WOMEN'S WORK IDENTITIES

Almost all women of the working classes engaged in some form of employ­ment outside the home for some or most of their lives, but still they were identified in discourse as primarily wives, housewives and mothers.

It is easy to interpret women as victims of the twin forces of patriarchy and capitalism in the workplace, and it is easily assumed that they were unlikely to develop a workplace consciousness or a work identity. Early factory employers commonly employed paternalistic strategies whereby the factory was envisaged as a family incorporating gender and status inequalit­ies. Within this hierarchy women workers were subjected to disciplining and were the recipients of welfare measures. The Courtaulds silk mill in Essex, England, combined both carrot and stick tactics: ‘immoral behaviour' could lose a women her job; women with illegitimate children were discriminated against in the allocation of company housing; at all times Courtauld's female employees were expected to conduct themselves in a respectable manner.

Work identity and pride is more often associated with skilled occupations, only attained through a period of lengthy training or apprenticeship. Since most women worked in jobs defined as unskilled, and owing to women's interrupted working lives and the fact that much of women's work took place at home, it may be assumed that the kinds of work identities demon­strated by men were not present amongst the female workforce. As Canning argues, ‘an ethic of work had no place in the popular image of the female worker'.⁹⁴ Yet, it is time to abandon the assumption that women's work identities were constituted solely or primarily by their domestic role. In her study of German textile workers, Kathleen Canning argues that: ‘pivotal in imagining how women formed work identities is the development of Berufsethos (work ethic), a process by which they came to identify with their jobs, feeling pride in the products of their labour and forming bonds or “shared dispositions” with fellow workers based on common fears, aspira­tions, interests and loyalties.'⁹⁵

There is plenty of evidence to support this assertion. According to the observations of Minna Wettstein-Adelt, a German social reformer who disguised herself as a worker in a weaving mill: ‘Many of these girls work enthusiastically, especially those who follow the completion of a whole piece, like those who weave smaller rugs or single fitted curtains. They love their machines, as one loves a loyal dog. They clean them until they shine and decorate them with colourful ribbons, holy cards, and other trinkets.'⁹⁶ Similarly, women in the mills and factories of central Scotland had a pride in their machinery.

Women’s attachment to their jobs also developed out of the sociability that characterised female-dominated workplaces. In some factory towns the level of friendship amongst workers was already high as the women all started work together after leaving school, and this continued as they learned the job, got married, had children and returned to work for the money and the desire for sociable contact. Social life on the job took the form of singing, dancing, joking and gossiping; and these bonding activities helped to create a sense of collective identity amongst women as workers which did spill over into collective action. These ‘fluid boundaries between factory and family’ were reflected in women’s work conflicts with employers and with male workers.¹⁰⁰

The tobacco industry in Spain and France provides a good example of how a female-dominated workplace could lead to strong female work iden­tities and to collective action.

Early industrial action by women workers was often characterised as spontaneous, impulsive and disorganised, the implication being that women lacked effective organisation and were liable to damage the more rational, male union-led disputes.

I addressed them from a stump, telling them that... if they really wanted to go on strike, they should demand more than just my reinstatement. What we should demand, we didn't really know, but strike we would... [The] demands for a reduc­tion of working hours from 12 to 10 and my reinstatement were rejected [by the factory owners]. Because of the great heat in the work rooms, the women stood about half dressed and went barefoot, but at a moment's notice, they all left the factory... The first meeting was promptly held in the afternoon on the Meidling meadowlands. The work force of three other factories also joined us, and after a few days about 700 women were on strike. It caused sensation, this being the first women's strike [in Vienna], and the bourgeois press took notice of it, complaining that now women workers also were being ‘incited'. ¹⁰⁵

The manifestation of women's protest may have differed from the models chosen by men, yet female action was similarly shaped by their experience of work and their understanding of the relationship between production and reproduction, workplace and family. The majority of disputes involving female workers, as for male, concerned wages. In the Milan textile factories, women's wages were around only one-third of male rates, a situation account­ing for women strikers outnumbering men in textile strikes in the 1890s.¹⁰⁶ But it is in disputes over hours and conditions that we see the blurring of the boundary between public and private. In 1880 in St Petersburg, women workers demanded that nursing mothers be allowed to nurse their babies at work twice a day for nine months instead of six and, in 1895 in the same city, women workers in a cigarette factory walked out complaining about the bosses' behaviour as well as new rates of pay.¹⁰⁷ During the industrial unrest of 1905 in Russia, women made numerous demands including the right to a half-day off so that they could do their laundry.¹⁰⁸ In Milan in 1894, seamstresses went on strike complaining about the abusive behaviour of the foremen.¹⁰⁹ In the Saxon town of Crimmitschau, female textile workers mobilised to demand improvements in facilities such as separate toilet and changing rooms for women. Also in this textile town in 1903, the struggle by male and female workers to achieve the ten-hour day incorporated the needs of female employees by demanding a wage rise to compensate for the shorter working day.

Finally, the manner in which women conducted disputes in this period of low female trade union membership contrasted with the more sober strategies adopted by male-dominated labour unions. Women's disputes were often conducted in a carnival-like atmosphere. In Dundee the women refused to confine their negotiations to within the factory gates and took their campaign to the streets. ‘Those on strike today paraded the streets in grotesque processions, bearing emblems of their trade, suspended from poles, such as mats, jugs etc', reported one newspaper. ‘They also indulged in shouting and singing... Besides this they held threatening demonstrations in front of the works where nobody had turned out.'¹¹² On other occasions they marched through the streets bearing mocking effigies of employers. In French pit villages the wives of striking miners confronted scabs and humiliated them by removing their trousers and spanking them. And they disarmed police and troops dispatched to control their protests by handing them flowers and even lifting their skirts. ¹¹³ German women strikers often took to the streets, ‘parading’ past the windows of mill owners' homes, ‘shopping basket in arm and knitting in hand’. For this they were described as ‘impertinent’ and ‘worse than the men’.¹¹⁴ In London and the Black Country in the early 1900s, women strikers produced leaflets, badges and ribbons reminiscent of the contemporaneous suffrage campaign, to draw attention to their struggle.

Perhaps women were drawn to this form of protest by the hierarchical and antagonistic nature of gender relations on the shopfloor between male super­visors and female workers. Ridiculing their bosses and celebrating a female work culture was a sign of strength. In Russian factories, female workers were subjected to degrading treatment at the hands of foremen and male workers. ‘Flirting, pinching, innuendo, abuse and bad language are in abundance’, com­plained one factory worker in 1905. Others complained of sexual abuse which occurred under the pretence of searches to prevent theft.¹¹⁵ The behaviour of women strikers in public, their possession of the streets, their attempts to humiliate their bosses by the use of jokes and insults, suggests not only an expression of female sociability but also that they were taking the opportunity to turn the world upside-down, to overturn the gender hierarchy that ruled their working lives. As Gordon says, ‘by using ridicule, embarrassment and sexual impropriety, they turned sexual divisions into an effective weapon which left the victims of their badinage emasculated and without redress.’¹¹⁶ Like most appropriations of the symbolism of carnival, however, it was not a route to fundamental change. The gender hierarchy was firmly entrenched in industry through a widespread acceptance of the discursive construction of women as wives and mothers. It was left to women to negotiate the boundaries between factory work and home work in ways that accepted and celebrated work identity whilst building upon shared experiences as women.

Women’s grievances at work were more likely to be expressed in these informal ways than through trade unions for most of the century. It is hard to know precisely what proportion of women did join a trade union but we can say that only a minority embraced collective bargaining by the First World War. Probably less than 10 per cent of the European female workforce was unionised by 1914, but in some states the proportion is likely to have been much lower.¹¹⁷ In Germany the figure of more than 255,000 unionised women in 1912 sounds impressive but this accounted for just 7 per cent of women in the non-agricultural labour force.¹¹⁸ The 90,000 French women who belonged to a trade union at this time were in an even smaller minority of 1.2 per cent although they accounted for around 10 per cent of all unionised workers. Russian women were no more eager to embrace the union move­ment, with just 4.4 per cent of Moscow women workers unionised in 1907.¹¹⁹ In the female-dominated textile industry, membership was stronger. In Germany, women constituted 36 per cent of members of the Social Demo­cratic Textile Union in 1907.¹²⁰ In Britain there were 154,000 female trade union members in 1900 — just 3.2 per cent of the workforce — but this figure did increase quite significantly in the decade before the war so that by 1914 around 8 per cent of women workers were unionised.¹²¹ By the beginning of the twentieth century, though, working women were beginning to realise the disadvantages of their labour market status and the benefits of collect­ive bargaining, the English union organiser Mary MacArthur commenting: ‘Women are badly paid and badly treated because they are not organised, and they are not organised because they are badly paid and badly treated.'¹²²

There was little incentive for most women to join a trade union. Few had either the time to attend meetings or the money to pay union dues. A few unions discriminated in favour of women members by offering them lower membership rates, but these paid out lower strike benefits to women than their male co-workers.¹²³ The majority of female workers, many of them domestic servants and home-workers, worked in sectors where there were no unions. Nineteenth-century unions were factory-based, geared primarily to men's employment patterns and concerned with job security and advance­ment, training and apprenticeships and, of course, the maintenance of the family or breadwinner wage. Moreover, many of the early trade unions were overtly hostile to women workers, regarding them as competitors rather than comrades. They were suspicious, too, of women's apparent indiscipline. Many male trade unions simply did not trust women to act in the interests of all workers, women and men. Male-dominated unions experienced difficulty penetrating women's work culture and in turn, female textile workers, unim­pressed by the unions' failure to represent their needs, resorted to strategies which challenged the factory system and male bargaining traditions. Women were not underrepresented in unions because they had been socialised to be submissive, as one English female union organiser argued; rather, they frequently regarded the unions as part of the structure of industry which could not acknowledge women's identity as workers. ‘Comrades! When will you understand that you are working not with a woman but with a person just like yourself?' exclaimed a Russian typesetter in 1914. ‘Only when you learn to see that the woman is the same kind of worker as yourself will you really be able to organise.'¹²⁴

Towards the end of the century, however, male unions began to recognise women as workers and some even began to support the principle of equal rights. In Russia, a number of unions, including the St Petersburg Textile Union, supported equal pay — presumably on the basis that cheap female labour undercut men doing the same jobs — and some, recognising women's double burden, even established child-care facilities.¹²⁵ At the same time, women began to organise themselves in unions modelled on those of their male comrades, and in Leagues and other cooperative organisations. In Italy, for example, in response to state legislation limiting the hours women could work, women in the clothing trades, ‘being touched to the heart by the enchanting words “brotherhood” and “solidarity”', organised themselves into a union in 1903 and wrote to their unionised sisters in England for sup­port and information. ‘Our union will base its aspirations on the evidence of your conditions; it will know how to fight and win.'¹²⁶ Unfortunately, women workers would have to wait until the end of the twentieth century before governments enacted equal pay and equal opportunities legislation. Women's struggle to be recognised as workers was long and hard.