WORKING AT HOME
Artificial flowers, umbrellas, Christmas crackers, sweets, bonnets and gloves, tassels and feather adornments, corsets, lacework, embroidery, knitted goods, shoes, clothing and all manner of tailored items.
These products were commonly manufactured by women in their own homes for very poor wages. These were the new home industries of the industrial revolution, dominated by married women making the new consumer or luxury goods for the middle classes for very little money. The flowers and feathers worn in extravagant hats to the opera, the pretty umbrellas, the dainty gloves, the embroidered handkerchiefs, as well as the cigars and cigarettes smoked by a lady’s male escort, were manufactured in working-class homes, especially in the metropolitan cities — Paris, London, Berlin, Milan — and ended up for sale in the new department stores.46For so long a hidden area of women’s employment, ignored by the census-takers and literally concealed in back kitchens, attics and basements, home work is acknowledged as representing women’s archetypal position in the labour market. Its chief characteristics — casual or seasonal, unskilled, repetitive, poorly paid and unregulated — are features replicated in the wider picture of women’s work in nineteenth-century Europe. In rural parts of Europe, women had traditionally turned to home work in the winter months, undertaking straw-plaiting, ribbon-weaving and even chainmaking when farm work was slack. But home work did not represent a transitional stage between the agrarian and industrial economy. It was not a remnant of a pre-industrial economy. It was central to industrial society. As production moved into mechanised factories and as manufacture was subdivided into a number of separate processes, much of the more labour-intensive, manual and unskilled work was farmed out to home-workers. An apocryphal example is that of needlemaking in Worcestershire which, it was said, involved more than 100 people in their homes to complete the finished product.47 In Britain, Germany and Italy, as certain industries became increasingly feminised, there was a simultaneous expansion of home work too.
In the clothing industry in particular, the association of sewing and the handicraft trades with women, the limited outlay required, and the flexible nature of this kind of work meant that thousands of women formed what were known as the ‘sweated’ trades. In Berlin, more than 100,000 in 1906 were employed at home in the clothing industry alone.48 In Milan there were more than 30,000 garment workers in the city in 1881. Most of these women worked at home; others were employed in small workshops making dresses and suits, hats, gloves, furs and lace goods; all supplied for the new department stores run by the Bocconi brothers’ garment company.49 Home production allowed the coexistence of industrialisation and separate spheres ideology. It reinforced the idea of woman as homemaker and nurturer, and man as breadwinner, whilst at the same time allowing employers to keep capital and wage costs low. There is merit in what Maxine Berg says, that women (and children) working at home contributed significantly to industrial expansion and to the productivity gain associated with the technologically advanced sectors. At the same time they lifted their families out of destitution, hence fuelling demand for consumer goods.50Domestic industry suited employers. Home-workers were used because they were cheap and flexible. They were paid piece rates, there were no overheads for the employers — workers commonly had to provide their own tools and other necessary items such as thread or glue — and workers could be called upon at any time to complete an order or be laid off when demand was slack. Employers’ responsibilities towards their workforce were few, limited to ‘his frequently doling out work as people dole out indiscriminate charity, and in his desire to have a reserve army of labour, which costs nothing for upkeep, and which he can count on for a few hours, a few days, or weeks as it suits his convenience.’51 One Glasgow industrialist commented that homeworkers ‘do not add to capital expenditure...
and do not make inroads on space’.52 The vagaries of the fashion market in Paris meant that employers were reluctant to invest in machinery; it was cheaper to shift the costs and the insecurity on to the workers.53 And with the introduction of the small, handoperated sewing machine by the Singer Company in the 1850s, clothing manufacturers saw an opportunity to produce machine-worked goods faster and more cheaply. The Singer machines were explicitly marketed to women and designed as a decorative piece of furniture in order to help deflect criticism away from the association of women with technology. Around 20,000 of these machines were sold in France every year during the 1870s and 1880s, many of them to individual workers on a payment by instalment basis, since few working-class women could have afforded to buy one outright. Thus, women home-workers were easily locked into a system of credit, low wages and long hours to pay off the debt. However, for some women the purchase of a machine gave them greater freedom to work for whomever they wished, including wealthy private clients, liberating them from the crushing production line of the major clothing manufacturers.54For the home-worker, though, there were few obvious advantages of such employment. The proposition that home work fitted in with a married woman's family and household responsibilities can hardly be supported. Home-workers frequently worked such long hours, sometimes late into the night, in order to complete an order or earn sufficient to make a small profit, that the work dominated home life, making a mockery of those who argued that home work complemented a woman's domestic role. On the contrary, home-workers had to manage their child care and housework to fit in with wage earning, not the other way around. The nature of the work meant that homes became workshops, dominated by the atmosphere, the smell and the accoutrements of work. And the fact that many women were forced to make use of the labour of their own children within the home made a nonsense of the argument that home work fitted in with child care.
As Sonya Rose points out, for England, ‘domestic responsibilities were given short shrift when they competed with activities that could put food on the table.'55 Paperbag making seemed particularly suited to child labour, with one German autobiographer recalling rising at six, ‘then we would glue until five or six minutes before eight o'clock, in order to be able to get to school by eight... In the evening we had to work until our assigned quota [which might be several thousand bags] was finished.'56 Similarly, in London, one investigator described ‘case after case of little match-box makers working habitually from the time that school closes till eleven, or even midnight; of little artificial flower makers beginning to twist green paper round the wire stems at five a.m., and toiling through the long weary day in a small, filthy attic.'57Home work was accepted when there was no feasible alternative. It was work to keep body and soul together, not a lifestyle choice. Some examples will serve to illustrate the unenviable position of the nineteenth-century home-worker. Henry Mayhew, on his travels around London in 1850, came upon a woman living over a coal shed who made shirts for between 2d and 3d each whilst having to provide her own thread, working from six in the morning until nine at night and living on little more than dry bread and weak coffee. On the Shetland Islands women engaged in hand-knitting, just about the only form of home work available in that part of the world, in order to stave off destitution. They were paid not in cash but in kind — the hated barter-truck system by which they received fish, corn or hardware goods at a poor rate of exchange for their knitwear. This kind of system exploited women's traditional skills whilst denying them an independent existence. As one hand-knitter remarked in 1872: ‘Knitting does very well in Lerwick for those that have friends to live with and keep them, but not for me when I had to look after myself.'58 Berlin garment workers, many of whom either purchased or rented sewing machines, still had to work up to twelve hours a day and sometimes more, in order to make a living.59 Employers invariably assumed women home-workers were earning a subsidiary wage — ‘pin money'.
Home work was little more than ‘the best alternative to destitution'.60Home work was the logical consequence of the ideological embrace by employers, trade unions and workers, of the breadwinner wage. Breadwinning was a male occupation in the eyes of employers and the state; mothering was self-evidently female. Yet few working families could sustain this division of labour. Only a minority of men earned enough to be considered the sole provider in their families, hence women's home work was a crucial element of the early industrial household economy. It was resorted to most often by widows, and by married women who were prevented from finding a job outside the home because of their child care responsibilities or the absence of suitable work for women. In Nottingham, a city dominated by the lace and hosiery trades, where home work was relatively easy to come by, it was the wives of casual workers, mothers with large numbers of young children, and widowed mothers who resorted to working from home, often lace-finishing or seaming.61 Nevertheless, home work was often preferred to work outside the home for good economic reasons. There were savings to be made from working at home. According to one home worker, women who worked in a factory had to ‘pay for washing to be done and must buy tinned meats. If they stay at home they can do their own housework and their own shopping; and can better care for their children.'62
By the end of the century, home work became a symbolic battlefield precisely because of its status as neither housework nor factory labour. Although conservatives often saw the home as the preferred production locale, since it allowed women to stay within their ‘natural place' and care for their children, this romantic vision of Industrie de famille, harking back to a mythical family economy, was regarded by others as a regrettable development. For one British critic, the very future of the race depended on the removal of women from waged work, and especially the displacement of this work from the sanctity of the home.
‘The value of maintaining a high standard in the home life of our people can hardly be averted, for upon it depends not only the present, but also the future of our race,' argued the trade unionist Clementina Black (1853—1922) in 1907. ‘But these poor creatures have no time to attend to the pure, tender delight of motherhood, or the many little duties which cluster around that word so sweet to the English ears — “home”.'63 The home-workers themselves were trapped. When the National Home Workers League was formed in England, not to protest against the deplorable conditions under which home-workers laboured, but to campaign against proposed legislation which threatened to place restrictions on home work, many women joined in the knowledge that limits on hours would prevent them from earning a living.Industrial home work was not a continuation of women's domestic labour; it was something qualitatively different. It was work specially created and defined by employers for women. From the outset, most types of home work were defined as unskilled, earnings were low as befitted a subsidiary wage, and as long as employers, trade unionists, male workers and the state told married women that waged work and work outside the home were incompatible, women were forced to work at home. Moreover, the continued association of woman with home had broader implications for women's position within the labour market as a whole, influencing what kinds of work they did, how much they earned and how their work was valued.