Work and Industrialisation

Overview

• Context• Debates about gender and work• Agriculture• Proto-industrialisation• Industrial revolution• Conclusion

Importance• Inequality persists

– 42% of UK workers and 55% graduates are female.– Just 22% MP’s, 20% Professors, 6% FTSE Exec’s, 3% Chairpersons are female.– Over career women earn £140,000 less than men.

• Political subject:– Impact on motherhood– Female capability– Unemployed men

• Employment=Emancipation?– Tilly: wage labour and suffrage.

Context

• Work is a political subject eg. how work impinges on motherhood/whether cheap female or child labour causes male unemployment/ability of women to perform certain tasks

• Much of the history of women’s work has been written from a male perspective

• Problem of sources• Status of women’s work

Debates about gender and work• ‘Golden age’ that evaporated under the new work organisation of the

industrial revolution.• Continuity: Bennett focused on radical feminist theories which

emphasise patriarchal continuities in women’s history, gender relations and women’s oppression: ‘women’s work changed over these centuries but was not transformed.’

• Supported by Katrina Honeyman and Jordan Goodman who emphasise patriarchy

• Bridget Hill countered arguing that a concentration on patriarchy focuses more on men than women

• Bennett, Honeyman and Jordan reacting to body of literature from that women experienced a ‘Golden age’ of (largely agricultural) work in the pre-industrial past.

Debates about gender and work• Optimistic vision - Ivy Pinchbeck in 1930. Women’s position was in the

long term improved by industrialisation• Areas of women’s work Pinchbeck chose not to detail: ‘domestic servants,

dressmakers, milliners, slop sewers, framework knitters and boot and shoe makers’ have provided the focus of much recent scholarship.

• Recent work more nuanced using cultural and sociological as well as economic approaches.

• De Vries has developed the concept of a demand led ‘industrious revolution’ suggesting that work effort was intensified by the use of more child and female labour.

• Were some growth areas for women such as agricultural services, potteries and metalware, at the same time some women fell victim to a labour surplus economy. Specialisation created opportunities for some women whilst denying them to others.

Agriculture• Women always played an indispensable role in subsistence agriculture • With the increasing specialisation of agriculture greater occupational

specialisation occurred and was predominantly confined to men. • Snell has stressed that the marked decline in female participation in

harvest labour in the south east of England was associated with the innovation of mowing across a range of cereals

• Casual labourers undertook some of the routine ‘female’ tasks • Decline of common land exacerbated female unemployment • Fall in demand for female labour and the steady drop in female wages

helped transition from the family economy (where all members of the family contributed to its total income) to a family's dependence upon the wage of a male breadwinner

Eighteenth-century agriculture

Male/Female wages in Agriculture

Yorks (1

770)

Herts (1

789)

Warks (1

797)

Oxon (1

807)

Cumberland (1

833)

Essex (

1833)

Worceste

r (1838)

0

5

1015

20

25

30

Chart Title

Female wage (per day)Male wage (per day)

d pe

r day

Proto-industrialisation• Proto-industry widened opportunities for women’s work and may

have developed partly as a response to the changes in agriculture and the declining opportunities for women.

• Berg argues that debates about the speed and intensity of Britain’s industrial revolution have largely ignored the question of women’s work . High proportion of the workforce in the dynamic industries ie textiles, potteries and to a lesser extent the metal trades were female. Lacemaking was an exclusively female trade. In Colyton in Devon Pam Sharpe has found that 4000 women were employed in the industry, occupying 21% of the population of the town.

• Thus industrial revolution supported by largely female workforce. Reasons: cheap labour or organisational and technological attributes of a women’s workforce.?

Workers in the Cotton Industry by Age and Gender, 1833

Manchester Lancashire Scotland0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Male 8-13Female 8-13Male 14-17Female 14-17Male 18+Female 18+

Age-Sex ratio in the Birmingham Metal Trades

Men Boys Women Girls0.00

10.00

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

60.00

70.00

80.00

18411851

Women’s/Men’s Wages 1760-70

Pottery (Staffs)

Calico (Lancs)

Spinning (Lancs)

Metal (Birmingham)

Lace (Beds)

Service (Notts)

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Female AverageMale Average

Shillings per week

Proto-industrialisation• Women and children were key workforce to be targeted

with any novelty in manufacturing methods. Machines and processes were invented with this workforce in mind.

• Belief was that women and girls had a greater natural aptitude for the manual dexterity and fine motor skills required and were more amenable to division of labour

• Presented technologies in terms of female and child labour they would employ rather than the male labour they would save.

• Technological change produced a reworking of the sexual division of labour.

Industrialisation• Industrialisation brought about a separation of home and work.

Industrialisation diminished women’s roles in economic production by drastically curtailing the role of the family as a market production unit.

• Marxist and feminist writers argue that it was specifically the rise of industrial capitalism which created the conditions for the increasing oppression of women.

• Alternative thesis centres on ability of women to enter the labour market as independent wage earners. Both explanations assume that women’s work and female subordination differed markedly in the pre-industrial era from what was to follow.

Industrialisation• Census data provides contradictory evidence about the impact of industrialisation on

women’s work. Recorded female work remained low in the nineteenth century and changes in occupational segregation were modest.

• The census of 1851 revealed a low rate of female labour force participation with approx. 2.8 million working women (25% of all adult women). Women remained concentrated in a few occupations that frequently revealed affinities to housework or simply represented extended housework. In Britain 35% of women were employed as domestic servants; 20% as textile workers and 15% as garment workers. There would appear to have been a sharp and persistent occupational segregation along the gender divide.

• Greater emphasis on the role of single women• Reflected in growing dominance of a bourgeois family model in which the breadwinner

was the husband and the wife and children were dependants. • Increased pressure from the organised labour movement for a ‘family wage’. • Campaign tended to drive married women out of industrial employment and increased

their marginalisation within the labour force as a whole.

Factory workers by age and gender, 1834

Wages for factory workers, 1833

Wife's earnings as Percentage of husband's earnings, 1787-1863

Year All Households

% Women Working

% Women not earning

Sample size

1787-96 12.10 16.70 28 160

1834-38 22.70 38.30 41 118

1840-44 9.80 29.10 66 83

1863 6.60 29.00 73 88

Flax heckling, Leeds 1830s

Textile factory

Workers in a clothing factory (early 20th century) showing strict gender separation and specialisation of tasks

Specialisation and gender segregation in the pottery industry

Conclusion• No clear answer to the optimistic/pessimistic debate about the

effect of the economic changes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on gender relations.

• Both women's and men's work patterns changed dramatically over the period but whether this was a transition from a golden age to a nightmarish dystopia is more difficult to ascertain

• More nuanced approach important and it is impossible to speak of a national trend.

• Local factors were vitally important, as was the status of the women concerned: whether they were married, single, or widowed.

• Importance of new techniques and technological change from industry to industry must be evaluated.