The economic role of middle-class women in Victorian Glasgow

Abstract

It has long been recognised that working-class women in the nineteenth century participated in waged labour, albeit dependent on marital status, stage in family life cycle, and locality. Middle-class women's economic role has been less fully explored, although it has been acknowledged that they played an informal, ‘hidden’ role in the economy. This article examines the extent of middle-class women's economic activity and independence by looking in detail at a residential area of Glasgow in the period 1850-1914. The authors demonstrate that women could negotiate the parameters of a gendered and limited labour market, the legal constraints on their property rights, and social constraints on their economic freedom, in order to achieve considerable economic autonomy and influence     

Unemployed women in inter-war Britain: the case of the Lancashire weaving district 1

Abstract

Women made up a high proportion of the inter-war workforce of the Lancashire weaving district but were concentrated in a cotton industry seriously affected by a collapse in exports. Consequently, in contrast with national experience, they had higher levels of recorded unemployment than men. Exceptionally high levels among married women led to suggestions that many such applicants for benefit were manipulating unemployment insurance regulations. However, evidence suggests that this resulted from difficulties in re-entering a tight labour market after necessary withdrawal, reinforced by employer and trade union practice and discriminatory social policies. Moreover, all women suffered from limited local diversification of women's employment opportunity while multi-income domestic economies inhibited migration.     

Women,Money and Debt: Notes for a Feminist Reappropriation Movement

ABSTRACT

What are the consequences and implications for women of the imperative of waged work and the rolling back of welfare provisions? In this article Silvia Federici charts how the consequences have not only been increases in unpaid labour but also a financialisation of social reproduction. These phenomena have turned every aspect of daily reproduction into a means of capital accumulation and led to a significant increase in women’s debt. In a world where finance has become a dominant force, Federici argues that the economic situation that women face demands a rethink of the ‘right to work’ strategy that mainstream feminists have embraced in the pursuit of economic autonomy. This is so not least because the quest for autonomy has been turned into an engine for the production of a large female underclass for whom dependence on men has been replaced by dependence on banks.     

Gender constructions and gender relations in cotton and chain-making in England: a contested and varied terrain

Abstract

While scholars have emphasised the positioning of women as wives and mothers in working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England, their position in the workforce remained significant, even in such disparate industries as cotton and chain-making. In the former, while excluded from spinning, women's employment in powerloom weaving brought them into the heart of the production process, encouraging their participation in workplace struggles and ultimately influencing a transformation in the working-class family in terms of fertility control. In chain-making, while some male workers attempted to position women in the domestic sphere, others were dependent on their labour. Cultural constructions of gender were thus undermined, as the struggle for the minimum wage superseded attempts to remove women from the workforce. In neither industry was equality between men and women realised, while antagonism on the basis of gender persisted. Yet women's identification with their work remained evident while mutuality across gender lines was also apparent, as women themselves played an active role in the shaping of gender relations. Conceptions of gender, as they intersected with particular labour market structures, thus came under duress. Consequently, a more complex picture of gender in working-class life emerges than an analysis which privileges cultural constructions would allow.     

The position of women in the Hungarian labour market after the regime change

Abstract

This paper examines changes in the position of Hungarian women in the labor market since 1989, arguing that women are disadvantaged in a competitive market because of specific features in their social position and their lack of means of defending their interests. Drawing on surveys and other government statistics, women are compared with men in terms of unemployment, their opportunity to do wage work, returns to schooling (which are low, and women are more likely to possess formal educational qualifications), mobility, wage and income differences, and the consequences of sex segregation of jobs. In response to unfavorable economic conditions, households have increased domestic work and decreased consumption. Financial problems are damaging family relations, according to recent surveys.     

Feminism,imperialism and race: a dialogue between India and Britain

Abstract

During the partition period and up to 1918, Polish women's interests and aspirations outside the family were in increasingly frequent cases directed to taking up paid work and resorting to other measures in order to sustain their family. In other cases women's activity was shaped by experiences of resistance to national and sometimes also religious discrimination. In the early twentieth century only small groups of women put forward demands for equality, and even if they did so, they usually thought that this would be possible only after the rebirth of an independent foolish state. It is to this supreme aim that they subordinated their interest and their struggle for equality.     

Women's right to work: The interplay of state,market and women's agency

This article addresses questions central to the conception of women's citizenship: Do women have the same right to wage work as men have? That is, do women have the same access to and chances to keep jobs as men? Is women's right to employment perceived as an individual right, disconnected from men's traditional prerogative to hold jobs as breadwinners? Women's right to work is conceptualized as a complex structural and ideological construct, shaped by the interplay of the labour market, welfare state and women's agency. The empirical analysis takes one of the Scandinavian welfare states, Norway, as its main case. The study concludes that women's individual right to work was significantly strengthened from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.     

Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work–Life Balance Law

Abstract

This article attempts to crack open the temporal assumptions in the goal of ‘balancing’ work and family, as it is mobilised in UK law. Within studies of gender and labour, ‘balance’, as a concept and a politico-legal objective, is worthy of much more scholarly attention than it has received to date. In the UK context, balance is understood as a means of achieving equilibrium, both at the level of the labour market and within the context of unpaid care. Specifically, mobilising the short horizon of a ‘reckonable present’, balance creates a paradigm or topos through which dilemmas of value and care can be played out and resolved. The specific qualities of the UK's right to request flexible work, for its part, indicate that law's temporal qualities can have specific regulatory functions, shifting scale and reframing responsibilities. By looking closely at legal technicalities, we can discern much about the conceptual logic that affects many of us through influential regulatory strategies. The political imperative of analysing work–life balance might, in this way, require us to return not only to time, but also, strangely, to legal form.     

Female education and full-time employment in Guinea: an ambiguous relationship

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the direct and indirect effects of female education on full-time labour market employment using Guinean demographic and health surveys. It addresses potential endogeneity of female education, unobserved heterogeneity and sample selectivity concerns using the control function model and a non-self-cluster identification strategy. Results show that female education has a diminishing direct effect on full-time employment, with the inverted-U-shaped relationship portraying that women with seven-plus years of schooling are less likely to be regularly employed than their counterparts with less years of schooling. Interacting female education and its square with the corresponding reduced form residuals increase the probability of full-time labour market employment – an indication that female education and unobserved correlates are complementary. Thus, highly educated Guinea women do not increase their full-time market engagements – a pointer of the importance they may be attributing to home-produced goods and services that push them to perhaps prefer flexi-work arrangements such as occasional or seasonal market engagements.     

Field-faring women: the resistance of women who worked in the fields of nineteenth-century England

In nineteenth-century England, women worked on farms at many different tasks. They frequently did laborious, repetitive work in the fields. In the 1860s this labour was defined as unfeminine by the middle class. The women who did it were described as unsexed and immoral. Working-class radicals took up and adopted this imagery in order to demand a male breadwinning wage when they fought their employers. However, the women also directly challenged their employers' authority and were frequently at odds with the development of that new male working-class respectability which stressed women's role as wives and mothers. This paper looks at the resistances of the field women and the response to their action by the radical, mainstream and feminist press of the second half of the nineteenth century. It highlights the complex relationship between class and gender.     

Life Cycle,Labour Remuneration,and Gender Inequality in a Chinese Agrarian Collective

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.     

Migrant women breadwinners in Italy during the crisis: improvement or trap?

Gender gaps in some aspects of the labour market in Europe narrowed during the recent economic crisis, mainly because men were hit harder and because of the ‘added worker effect’. Therefore, the number of families with a single wage-earner, in particular female-headed households, increased. However, the differential impact of the crisis on male and female labour force in part was an unintended effect of the ‘gendered’ and ‘racialized’ structure of the labour market. Occupational concentration in care and reproductive work and the public sector in fact protected women from unemployment. Adopting an intersectional approach and using individual and household data from the Labour Force Survey from 2008 to 2015, the aim of this paper is to assess to what extent the gendered and ‘racialized’ structure of the Italian labour market has changed, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, and to what extent the increase in female breadwinner families, especially among migrants, hides widening or narrowing intersectional inequalities by gender and citizenship.     

The Sexual Contract,Youth, Masculinity and the Uncertain Promise of Waged Work in Austerity Britain

Abstract

Economic restructuring, the rise of service sector employment and precarious forms of attachment to the labour market have coincided with the financial crisis and the subsequent austerity programme in Britain to disadvantage young working-class men. In the context of high rates of youth unemployment, the consequences for the social construction of masculinity, for young men's labour market disadvantage and for the distribution of responsibilities between generations are explored though the lens of a comparative case study in two English towns, Luton and Swindon.     

Increasing Employment Precariousness in Post-socialist China: Everyone Equal in a World of Uncertainty?

ABSTRACT

Based on a mixed-methods research design, this article explores young adults’ work trajectories. The findings presented in this article are based on retrospective longitudinal data collected in Beijing between September 2012 and August 2014. It is argued that, in China, neoliberal ideology has been mobilized in conjunction with a neo-familialist discourse which emphasizes the central role of women within Chinese families. Once married, women are compelled to embody “traditional” Chinese values. Although the country has a high level of female labour-market participation, in post-socialist China, the public discourse on family tends to reassign women to their roles as wives and mothers above their role as workers. Women are also more at risk than men of encountering vulnerabilities in their employment trajectories. Since the opening-up to a market economy and the individualization of labour relations, the market ideology has imposed itself and deepened socio-economic inequalities and social stratification. As the collectivist welfare system has not yet found a solid substitute able to provide social protection for the whole population, the family, and especially women, are asked to take on part of this role.     

Hostages of destiny: gender issues in today's Poland

In an e-mail of June 2002, some women on Gender Link noticed that in Polish there is an expression, ‘husband of trust’, used to describe a person in the workplace appointed to represent workers’ interests. This role is more often than not given to women, and yet they are called ‘husbands of trust’. ‘Isn't that strange,’ they said. ‘Isn't it time to change this?’. It is. The change in gender role identities has started with questioning the language. It has started with asking who has produced and is reproducing the language, and for whom. The journey has not stopped there. From looking at language it has continued through social stereotypes, work, labour, money and the division of power, and reached the law and legal system itself. In Poland, the path has been rather circuitous and uneasy for we are, more than many other countries, bound by Catholic tradition mingled with apparent freedom. We had the ethos of Solidarity, and Lech Wa??sa. Wa??sa had a badge of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus on his jacket, which somehow helped label all Polish women, even those still very young, a ‘Mother Pole’. To resist that identity one needed to look beneath the image and be brave enough to call oneself just a woman. This article will try to analyse that process.     

Child care: Love, work and exploitation

In Western countries child care is considered the private affair of parents, but it is in fact the responsibility of women. Thus child care is intimately linked with the sexual division of labour and leads directly to inequality and manifold discrimination against women. The situation of mothers with school-age children in western Germany shows that changes are more a question of ideology than of economic resources. Personal convictions and values on the subject of motherhood and femininity, as well as attitudes toward social structures supportive of these, lead to paradoxes which confuse women's perception and slow down change. This article contends that the discussion of child care must take account of the situation of mothers and that the ideological notion of the “normality” of motherhood has to be made visible as fictitious.     

Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT

Despite her contribution to some of classical Hollywood’s most renowned musicals, the largely unknown Lela Simone exemplifies one of Hollywood’s ‘anonymous movie workers’ (Leo Rosten) working in the shadows of film history. As music co-ordinator for MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit (1944–1957), Simone’s exacting technical supervision of sound and music recording and post-production ensured films such as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958) achieved perfect synchronisation and polished production values. Drawing on archival sources this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making visible the labour of women, like Simone, working below-the-line in technical roles. Taking Simone’s work on sound and music in the iconic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number as a case study, the article illustrates how a micro-historical focus can bring a previously invisible realm of women’s labour, and agency, into view.     

LOVING TO STRAIGHTEN OUT DEVELOPMENT: SEXUALITY AND ETHNODEVELOPMENT IN THE WORLD BANK'S ECUADORIAN LENDING

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation.     

Global capital and local labour. Strategies and labour relations in the Hex River Textiles factory from the 1940s to the early 1990s

ABSTRACT

This article analyses labour relations and management strategies in the Hex River Textiles factory in Worcester, South Africa, from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The factory was established by a French textile manufacturer in 1946, who relocated an entire mill from Bradford in England, to exploit the low wage labour provided by primarily coloured women. The strategy also included investments in new technology. The workers who were drawn into capitalist production resisted exploitation despite government attempts to crush the trade unions. In the late 1980s, trade union activity was rekindled, not least because there was a core group of coloured workers, who carried on the tradition. The strategy in the 1980s was less militant than in the 1950s, but, arguably more successful.