THE FAMILY ECONOMY
Woman's position in the labour market and her experience of work cannot be understood without a recognition of the relationship between home and work in women's lives. Employers and male workers used the rhetoric of separate spheres and the ideology of domesticity to justify their subordination of female workers as dependants or supplementary earners.
In their important study, Women, Work and Family, Joan Scott and Louise Tilly emphasised the central place of the family economy in analyses of women's work and argued for continuity in women's experience as opposed to the sharp discontinuity favoured by those whose focus is the impact of industrial capitalism.25 The absence of a linear movement from domestic to factory production, from the family or household economy to the separation of home and work, implies a considerable grey area, moments and places when home-based production coexisted with machine-based factories, when agriculture and domestic industry coexisted, where home-work complemented factory production, where housewives lived side-by-side with factory labourers, and when women were housewives and factory workers simultaneously. However, whilst acknowledging that women's relationship to the family economy is a continuous element of women's work experience, we should not exaggerate the extent to which women themselves conflated home and work or had aspirations to establish work identities separate from the identity of wife, mother and homemaker.The concept of the family economy originally belonged to discussions of the pre-industrial, rural household, encompassing production and reproduction, the interdependence of all family members and the codependence of work and domestic life. As Deborah Simonton neatly summarises, the family economy ideal incorporated the interrelationship between economic survival strategies and what might be regarded today as the emotional needs of individuals.
It is within this context that woman's work is seen as having value; her role in production — agricultural or proto-industrial — and in reproduction and household management, positioned the woman as pivotal, if not equal, within the household unit.The family economy incorporated a sexual division of labour but it did not necessarily incorporate notions of sexual difference or hierarchy. The sexual division of labour in farming saw women commonly employed in activities closer to the farmhouse, in the dairy, the farmyard, the kitchen garden and in the kitchen, and engaged in tasks believed suitable such as weeding, hoeing and helping at harvest. There were certain tasks which were almost always carried out by one sex or the other — for instance, fishing, tree-felling and hunting are almost universally male tasks, whereas carrying water, cooking, collecting wood and preserving meats were female.26 In Russia, although farms were organised along patriarchal lines, woman's work complemented that carried out by men and was essential to the survival of the peasant household. Not only did she carry out all the work in and around the home, she also worked to produce and sell goods for the market, and she worked to reproduce the family. Women gained in authority by performing their household tasks but also by ensuring the family's future.27 The division of labour was practical and, indeed, women probably undertook a wider range of tasks than men, and were more likely to substitute for male workers than vice versa. But these divisions were culturally and economically specific and did not necessarily have anything to do with the physical differences between the sexes. In Shetland, for example, where most households were tied to their landlord in a neo-feudal tenure relationship, the household economy was sustained by fishing undertaken by men and crofting (small-scale subsistence farming), which fell to women for much of the year. In addition, women engaged in domestic production — mainly knitting — which was bartered for goods rather than cash.
Here, it was often said that households were egalitarian, acknowledging the value placed on women's productive role. And yet this alleged egalitarianism was based on a fairly strict division of labour: fishing was men's work, whilst crofting and knitting were women's work.28 In Scandinavia, on the other hand, although it was generally believed that women were more suited to handicrafts on account of their dextrous fingers, the knitting of woollen goods for cash sale was undertaken by both women and men.29However, during periods of change on the land, for example during a shift to more specialised or commercial crop production, gendered power relations were likely to shift as the collective family or household unit lost its internal cohesiveness. Changes in the nature and extent of women's participation in agricultural labour were caused by many things: peasant emancipation and the ensuing migration from the land in Russia, enclosure in England, the Clearances in Scotland, the move to cash-crop production in Prussia and regional specialisation, mechanisation and the shift to large- scale agriculture in many parts of Europe, accompanied by the emergence of alternative employment in nearby industrialising towns. In the Scottish Lowlands the introduction of new crops, especially potatoes and soft fruit, resulted in a demand for seasonal female labour and the emergence of the female gang who moved from one farm to another, taking their children with them and sleeping in barns.30 In eastern England, female field gangs were employed for turnip-singling, and in southern Spain, female gangs were hired to carry out the worst and most poorly paid jobs on the large olive- and grape-producing estates.31 In areas which specialised in dairy and livestock farming, opportunities for women expanded. For the most part, though, the commercialisation of farming promoted men's opportunities and marginalised women's roles on account of increasing division of labour into specialist and non-specialist tasks.
For example, in cereal-growing areas in Scotland and Scandinavia, the introduction of mowing with the long, double-handed scythe in place of reaping with the more easily managed short, one-handed sickle, meant women ceased their role in cutting the corn, but they continued to take part in other aspects of the harvest such as binding the corn in sheaves and threshing.32 In fact threshing with a flail was extremely hard work, yet it was generally regarded as unmanly.33Technical advances tended to oust women from some kinds of farm work. In grain-growing regions of England the use of heavy agricultural machinery in intensive cereal production resulted in women and girls being reduced to the seasonal work of weeding corn and haymaking.34 In Norway, the milling of the corn in watermills was always men's work, whereas hand-milling remained the preserve of women.35 In Sweden and Denmark the mechanisation of the dairy industry and the training of men to become scientific managers of dairies, edged out women from what had traditionally been a female-dominated skill.36 Milk and butter production, which had previously taken place on small farms, shifted to large cooperative dairies in the 1880s, and women were displaced on the grounds that they lacked physical strength and technical knowledge, along with the belief that it would be unnatural for women to manage such an enterprise.37
Alongside these structural changes on the land, attitudes towards female agricultural workers shifted. It seems clear that, at least in England, women's work was increasingly being structured according to gendered notions of what constituted appropriate or suitable work for women. Already by 1843 a Royal Commission in England commented that cheesemaking was unsuitable work for women on account of ‘the patience, skill and strength needed'. Moreover, field work was not only deemed to be too heavy for women, it was also regarded as unfeminine and a threat to male workers.
‘There is an evil prevailing in this district... that of women going into the fields', remarked an agricultural union representative in Essex in 1879: ‘Surely employment could be found for the women more congenial to their tastes and more in accord with modern civilisation?'38 The net result of these changes was to move women off the land except in a seasonal or temporary capacity. This was especially true of England where, in 1843 it was noted that ‘Now you never see a girl about in the fields' — almost certainly an exaggeration but notable nonetheless.39 Instead, women worked in agriculture and horticulture more often as waged labour in a situation more akin to their town cousins.The transition to industrial capitalism has been seen by some to herald the emergence of a different kind of economic and family unit characterised by the separation of home and work — what might be termed the family-wage or family-provider economy. Within this model, home and work are usually separately located, wage labour predominates over domestic production, and the position of women and the value of their labour is subordinated to that of the male breadwinner. However, there is no direct relationship between the functioning of a family economy and the value ascribed to women's
labour. A number of case studies taken from quite different economic regions demonstrate the weakness of the ideal/typical model. In the Loire region of France, where domestic handloom weaving survived throughout the century despite mechanisation elsewhere, the family economy was infused with gender inequality. The male handloom weavers' struggle to maintain their skills in the face of declining piece rates forced their wives and daughters into waged work in order to ensure the family's survival. Here, the family economy, far from encompassing some degree of gender equality, instead reinforced inequality at the expense of the proletarianisation of women.40 Elsewhere, where home- or cottage-based production not only survived but adapted and expanded (a stage often described as proto-industrialisation), work for women often expanded too.
In the Caux region of northern France, the expansion of cottage weaving and a rise in agricultural production did lead to an increase in work opportunities for women, although the price to be paid was the intensification of female labour. As technical changes shifted cottage spinning into small factories, hand spinners — the majority of whom had been female — were forced to find work in the mills.41 Women thus moved into the traditionally male job of weaving, but did not accrue any of the advantages of male employment. These women were paid less than men, they experienced problems in combining work with child care, and they lost the sense of female cameraderie which had characterised female spinners. Similarly, in the northern Italian silk-producing district of Como, where the silk industry existed side by side with agriculture, it was the women who worked in the silk factories, becoming proletarianised, whilst the men continued to farm. Thus women were exploited not only by factory owners, but by their husbands too.42 The family economy was a flexible system that could as easily subordinate women as place value on their labour.For another group of women, the emergence of wage-earning opportunities for men had some benefits. In Russia, in the years following peasant emancipation in 1861, the migration of more than 20 per cent of adult males to the industrial centres left villages dominated by women, children and the elderly. Migrants remained attached to their villages through marriage to local women, but they returned infrequently, and when they did so it was said they lived there ‘like guests', neither able nor willing to work. In these circumstances, the family economy was maintained by women's work around the farm and in cottage industry, and the men's injection of cash. When a woman married a man who worked elsewhere, it tied her still more closely to the soil and increased her burden of physical labour', writes Engel. ‘In “the woman's kingdom” even heavy agricultural labour... was conducted primarily, sometimes exclusively, by women.'43 In men’s absence, it was said that ‘women worked harder, but breathed more freely’.44 In the fishingfarming communities of Norway, the importance of the woman’s role was so important that she was often described as a female farmer rather than a farmer’s wife.45
The family economy did undergo shifts as women’s responsibilities adapted to structural transformations, but, in the main, woman’s work remained tied to the home in a number of ways. She carried out her work within the home or near it, and her earnings contributed to the household pot. And increasingly her labour was judged in terms of notions of appropriate womanly work defined by her domestic responsibilities. Ironically, whilst toiling in muddy fields was regarded as incompatible with a woman’s homemaking qualities, working as a sweated labourer under one’s own roof was acceptable. Home work, outwork, domestic industry or sweating, as such employment came to be called, was seen by women and by critics of women’s paid work outside the home as one way of squaring the circle, of contributing to the family economy whilst not visibly engaging in waged labour.