egalitarian one, and second, how
this hierarchical division of labour became extended to wage labour in the
modern period.
I
want to argue that, before capitalism, a patriarchal system was established in
which men controlled the labour of women and children in the family, and that
in so doing men learned the techniques of hierarchical organisation and
control. With the advent of
public/private separations such as those created by the emergence of state
apparatus and economic systems based on wider exchange and larger production
units, the problem for men became one of maintaining their control over the
labour power of women. In other words,
a direct personal system of control was translated into an indirect, impersonal
systems of control, mediated by society of labour between the sexes, and (2)
techniques of hierarchical organisation and control. These mechanisms were crucial in the second process, the
extension of a sex-ordered division of labour to the wage-labour system, during
the period of emergence of capitalism in Western Europe and the United States.
The
emergence of capitalism in the fifteenth centuries threatened patriarchal
control based on institutional authority as it destroyed many old institutions
and created new ones, such as a ‘free’ market in labour. It threatened to bring all women and
children into the labour force and hence to destroy the family and the basis of
the power of men over women (i.e. the control over their labour power in the
family). If the theoretical tendency of
pure capitalism would have been to eradicate all arbitrary differences of
status among labourers, to make all labourers equal in the market place, why
are women still in an inferior position to men in the labour market? The possible answers are legion; they range
from neoclassical views that the process is not complete or is hampered by
market imperfections to the radical view that production requires hierarchy
even if the market nominally requires ‘equality’. All of these explanations, it seems to me, ignore the role of men
– ordinary men, men as men, men as workers – in maintaining women’s inferiority
in the labour market. The radical view,
in particular, emphasises the role of men as capitalists in creating
hierarchies in the production process in order to maintain their power. Capitalists do this by segmenting the labour
market (along race, sex, and ethnic lines among others) and playing workers off
against each other. In this paper I argue
that male workers have played and continue to play a crucial role in maintaining
sexual divisions in the labour process.
Job
segregation by sex, I will argue, is the primary mechanism in capitalists
society that maintains the superiority of men over women, because it enforces
lower wages for women in the labour market.
Low wages keep women dependent on men because they encourage women to
marry. Married women must perform
domestic chores for their husbands. Men
benefit, then, from both higher wages and the domestic division of labour. This domestic division of labour, in turn,
acts to weaken women’s position in the labour market, and vice versa. This process is the present outcome of the
continuing interaction of two interlocking systems, capitalism and patriarchy. Patriarchy, far from being vanquished by
capitalism, is still very virile; it shapes the form modern capitalism takes,
just as the development of capitalism has transformed patriarchal
institutions. The resulting mutual
accommodation between patriarchy and capitalism has created a vicious circle
for women…
The emergence of
capitalism and the industrial revolution in England and the United States
The creation of a
wage-labour force and the increase in the scale of production that occurred
with the emergence of capitalism had in some ways a more severe impact on women
than on men. To understand this impact
let us look at the work of women before this transition occurred and the
changes which took place as it occurred.
In the 1500s and 1600s, agriculture, woollen textiles (carried on as by
by-industry of agriculture), and the various crafts and trades in the towns
were the major sources of livelihood for the English population. In the rural areas men worked in the fields
on small farms they owned or rented and women tended the household plots, small
gardens and orchards, animals, and diaries.
The women also spun and wove. A
portion of these products were sold in small markets to supply the villages,
towns, and cities, and in this women supplied a considerable proportion of
their families’ cash income, as well as their subsistence in kind. In addition to the tenants and farmers,
there was a small wage-earning class of men and women who worked on the larger
farms. Occasionally tenants and their
wives worked for wages as well, the men more often than the women. As small farmers and cottagers were
displaced by larger farmers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their
wives lost their main sources of support, while the men were able to continue
as wage labourers to some extent. Thus
women, deprived of these essential household plots, suffered relatively greater
unemployment, and the families as a whole were deprived of a large part of
their subsistence.
In the 1700s, the demand for
cotton textiles grew, and English merchants found they could utilise their labour
of the English agricultural population, who were already familiar with the arts
of spinning and weaving. The merchants
distributed materials to be spun and woven, creating a domestic industrial
system which occupied many displaced farm families. This putting-out system, however, proved inadequate. The complexities of distribution and
collection and, perhaps more important, the control the workers had over the
production process (they could take time off, work intermittently, steal
materials) prevented an increase in the supply of textiles sufficient to meet
the merchant’s needs. To solve these
problems first spinning, in the late 1700s, and then weaving, in the early
1800s, were organised into factories.
The textile factories were located in the rural areas, at first, in
order both to take advantage of the labour of children and women, by escaping
the restrictions of the guilds in the cities, and to utilise water power. When spinning was industrialised, women
spinners at home suffered greater unemployment, while the demand for male
handloom weavers increased. When
weaving was mechanised, the need for handloom weavers fell off as well.
In this way, domestic
industry, created by emerging capitalism, was later superseded and destroyed by
the progress of capitalist industrialisation.
In this process, women, children, and men in the rural areas all
suffered dislocation and disruption, but they experienced this in different
ways. Women, forced into unemployment
by the capitalisation of agriculture more frequently than men, were more
available to labour, both in the domestic putting-out system and in the early
factories. It is often argued both that
men resisted going into the factories because they did not want to lose their
independence and that women and children were more docile and malleable. If this was in fact the case, it would
appear that these ‘character traits’ of women and men were already established
before the advent of the capitalistic organisation of industry, and that they
would have grown out of the authority structure prevailing in the previous
period of small-scale, family agriculture.
Many historians suggest that within the family men were the heads of
households, and women, even though the contributed a large part of their
families’ subsistence, were subordinate.
In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries the family industry system and the guilds began to break
down in the face of the demand for larger output. Capitalists began to organise production on a larger scale, and
production became separated from the home as the size of establishments
grew. Women were excluded from
participation in the industries in which they had assisted men as they no
longer took place at home, where married women apparently tended to remain to
carry on their domestic work. Yet many
women out of necessity sought work in capitalistically organised industry as
wage labour they appear to have been at a disadvantage relative to me. First, as in agriculture, there was already
a tradition of lower wages for women (in the previously limited area of wage
work). Second, women appear to have
been less well trained than men and obtained less desirable jobs. And third, they appear to have been less
well organised than men.
Because I think the ability
of men to organise themselves played a crucial role in limiting women’s
participation in the wage-labour market, I want to offer, first, some evidence
to support the assertion that men were better organised and, second, some
plausible reasons for their superiority in this area. I am not arguing that men had greater organisational abilities at
all times and all places, or in all areas or types of organisation, but am
arguing here that it is plausible that they did in England during this period,
particularly in the area of economic production. As evidence of their superiority, we have the guilds themselves,
which were better organised among men’s trades than women’s, and in which, in
joint trades, men had superior positions – women were seldom admitted to the
hierarchical ladder of progression.
Second, we have the evidence of the rise of male professions and the
elimination of females ones during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The medical profession, male
from its inception, established itself through hierarchical organisation, the
monopolisation of new, ‘scientific’ skills, and the assistance of the
state. Midwifery was virtually wiped
out by the men. Brewing provides
another example. Male brewers organised
a fellowship, petitioned the king for monopoly rights (in exchange for a tax on
every quart they brewed), and succeeded in forcing the numerous small-scale
brewsters to buy from them. Third,
throughout the formative period of industrial capitalism, men appear to have
been better able to organise themselves as wage workers. And as we shall see below, as factory
production became established men used their labour organisations to limit
women’s place in the labour market.
As to why men might have had
superior organisation ability during the transnational period, I think we must
consider the development of patriarchal social relations in the nuclear family,
as reinforced by the state and religion, a process briefly described above for
Anglo-Saxon England. Since men’s
superior position was reinforced by the state, and men acted in the political
arena as heads of households and in the households as heads of production
units, it seems likely that men would develop more organisation structures
beyond their households. Women, in an
inferior position at home and without the support of the state, would be less
likely to be able to do this. Men’s organisational knowledge, then, grew out of
their position in the family and in the division of labour. Clearly, further investigation of
organisations before and during the transition period is necessary to establish
the mechanisms by which men came to control this public sphere.
Thus, the capitalistic
organisation of industry, in removing work from the home, served to increase
the subordination of women, since it served to increase the relative importance
of the area of men’s domination. But it
is important to remember that men’s domination was already established and that
it clearly influenced the direction and shape that capitalist development
took. As Clark has argued, with the
separation of work from the home men became less dependent on women for
industrial production, while women became more dependent on men
economically. From a position much like
that of African women…., English married women, who had supported themselves
and their children, became the domestic servants of their husbands. Men increased their control over technology,
production, and marketing, as they excluded women from industry, education, and
political organisation.
When women participated in
the wage-labour market, they did so in a position as clearly limited by
patriarchy as it was by capitalism.
Men’s control over women’s labour was altered by the wage-labour system,
but it was eliminated. In the labour
market the dominant position of men was maintained by sex-ordered job
segregation. Women’s jobs were lower
paid, considered less skilled, and often involved less exercise of authority or
control. Men acted to enforce job
segregation in the labour market; they utilises trade union associations and
strengthened the domestic division of labour, which required women to do
housework, child care, and related chores.
Women’s subordinate position in the labour market reinforced their
subordinate position in the family, and that in turn reinforced their labour
marked position.
The process of
industrialisation and the establishment of the factory system, particularly in
the textile industry, illustrate the role played by men’s trade union
associations. Textile factories
employed children at first, but as they expended they began to utilise the
labour of adult women and of whole families.
While the number of married women had followed their work into the
factories to cause both their husbands and the upper classes concern about home
life and the care of children. Smelser
has argued that in the early factories the family industry system and male
control could often be maintained. For
example, adult make spinners often hired their own or related children as
helpers, and whole families were often employed by the same factory for the
same length of working day.
Technological change, however, increasingly made this difficult, and
factory legislation which limited the hours of children, but not of adults,
further exacerbated the difficulties of the ‘family factory system’.
The demands of the factory
labourers in the 1820s and 1830s had been designed to maintain the family
factory system, but by 1840 male factory operatives were calling for
limitations on the hours of work of children between nine and thirteen to eight
a day, a forbidding the employment of younger children. According to Smelser this caused parents
difficulty in training and supervising their children, and to remedy it male
workers and the middle and upper classes began to recommend that women, too, be
removed from the factories.
The upper classes of the
Victorian Age, the age that elevated women to their pedestals, seem to have
been motivated by moral outrage and concern for the future of the English race
(and for the reproduction of the working class): ‘In the male,’ said Lord
Shaftesbury, ‘the moral effects of the system are very sad, but in the female
they are infinitely worse, not alone upon themselves, but upon their families,
upon society, and, I may add, upon the country itself. It is bad enough if you corrupt the man, but
if you corrupt the woman you poison the waters of life at the very
fountain.’ Engels, too, appears to have
been outraged for similar reasons: ‘..we find here precisely the same features
reappearing which the Factories Report presented, the work of women up to the
hour of confinement, incapacity as housekeepers, neglect of home and children,
indifference, actual dislike to family life, and demoralisation; further the
crowding out of men from employment, the constant improvement of machinery,
early emancipation of children, husbands supported by their wives and children,
etc, etc. Here, Engmels has touched
upon the reasons for the opposition of the male workers to the situation. Engles was apparently ambivalent about whose
side he was on, for, while he often seems to sharer the attitudes of the men
and of the upper classes, he also referred to the trade unions as elite
organisations of grown-up men who achieved benefits for themselves but not for
the unskilled, women, or children.
That male workers viewed the
employment of women as a threat to their jobs is not surprising, given an
economic system where competition among workers was characteristic. That women were paid lower wages exacerbated
the threat. But why their response was
to attempt to exclude women rather than to organise them is explained, not by
capitalism, but by patriarchal relations between men and women: men wanted to
assure that women would continue to perform the appropriate tasks at home. Hostility to the competition of young
females, almost certainly less well trained and lower paid, was common
enough. But if anything, the wage work
of married women was thought even less excusable.
In 1846 the Ten Hours’
Advocate stated clearly that they hoped for the day when such threats would be
removed altogether..’It is needless for us to say, that all attempts to improve
the morals and physical condition of female factory workers will be abortive,
unless their hours are materially reduced.
Indeed we may go so far as to say, that married females would be much
better occupied in performing the domestic duties of the household, than
following the never-tiring motion of machinery. We therefore hope the day is not distant, when the husband will
be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending the former to
endure the drudgery of a cotton mill’
Eventually, male tradition unionists realised that women could not be
removed altogether, but their attitude was still ambivalent. One local wrote to the Women’s Trade Union
League, organised in 1889 to encourage unionisation among women workers:
“Please send an organiser to this town as we have decided that if the women
here cannot be organised they must be exterminated.
The main explanation the
English literature offers for lower wages is job segregation by sex, and for
both lower wages and the existence of job segregation it offers several
interdependent explanations (1) the exclusionary policies of male unions, (2)
the financial responsibility of men for their families, (3) the willingness of
women to work for less (and their inability to get more) because of subsidies
or a lower standard of living, and (4) women’s lack of training and
skills. The English historical
literature strongly suggests that job segregation by sex is patriarchal in
origin, rather longstanding, and difficult to eradicate. Men’s ability to organise in labour unions –
stemming perhaps from a greater knowledge of the technique of hierarchical
organisation – appears to be key in their ability to maintain job segregation
and the domestic division of labour.
Turning to the United States
experience provides an opportunity, first, to explore shifts in the sex
composition of jobs, and second, to consider further the role of unions, particularly
in establishing protective legislation.
The American literature, especially the works of Abbott and Baker,
emphasises sex shifts in jobs and, in contrast to the English literature,
relies more heavily on technology as an explanatory phenomenon.
Conditions in the United
States differed from those in England.
First, the division of labour within colonial farm families was probably
more rigid, with men in the fields and women producing manufactured articles as
home. Second, the early textile factories
employed young single women from the farms of New England; a conscious effort
was made, probably out of necessity, to avoid the creation of a family labour
system to preserve the labour of men for agriculture. This changed, however, with the eventual dominance of manufacture
over agriculture as the leading sector in the economy and with
immigration. Third, the shortage of
labour and direct necessity in colonial and frontier America perhaps created
more opportunities for women in non-traditional pursuits outside the family;
colonial women were engaged in a wide variety of occupations. Fourth, shortages of labour continued to
operate in women’s favour at various points throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Fifth, the
constant arrival of new groups of immigrants created an extremely heterogeneous
labour force, with varying skills levels and organisational development and
rampant antagonisms.
Major shifts in the sex
composition of employment occurred in boot and shoe manufacture, textile manufacture,
teaching, cigar making, and clerical work.
In all of these, except textiles, the shift was toward more women. New occupations opened up for both men and
women, but men seemed to dominate in most of them, even though there were
exceptions. Telephone operating and
typing, for example, became women’s jobs.
Cigar making offers ample
opportunity to illustrate both the opposition of make unionists to impending
sex changes in labour force composition in their industries and the form that
opposition took: protective legislation.
Cigar making was a home industry before 1800, when women on farms in
Connecticut and elsewhere made rather rough cigars and traded them at village
stores. Early factories employed women,
but they were soon replaced by skilled male immigrants whose products could
compete with fancy European cigars. By
1860 , women were only 9 per cent of the employed in cigar making. This switch to men was followed by one to
women, but not without opposition from the men. In 1869, the wooden mold was introduced, and so were Bohemian
immigrant women (who had been skilled workers in cigar factories in
Austria-Hungary). The Bohemian women,
established by tobacco companies in tenements, perfected a division of labour
in which young girls (and later their husbands) could use the molds. Beginning in 1873 the Cigarmakers
International Union agitated vociferously against home work, which was
eventually restricted (for example, in New York in 1894). In the late 1880s machinery was introduced
into the factories, and women were used at strike-breakers. The union turned to protective legislation.
The attitude of the
Cigarmakers International Union toward women was ambivalent at best. The union excluded women in 1864, but
admitted them in 1867. In 1875 it
prohibited locals from excluding women, but apparently never imposed sanctions
on offending locals. In 1878 a
Baltimore local wrote Adolph Strasser, the union president: ‘We have combated
from its incipience the movement of the introduction of female labour in any
capacity whatever, be it bunch maker, roller, or what not.’ Let these ambiguities be interpreted as
national/local conflicts, let Strasser speak for himself (1879): ‘We cannot
drive the females out of the trade, but we can restrict their daily quota of
labour through factory laws. No girl
under 18 should be employed more than eight hours per day; all over-work should
be prohibited…’
Because women are unskilled
workers, it may be erroneous to interrupt this as animosity to women per se. Rather it is the feat of the skilled for the
unskilled. Yet male unions denied women
skills, while they offered them to young boys.
This is quite clear in the case of printing.
Women had been engaged as
typesetters in printing from colonial times.
It was a skilled trade, but required to heavy work. Abbot attributed the jealousy of the men in
the trade to the fact that it was a trade ‘suited’ to women. In any case, male unions seem to have been
hostile to the employment of women from the beginning. In 1854 the National Typographical Union
resolved not to ‘encourage by its act the employment of female
compositors. Baker suggests that the
unions discouraged girls from learning the trade, and so women learner what
they could in non union shops or as strikebreakers. In 1869, at the annual convention of the National Labour Union,
of which the National Typographical Union was a member, a struggle occurred
over the seating of Susan B Anthony, because she had allegedly used women
compositors as strikebreakers. She has,
she admitted, because they could learn the trade no other way. In 1870 the Typographical Union charted a
women’s local in New York City. Its
president, Augusta Lewis, who was also corresponding secretary of the National
Typographical Union, did not think the women’s union could hold out for very
long, because, although the union women supported the union men, the union me
did not support the union women: ‘It is the general opinion of female
compositors that they are more justly treated by what is termed “rat” foremen,
printers, and employers than they are by union men.’ The women’s local eventually folded in 1878.
Apparently, the general lack
of support was successful from the men’s point of view, for, in 1910, Abbott
claimed that: Officers of other trade unions frequently refer to the policy of
the printers as an example of the way in which trade union control may be
successful in checking or preventing the employment of women. The Typograpical Union strongly backed equal
pay for equal work as a way to protect the men’s wage scale, not to encourage
women. Women who had fewer skills could
not demand, and expect to receive, equal wages.
Unions excluded women in
many ways, not the least among them protective legislation. In this the unions were aided by the
prevailing social sentiment about work for women, especially married women,
which was seen as a social evil which ideally should be wiped out, and by a
strong concern on the part of ‘social feminists’ and others that women workers
were severely exploited because they were unorganised. The social feminists did not intent to
exclude women from desirable occupations but their strategy paved the way for
this exclusion, because, to get protection for working women – which they felt
was so desperately needed – they argued that women, as a sex, were weaker than
men and more in need of protection.
Their strategy was successful in 1908 in Muller v Oregon, when the
Supreme Court upheld maximum hours laws for women, saying: “The two sexes
differ in structure of body, in the capacity for long-continued labour
particularly when done standing, the influence of vigorous health upon the
future well-being of the race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert
full rights, and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence. The difference justifies a difference in
legislation and upholds that which is designed to compensate for some of the
burdens which rest upon her.
In 1916 in Bunting v Oregon
Brandeis uses virtually the same data on the ill effect of long hours of work
to argue successfully for maximum hours laws for men as well as women. Bunting was not, however, followed by a
spate of maximum hours law for men, the way Muller has been followed by laws
for women, in general, unions did not support protective legislation for men,
although they continued to do so for women.
Protective legislation, rather than organisation, was the preferred
strategy only for women.
Historically, male workers
have been instrumental in limiting the participation of women in the labour
market. Male unions have carried out
the policies and attitudes of the earlier guilds, and they have continued to
reap benefits for make workers. Capitalists
inherited job segregation by sex, but they have quite often been able to use it
to their own advantage. If they can
supersede experienced men with cheaper women, so much the better; if they can
weaken labour by threatening to do so, that’s good, too; or if, failing that,
they can use those status differences to reward men, and buy their allegiance
to capitalism with patriarchal benefits, that’s okay too.
Perhaps the relative
importance of capitalists and male workers in instituting and maintaining job
segregation by sex has varied in different periods. Capitalists during the transition to capitalism, for example,
seemed quite able to change the sex composition of jobs – when weaving was
shifted to factories equipped with power looms women wove, even though most
handloom weavers had been men, and mule spinning was introduced with male
operators even though women had used the earlier spinning jennies and water
frames. An industrialisation progressed
and conditions stablised somewhat, male unions gained in strength and were
often able to preserve or extend male arenas.
Nevertheless, in times of overwhelming social or economic necessity,
occasioned by vast increases in the demand for labour, such as in teaching or
clerical work, male capitalists were capable of overpowering male workers. Thus, in periods of economic change, capitalists’
actions may be more instrumental in instituting or changing a sex-segregated
labour force – while workers fight a defensive battle. In other periods male workers may be more
important in maintaining sex-segregated jobs; they may be able to prevent the
encroachment of, or even to drive out, cheaper female labour, thus increasing
the benefits to their sex.
The present status of women
in the labour market and the current arrangement of sex-segregated jobs is the
result of a long process of interaction between patriarchy and capitalism. I have emphasised the actions of male
workers throughout this process because I believe that emphasis to be
correct. Men will have to be forced to
give up their favoured positions in the division of labour – in the labour
market and at home – both if women’s subordination is to end and if men are to
begin to escape class oppression and exploitation. Capitalists have indeed used women as unskilled, underpaid labour
to undercut male workers, yet this is only a case of the chickens coming home
to roost – a case of men’s co-operation by and support for patriarchal society,
with its hierarchy among men, being turned back on themselves with a
vengeance. Capitalism grew on top of
patriarchy; a patriarchal society, with its hierarchy among men, being turned
back on themselves with a vengeance.
Capitalism grew on top of patriarchy; patriarchal capitalism is
stratified society par excellence. If
non-ruling class men are to be free they will have to recognise their
co-operation by patriarchal capitalism and relinquish their patriarchal
benefits. If women are to be free, they
must fight against both patriarchal power and capitalist organisation of
society.
Because both the sexual
division of labour and male domination are so long-standing, it will be very
difficult to eradicate them and impossible to eradicate the latter without the
former. The two are now so inextricably
intertwined that it is necessary to eradicate the sexual division of labour
itself in order to end male domination.
Very basic changes at all levels of society and culture are required to
liberate women. In this paper, I have
argued that the maintenance of job segregation by sex is a key root of women’s
status, and I have relied on the operation of society-wide institutions to
explain the maintenance of job segregation by sex. But the consequences of that division of labour go very deep,
down to the level of the subconscious.
The subconscious influences behaviour patterns, which form the micro-underpinnings
(or complements) of social institutions and are in turn reinforced by those
social institutions.
In attacking both patriarchy
and capitalism we will have to find ways to change both society-wide
institutions and our most deeply ingrained habits. It will be a long, hard struggle.
1
Max and Engels
perceived the progress of capitalism in this way, that it would bring women and
children into the labour market and thus erode the family, yet despite Engel’s
acknowledgement in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
(New York: International Publishers, 1972) that men oppress women in the
family, he did not see that oppression as based on the control of women’s
labour, and, if anything, he seems to lament the passing of the male-controlled
family (see his The Condition of the Working Class in England, Stanford CA:
Sanford University Press 1968, especially pp 161-4).
2
See Richard C Edwards,
David M Gordon, and Michael Reich, ‘Labour Market Segmentation in American
Capitalism, ‘draft essay, and the book they edited, Labour Market Segmentation
(Lexington KY: Lexington Books, 1976) for an explication of this view.
3
This account relies
primarily on that of Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth
Century (New York: Harcourt Brace & Howe, 1920). Her account is supported by many others, such as B.L Hutchins,
Women in Modern Industry (London: G Bell & Sons, 1915): Georgian Hill,
Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times, two volumes (London:
Richard Bentley & Son, 1896); F W Tickner, Women in English Economic
History (New York: E.P Dutton & Co, 1923); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and
the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London; 1930; reprinted Frank Cass &
Co, 1969).
4
Women and men in
England had been employed as agriculture labourers for several centuries. Clark found that by the seventeenth century
the wages of men were higher than women’s and the tasks done were different,
though similar in skill and strength requirements (Clark 1920, p 60). Wages for agricultural (and other work) were
often set by local authorities. These
wage differentials reflected the relative social status of men and women and
the social norms of the time. Women
were considered to require lower wages because they ate less, for example, and
were expected to have fewer luxuries, such as tobacco (see Clark and Pinchbeck
throughout for substantiation of women’s lower standard of living). Laura Oren has substantiated this for
English women during the period 1860-1950.
5
The problem of female
unemployment in the countryside was a generally recognised one which figured
prominently in the debate about poor-law reform, for example. As a remedy, it was suggested that rural
families be allowed to retain small household plots, that women be used in
agricultural wage labour and also in the putting-out system, and that men’s
wages be adjusted upward (see Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial
Revolution, 1750-1850, pp 69-84).
6
See Stephen Marglin,
‘What do bosses do? The origins and functions of hierarchy in capitalist
production’, Review of Radical Political Economics 6, no2 (1974): 60-112, for a
discussion of the transition from putting out to factories. The sexual division of labour changed
several times in the textile industry.
Hutchins writes that the further back one goes in history, the more was
the industry controlled by women. By
the seventeenth century, though, men has become professional handloom weavers,
and it was often claimed that men had superior strength or skill – which was
required for certain types of weaves or fabrics. Thus, the increase in demand for handloom weavers in the late
1700s brought increased employment for men.
When weaving was mechanised in the factories women operated the power
looms, and male handloom weavers became unemployed. When jenny and waterframe spinning were replaced by mule
spinning, supposedly requiring more strength, men took that over and displaced
women spinners. A similar transition
occurred in the United States. It is
important to keep in mind that as a by-industry, both men and women engaged in
various processes of textile manufacture, and this was intensified under
putting out (see Pinchbeck 1969, chapters 6-9).
7
See Clark; Pinchbeck;
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage
Books, 1963).
8
See Clark, pp221-31,
for the brewers, and pp 242-84, for the medical profession.
9
Ibid, chapter 7. Eli
Zaretsky (‘Capitalism, the family, and personal life’, Socialist Revolution,
nos 13,14, 1973, follows a similar interpretation of history and offers
different conclusions. Capitalism
exacerbated the sexual division of labour and created the appearance that women
work for their husbands; in reality, women who did domestic work at home were
working for capital. Thus according to
Zaretsky the present situation has its roots more in capitalism than in
patriarchy. Although capitalism may
have increased the consequence for women of the domestic division of labour,
surely patriarchy tells us more about why men didn’t stay home. That women worked for men in the home, as
well as for capital, is also a reality.
10
William Lazonick argues
in his dissertation, ‘Marxian Theory and the Development of the Labour Force in
England’ (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1975, that the degree of authority
required of the worker was often decisive in determining the sex of the
worker. Thus handloom weavers in
cottage industry were men because this allowed them to control the production
process and the labour of the female spinners.
In the spinning factories, mule spinners were men because mule spinners
were required to supervise the labour of piecers, usually young boys. Men’s position as head of the family
established their position as heads of production units, and vice versa. While this is certainly plausible, I think
it requires further investigation.
Lazonick’s work in this area (see chapter 4, ‘Segments of the labour
force: women, children, and Irish’) is very valuable.
11
Perhaps 25 per cent of
female textile factory workers were married women (see Pinchbeck, p 198;
Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry. London: Rockliff, 1958, pp 14ff). It is important to remember also that
factory employment was far from the dominant employment of women. Most women worked as domestic servants.
12
Neil Smelser, Social
Change and the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1959), chapters 9-11. Other researchers
have also established that in some cases there was a considerable degree of familial
control over some aspects of the work process.
See Tamara Hareven’s research on mills in New Hampshire, eg ‘Family time
and industrial time: the interaction between family and work in a planned
corporation town, 1900-1924’, Journal of urban History 1, no3 (1975): 365-89.
Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971), argues, based on demographic data, that the
‘practice of allowing operatives to employ assistants, though widespread, can
at no period have resulted in a predominately parent-child pattern of
employment’ (p116). Also see Amy
Hirsch’s treatment of this question in her ‘Capitalism and the Working Class
Family in British Textile Industries during the Industrial Revolution;
mimeographed (New York: New School for Social Research, 1975).
13
‘(The factory of
operatives’) agitation in the 1820s and 1830s was one avenue taken to protect
the traditional relationship between adult and child, to perpetuate the
structure of wages, to limit the recruitment of labourers into industry, and to
maintain the father’s economic authority’ (Smelser, p265. Lazonick argues that
the workers’ main interest were not in maintaining their familial dominate in
industry but in maintaining their family life outside industry. According to Smelser, agitation before 1840
sought to establish equal length days for all workers, which would tend to
maintain the family in the factory, whereas after 1840 male workers came to
accept the notion that married women and children should stay at home.
14
The question of the
motives of the various groups involved in passing the factory acts as indeed a
thorny one. Women workers themselves
may have favoured the legislation as an improvement in their working
conditions, but some undoubtedly needed the incomes longer hours enabled. Most women working in the mills were young,
single women who perhaps benefited from the protection. Single women, though ‘liberated’ by the
mills from direct domination in their families (about which there was much
discussion in the 1800s), were nevertheless kept in their place by the
conditions facing them in the labour market.
Because of their age and sex, job segregation and lower wages assured
their inability to be completely self-sufficient. Ruling-class men, especially those associated with the larger
firms, may have had an interest in factory legislation in order to eliminate
unfair competition. Working-class and
ruling-class men may have co-operated to maintain men’s dominant position in
the labour market and in the family.
15
From Mary Merryweather,
Factory Life, cited in Women in English Life from Medieval to Modern Times,
2:200. The original is recorded in
Hansard Parliamentary Debates, third series, House of Commons, 7 June 1842.
16
Frederick Engels, The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 18944 (London: Allen & Unwin,
1892), 199.
17
Ibid, p xv.
18
Smelser, p 301. Similarly, Pinchbeck quotes from a
deputation of the West Riding Short Time Committee which demands ‘the gradual
withdrawal of all females from the factories’ because home, its cares, its
employments, its woman’s true sphere’.
Gladstone thought this a good suggestion, easily implemented by
appropriate laws, eg ‘forbidding a female to work in a factory after her
marriage and during the lifetime of her husband’ (Pinchbeck, p 200, n3, from
the Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 8, 15 January 1842)/
19
Quoted in G.D.H. Cole
and Raymond Postgate, The Common People, 1746-1946, fourth edition (London:
Methuen, 1949, p432.
20
Edith Abbott, Women in
Industry (New York, Arno Press, 1969): Elizabeth F Baker, Technology and
Woman’s Work (New York; Columbia University Press, 1964).
21
See Abbott, especially
chapter 4.
22
lbid, chapter 2.
23
These antagonisms were
often increased by employers. During a
cigar makers’ strike in New York City in 1877 employers brought in unskilled
native American girls. By printing on
the boxes ‘These cigars were made by American girls,’ they sold many more boxes
of the imperfect cigars than they had expected to Abbott, p 207).
24
This summary is based
on Abbott and is substantiated by both Baker and Helen L Summer, History of
Women in Industry in the United States (Washington DC: Government Printing
Office, 1911), vol 9.
25
This account is based
primarily on Abbott, chapter 9, and Baker, pp 31-6.
26
According to Abbott, Samuel
Gompers claimed the Bohemian women were brought in for the express purpose of
strikebreaking (p197n).
27
Bohemian women came to
America first, leaving their husbands behind to work on the fields. Their husbands, who were unskilled at the
cigar trade, came over later (ibid, p 199).
28
In 1877 a Cincinnati
local struck to exclude women and was apparently successful. The Cincinnati Inquirer said: ‘The men say
the women are killing the industry. It
would seem that they hope to retaliate by killing the women’ (ibid, p 207).
29
Baker, p34.
30
John B Andrews and W D
P Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions in Report on Condition of Woman and
Child Wage Earners in the United States, vol 10. Although the proportion of women in cigar making did increase eventually,
in many other manufacturing industries the proportion of women decreased over
time. Textiles and clothing are the
outstanding examples (See Abbott, p 320, and her ‘The history of industrial
employment of women in United States’, Journal of Political Economy 14, 1906:
461-501). Sumner, cited in US Bureau of Labour Statistics, Bulletin 175,
concluded that men had taken over the skilled jobs in women’s traditional
fields, and women had to take unskilled work wherever they could find it (p28)
31
This account is based
primarily on Abbott and Baker. The
hostility to training women seems generalisable. The International Molders Union resolved: ‘Any member, honorary
or active, who devotes his times in whole or in part to the instruction of
female help in the foundry, or in any branch of the trade shall be expelled
from the Union’ (Gail Falk, ‘Women and Unions: A Historical View’ mimeographed,
New haven CT: Yale Law School, 1970. Published in somewhat shortened form in
Women’s Rights Law Reporter 1, 1973: 54-65)
32
Abbott, pp 252-3.
33
Baker, pp. 39-40.
34
See Falk.
35
Eleanor Flexner,
Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1970), p 136.
36
Abbott, p260.
37
Baker observed that the
testimony on the Equal Pay Act in 1963 was about evenly divided between those
emphasising women’s needs and those emphasising the protection of men (p 419).
38
Falk noted that unions
used constitutional exclusion, exclusion from apprenticeship, limitation of
women to helper categories or nonladder apprenticeships, limitation of
proportion of union members who could be women, ie quotas, and excessively high
fees. Moreover, the craft unions of this period, pre1930, had a general
hostility toward organising the unskilled, even those attached to their crafts.
39
Such a diverse group as
Caroll Wright, first US Labour Commissioner (Baker, p 84, Samuel Gompors and
Mother Mary Jones, traditional and radical labour organisations, respectively
(Falk), James L Davis, US Secretary of Labour, 1922 (Baker, p 400), Florence
Kelley, head of the National Consumers League (Hill), all held views which were
variations of this theme. (Hill is Ann
C Hill, ‘Protective Labour Legislation for Women: Its Origin and Effect’,
mimeographed, New Haven CT: Yale Law School, 1970, parts of which have been
published in Barbara A Babcock, Ann E Freedman, Eleanor H Norton, and Susan C
Ross, Sex Discrimination and the Law: Courses and Remedies, Boston MA: Little
Brown & Co, 1975, a law text which provides an excellent analysis of
protective legislation, discrimination against women, etc.)
40
William O’Neill
characterised those women who participated in various reform movements in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ‘social feminists’ to distinguish
them from earlier feminists like Stanton and Anthony. The social feminists came to support women’s rights because they
thought it would help advance the cause of their reforms; they were not
primarily interested in advancing the cause of women’s rights (Everyone was
Brave, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969, especially chapter 3). William H Chafe, The American Woman (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1972), also provides an excellent discussion of
the debate around protective laws.
41
What was achievable
from the legislatures and the courts, was what the social feminists aimed
for. Because in Ritchie v People (155
III.98 (1985), the court had held that sex alone was not a valid basis for a
legislature to abridge the right of an adult to contract for work and, thus,
struck down a maximum hours law for women, and because a maximum hours law for
baking employees had been struck down by the US Supreme Court (Lockner),
advocates of protective labour legislation believed their task would be
difficult. The famous ‘Brandeis Brief’
compiled hundreds of pages on the harmful effects of long hours of work and
argued that women needed ‘especially protection’ (see Babcock et al).
42
lbid, p32.
43
In 1914 the AFL voted
to abandon the legislative road to reform (see Ann C Hill).
44
Capitalists are not
always able to use patriarchy to their advantage. Men’s ability to retain as much of women’s labour in the home as
they have may hamper capitalist development during expansive phases. Men’s resistance to female workers whom
capitalists want to utilise also undoubtedly slows down capitalist advance.
45
David Gordon suggested
to me this ‘cyclical model’ of the relative strengths of employer and workers.
46
Most Marxist-feminist
attempts to deal with the problems in Marxist analysis raised by the social
position of women seem to ignore these basic conflicts between the sexes,
apparently in the interest of stressing the underlying class solidarity that
should obtain among women and men workers.
A few months ago a friend (female) said, ‘We are much more likely to be
able to get Thieu out of Vietnam that we are to get men to do the dishes. ‘She
was right’.
47
In our society, women’s
jobs are synonymous with low-status, low-paying jobs: ‘…we may replace the
familiar statement that women earn less because they are in women’s jobs…As
long as the labour market is divided on the basis of sex, it is likely that the
tasks allocated to women will be ranked as less prestigious or important,
reflecting women’s lower social status in the society at large’ (Francine Blau
(Weisskoff), ‘Women’s place in the labour market’, American Economic Review,
62, 4, 161).