THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR
One of the key features of the European industrial economies was the sexual division of labour that characterised waged work. It is also one of the hardest to explain. Some scholars blame industrial capitalism, whilst others blame men, or rather, patriarchy based on gender.
Industrialisation did not create discriminatory labour markets. The employment of thousands of women in the textile industry, one of the most mechanised and technologically advanced of all industrial processes, demonstrates how a highly industrial, factory-based mode of production could successfully function using predominantly female labour. In this industry at least, there was no impediment to the employment of women in new jobs using machinery. Neither was it solely the hegemony of domestic ideology and the new construction of femininity that caused industrial labour to be divided into men's work and women's work. Women worked in mines until the 1840s in Britain, as hauliers pulling coal trucks through the underground shafts and in Cornwall's metalliferous mining industry, breaking lumps of rock with a sledgehammer. The tradition of employing family groups and the low wages paid to women miners offers a more convincing explanation for women undertaking such an ‘unwomanly' job.64It is in fact misleading to try to explain the sexual division of labour by adopting an either/or perspective: either capitalism was to blame, or patriarchy. Rather, it was a combination of the new tensions and insecurities of the industrial labour market and the appropriation of the middle-class ideology of separate spheres which resulted in an exacerbation of sexual conflict and a hardening of gender hierarchies (not just divisions), both within the workforce and within working-class culture. The late nineteenth century saw the culmination of a process of struggle during which working-class men had reacted to the new insecurities of the industrial economy by excluding other workers, including women, and by adopting a defensive consciousness based on the appropriation of skill and the breadwinner wage.
In this context, Anna Clark writes, ‘working-class culture was characterised by... a leisure culture of music-halls, betting, and drinking; moderate trade union activity; and a strict sexual division of labour both in the workplace and at home.'65 Men had become the new ‘aristocracy of labour', whose work opportunities, earnings, status and lifestyle separated them from women workers.In her influential book Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, published in 1919, Alice Clark argued that the rise of capitalism in Britain in the late seventeenth century resulted in a diminution of the woman's economic role: ‘it seems probable that the wife of the prosperous capitalist tended to become idle, the wife of the skilled journeyman lost her economic independence and became his unpaid domestic servant, while the wives of the wage-earners were drawn into the sweated industries of that period.'66 Clark's analysis implies that work opportunities for men and women were equal before the rise of industrial capitalism. Notwithstanding the relative freedom of women to engage in independent trade and a range of crafts, women's work has, for centuries, been bunched in particular occupations and their wage rates were generally lower than men's. For example, in London around 1700, the majority of women worked for a living but their working relationship with their menfolk was characterised more by competition than by harmony, with the majority engaged in occupations closely related to domestic tasks: charring, laundry, clothes-mending and making, and domestic service.67 So, there was continuity in the status of women's work but changes in the economy, and the resultant undermining of traditional male work practices and bonds led some male workers to experience insecurity, both on account of a perceived loss of skill and control of the work process, and because of employers' strategies to replace them with cheaper female labour. This was especially true of the early feminised textile industry where, in Germany as elsewhere, male workers ‘fought vigorously to define a place for themselves' and struggled to hold on to jobs against the attempts of employers to create a permanent core female workforce.68 The response was that ‘working men identified skill with manhood and sought to keep women out of the workplace.'69 In other words, the failure of the (male) working class to defend the interests of women workers was a result of a ‘construction of class that equated productivity and masculinity.'70 Women were seen as competitors, as auxiliary and subordinate workers, and defined primarily by the domestic sphere as expressed by one of the French workers' newspapers, LAtelier, in 1842: ‘If the salary of the male worker were generally sufficient for the keep of his family — as it should be — his wife would not be obliged to frequent the workshops.'71
It is this attempt by male workers to exclude women as competitors that appears to be a key feature of the industrial economy.
The overt exclusion of women from certain trades before the mid-eighteenth century was on the grounds that the work was not appropriate for women: it was too physical or would promote immorality, although men's desire to protect their privileged labour market status should not be forgotten either.72 In the industrial economy, although physical difference was still used as a means ofsex-typing jobs, or at least as a way of legitimating the practice, employers were just as likely to allocate tasks according to the perceived level of skill required and the degree of responsibility attached to a job. In Italian textile factories, sex was a factor in assigning tasks, but other factors such as the necessary or desirable qualities in a worker also determined who did what job. Hence the sorting and grading of wool in the Sella company of Piemonte was given to ‘clever' women, whilst the beating and washing of wool was a job for ‘robust' men. Carding, twisting and weaving was done by women in the daytime and men at night, whilst young men were required for finishing. However, across the industry as a whole, women were more likely to be employed in the preparatory stages of production and in weaving, whilst men were almost universally to be found in the central stages of the production and as supervisors.73Neither was mechanisation necessarily central to sex-typing, although it is probably true to say that men dominated machine work in all industries with the exception of textiles where predominantly female labour was employed to work power looms. So women did work with machines, not just in textiles but in a range of manufacturing industries, yet in general this did not result in a raising of their status and pay. Female machine operatives were normally supervised by men who, it was said, were more technically minded and, in Italy it was said, more efficient at surveillance than ‘humane’ women.74 Machinery was gendered, thus women were often restricted to machinery deemed suitable for female capabilities whilst men operated the larger, more powerful or more complex machinery.
In the French hosiery industry, the sexual division of labour practised by artisans whereby men appropriated the knitting frame and women were employed in the more marginal preparatory tasks ‘evolved out of custom, craft and convention.’ ‘In the transition from an artisan mode of production to an industrial one, the male knitter maintained his privileged position at the knitting frame, the most valorized and productive machine’. Women were set to work on labour-intensive, fragmented tasks which required those ubiquitous nimble fingers, good eyesight, patience and care.75 As factory production came to predominate, male workers benefited from extended training and apprenticeships whilst women were given only on-the-job training. And the mechanisation of women’s tasks — the seaming of knitted goods for example — resulted in a dilution of skill and the concomitant increasing productivity demands. In the paper industry, boys were preferred over girls, despite girls’ ‘nimble fingers’, because, it was said, ‘boys had more aptitude to manage machines and are better worth teaching, as they may grow up to be competent mechanics.’76 In the Edinburgh printing industry, mechanisation resulted in a downgrading of women’s work. There was no craft tradition behind some of the new mechanised jobs, thus they could be defined as unskilled with a wage rate to match — female work in other words. However, one new machine — the Linotype — was soon appropriated by ‘skilled workers’. ‘There was never any question of women working on the Linotype’, despite the fact that ‘the work required by the compositor is very little different from that required by a typewriter’. This machine was hot, noisy and a threat to hand typesetting whereas the Monotype could be operated by female compositors sitting at keyboards in a room adjacent to the noise and heat produced by the casting of type.77Skill was gendered. It was widely believed that men and women possessed different natural skills: women were dextrous, dainty, sharp-eyed and careful.
They were also, it was said, docile, better equipped to endure monotonous tasks, and willing to work hard. Men's skill, on the other hand, was defined by the type of work they undertook and the amount of training the job entailed. So, for women, definitions of their natural abilities circumscribed their work opportunities and ascribed a lesser value to the work they did, whereas for men the opposite was true. A nimble-fingered silk worker was expected to deploy her natural skills in her task, but work that came naturally was, perversely, ascribed a lower status. Male workers achieved skill through hard work and training or apprenticeships. Referring to female-dominated assembly work, de Groot and Schrover summarise the situation for women workers: ‘[assembly work] was perceived as light, clean, monotonous, and unskilled because women did it, and conversely women were perceived as the appropriate gender for the job because it was light, clean, monotonous and unskilled.'78 If the relationship between sex-typing and mechanisation is complex, then the division of labour according to attributions of skill is no less so. Feminist historians have long recognised that definitions of skill are ‘saturated with sexual bias... Far from being an objective economic fact, skill is often an ideological category imposed on certain types of work by virtue of the sex and power of the workers who perform it.'79 The construction of skill and the definition of certain tasks as skilled or unskilled is contingent upon a range of variables including: the pre-existence of craft traditions, the technology employed, notions of appropriate work for men and women, ideas about natural competence, competition within the labour market, the level of unionisation, and women's work and lifecycle.Whilst supervision is not conventionally defined as a skill, responsibility did increasingly become categorised as skilled work in mechanised sectors. Supervisory roles are seen as crucial to the efficient and cost-effective production process where mistakes or inferior work may compromise output and production quality, and where speed is crucial.
Conversely, labour-intensive jobs were often assigned to female workers and involved little control or responsibility. In such situations the supervisory positions invariably are assigned to male workers. In Dundee's jute industry, in which the workforce was three-quarters female, positions of authority were assumed by men.80 Similarly, in the German linen industry, also feminised with female workers comprising 76 per cent of the labour force by 1900, the remaining quarter comprising the supervisors, mechanics and office workers, were male. One of the consequences of this gender hierarchy of skill was the emergence of tensions between male and female workers in labour disputes. Male workers, who regarded themselves as skilled and therefore deserving of a higher status and wages than female operatives, not infrequently went on strike against the employment of women. The silk and velvet weavers of the lower Rhine region, desperate to preserve their identity as skilled workers in the face of mechanisation and the increasing employment of women, went on strike arguing, rather disingenuously, for higher wages and a ban on women's factory employment altogether.81Another explanation for the subordination of women within the industrial hierarchy was the appropriation of the ideology of separate spheres and domesticity by male workers and trade unions defending their jobs, employers justifying their hiring and employment practices, and also the state in support of protective legislation. Yet, if the ideal construction of femininity had influenced the sex-typing of jobs, then women would not have been permitted to work in the dirtiest, dangerous and most unfeminine of employments such as fish-gutting, mining, smelting and chainmaking. Rather, the exclusion of women from certain sectors of the industrial labour force suited the interests of workers and trade unionists who sought to maintain wage rates and, as a result, cultivate an aura of respectability which encompassed a wife at home, thus creating a reservoir of cheap and readily available female labour to be utilised by employers. The combination of an ideology that positioned women in the domestic sphere, and practices which excluded women from the acquisition of skill, resulted in women becoming a ‘glut on the urban labour market', a ‘reserve army of labour'. Women were not excluded from the labour force but they were marginalised. Changing labour organisation then, was not the cause of these gender hierarchies; rather it was a combination of shifting ideas about masculinity and femininity and a changing occupational structure which reaffirmed rather than created the hierarchical economic order.
The introduction of protective legislation was both a contributor to and a consequence of the sexual division of labour in industry. Restrictions on the number of hours worked by women, the banning of female night work, and the imposition of health and safety standards, were all introduced on the principle that women were a different category of workers from men. By 1900, most European states had enacted legislation that raised the minimum age of a worker to around 13, and had imposed a maximum length of the working day of up to 12 hours. There were also laws restricting women's employment in jobs defined as dangerous. The 1892 Labour Law in France stated that ‘Work of a hazardous nature, beyond the strength, or dangerous to morality,... will be forbidden to women, girls and children.'82 As a result women were banned from a large number of trades, mainly those which used dangerous chemicals such as lead and mercury or which produced unstable substances, owing to the likelihood of ‘deleterious vapours, noxious emanations or possible poisoning'.83 The result was the restriction of women's work in what came to be seen as male occupations and the facilitation of it in occupations identified as feminine. Thus, protective legislation acted as a bulwark to labour market segmentation. As Stewart argues, ‘Notions about women's reproductive role provided ideological support for this distribution of occupations as well as for sex-specific labour legislation. In turn such legislation raised expectations about women's domestic responsibilities and reinforced the assignment of occupations by gender.'84
The arguments of protective legislation campaigners were informed more by accounts of immorality in the workplace and the damage done to women's fitness for domesticity and reproduction, than by a humanitarian concern for working women's health and welfare. The example of mining is the most illuminating in this regard. When a British government commission investigated the plight of women in the mines they were not overly concerned about the physical demands of the work. Rather, they focused on the potential for immoral behaviour underground, the indecent clothing of the male and female workers, and the unfeminine appearance of female miners. In 1881, a visitor to a Cornish copper mine was shocked at the sight of a ‘bal maiden' (female mineworker), shovelling ore into a cart working ‘with the vigour of a young man'. ‘Her petticoats were stained with the hue of the copper ore; her shapeless legs... muffled up in woollen wraps' so that he was unsure of her sex.85 ‘Legislators' increasing fascination with working women's sexuality and their fears about gender role reversal were provoked more by the growing social crisis... than by the actual conditions under which women laboured in the mines and factories.'86 Nevertheless, almost all west European states, with the exception of Belgium, banned female minework. By 1900 in Britain, France, Germany and Russia, the social question was defined by concerns about the family, about infant mortality and thus women's reproductive and maternal role.87 In Germany the bodies of female textile workers were made analogous with the body of the family and the body of the nation. Factory work destroyed the family by destroying women who were the lynchpin of the domestic unit. Thus the 1891 German labour code extended lunch breaks and reduced women's working hours on Saturdays ‘to give the gainfully employed woman more time in the day to learn and perform her crucial household tasks.'88 Similarly, in France, fears of depopulation and degeneration of the race were centred on working women. Women were identified, first and foremost, as mothers and housekeepers, not as workers, and thus legislation restricting women's working hours helped to create a dichotomy between the dependant mother and the working woman.
Protective legislation served to amplify and solidify a pre-existing sexual division of labour. In singling out women as in need of special treatment, reformers, employers and the state bolstered the ideal of the patriarchal family. The restrictive labour laws also had negative side-effects. Many women were forced to find work in the unregulated sectors where they would invariably work longer hours for less pay. The failure to compensate women for the wages or work lost by paying their husbands higher wages meant that the rhetoric about women's valued role as housewives and mothers was empty. There was never any serious proposal to prohibit women from working outside the home — although in Germany some did campaign for the banning of married women from factory work. Instead, as Stewart remarks, ‘legislators limited women's working hours outside the home to facilitate a dual role as nearly full-time wage-earners and part-time housewives.'89