Gendering exploitation: the use of gender in the campaign against driving in Lancashire weaving sheds, 1886–1903[1]

Abstract

This article, by focusing on the Lancashire cotton weaving industry, explores the implications for gender relations of an organisation of the labour process characterised by the virtual absence of any differentiation of the workforce along gender lines. In the use made of gender by trade unions in their campaign against methods of pressurising workers to increase output, the construction of difference emerges as central to the structuring of gender relations. The article demonstrates further that conditions in cotton weaving engendered a female identity that revolved around women weavers' ability to perform a skilled job. Failure to attain this standard of proficiency at work resulted in despair, leading in extreme cases to such women committing suicide.     

The New Economy,Class Condescension and Caring Labour: Changing Formations of Class and Gender

An argument about the declining significance of class and gender as structural constraints in British society has become common in mainstream sociological theory. Mobility, reflexivity, and detraditionalization are seen as key characteristics of a post‐Fordist, post‐structural society. In feminist theory, however, debates about the reconstitution of class and gender, as well as the symbolic meaning of class, challenge assumptions about detraditionalization. I assess these arguments through an exploration of the consequences of women's changing labour market position and the contradictions between employment and caring responsibilities. I argue that emerging class differences and widening inequalities between women, as well as new class relationships in the home, should be explored further.     

Perceptions of work by pious Muslim students: a comparison between the Netherlands and Turkey

There are widespread ideas about Muslim women being oriented to life at home and not participating in paid labour. This article explores notions of work in the groups of practicing Muslim, veiled Turkish-Dutch students of higher education in the Netherlands and Turkish veiled higher education students in Turkey, as the best-prepared group of women for a future in paid work. The primary objective of this article is to see how respondents think about their futures with regard to paid work. Their views are compared drawing on in-depth interviews analysed using grounded theory. The article shows that respondents in both settings have a keen interest in taking up paid work while also raising families. However, ideas of work differ in the two settings. As the Turkish-Dutch are faced with rather gendered expectations in their local community, for them paid work is perceived more along gendered lines taking into account one’s roles as wife and mother. Their choices of profession are rather gender-specific. However, Turkish respondents do not encounter gendered discourses of marriage and homemaking as strongly. Their choices of profession are less gender-specific; rather they choose their professions regarding perceptions of how much money they would make. The article shows that the different discourses regarding gender roles and work shape how they think about paid work differently in the two settings.     

Rural studies in France

The article examines a number of criteria by which to categorise rural households into distinct socio‐economic classes. Based on the author's sample survey of 211 households in the state of Aguascalientes, Mexico, the study argues that an analysis of rural class structure must focus not only on access to the means of production and the extent of participation in the labour market but also on key structural features of domestic units such as household size, generational composition, and the division of labour by gender and age. Statistical tests strongly support the thesis that considerations of household structure sharpen and enrich the concept of class. The results also define and distinguish three main class types in the survey region ‐ commercial, subsistence, and landless households.     

Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy

Lisa Folkmarson Käll's article “Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy” deals with Rosi Braidotti's attempt at rethinking sexual difference and female subjectivity in terms of nomadism. It explores how the idea of nomadism can function as a framework for understanding sexual difference which takes into account the multiple ways in which difference is configured, experienced, and contextually given meaning. Braidotti's account of sexual difference as nomadism captures difference in three interrelated dimensions, namely the difference between man and woman, differences between women, and differences within each woman. In all three dimensions, the central issue at stake is to bring forth an understanding of identity as a site of difference. Such an understanding allows Braidotti to locate sexual difference at the very core of subjectivity and recognize difference as constitutive of identity in a more fundamental way than as marking out its external limits. According to Käll, Braidotti's tripartite understanding of nomadism further opens up towards a rethinking of sexual difference beyond the confines of a strict exclusionary binary relation between man and woman. It locates sexual difference as a central element in the identification and becoming of subjectivity while at the same time recognizing that sexual difference is not the only central element, but one which intersects with others.     

The business of leisure: sport,labour and co-operation in post-war Britain

Compared with the activities of its European counterparts, the sporting and recreational pursuits of the British labour movement are less well known. Yet the co-operative movement organised an impressive range of sports clubs, competitions and events. Whereas previous studies have examined the relationship between the labour movement and working-class leisure during the interwar years, this article considers the interactions of the co-operative moment with popular discourses on recreation in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. In so doing, it challenges assumptions about the Left's disconnection from sporting culture. The Co-op used sport to create a collective co-operative identity amongst its employees. Examining the social and political context of these activities in post-war Britain can inform debates on the construction of female identity through sport, the use of recreation for business advantage and the extent to which the co-operative movement shaped working-class leisure patterns. Although the article highlights that co-op sport formed a source of tension between the retail and wholesale sections of the movement and could be adversely affected by popular affluence, it argues that a reappraisal of the co-operative movement's recreational activities contributes to a broader understanding of post-war working-class culture.     

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.     

Class,ethnicity and gender intertwined: Jewish women and the East London rent strikes, 1935-1940

Abstract

Feminist theorists have long debated whether gender or class position is of primary importance in shaping women's political consciousness; the consequences of ethnic or religious distinctions have not been examined as fully. This article hopes to rectify some of these oversights by focusing on the experiences of working-class, east London Jewish women involved in the pre-war rent strikes organized by the Communist-led Stepney Tenants' Defence League. It attempts to explain why so many of them became left-wing militants while their female Irish neighbors, equally marginalized, often gravitated towards the radical right. It concludes that in these close-knit communities ethnic identity proved more politically salient than did class or gender.     

Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.     

Class relations and capitalist development: Subsumption in the Colombian coffee industry, 1928–92

The concept of subsumption had a short life within Marxist analysis of family farming because analysts using the concept failed to appreciate the centrality of class relations in Marx's analysis of capitalist development. I argue that the concept of subsumption is best understood as a theorisation of the subtle cultural and historical processes through which labour is incorporated into capitalist development projects. I reinforce this theoretical discussion with an analysis of capitalist development in the Colombian coffee industry. This case demonstrates that capitalist development is as much project as process, as much the reformation of cultural identity as the restructuring of relations of production.     

images within the precarity movement in Italy

The recent cycle of social struggles against precarity in Italy has been characterized by an extensive use of images representing precarious workers. This contribution explores this in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP) protest campaign. The subversion of existing popular culture traditions was the main objective of the activists' newly created icons such as San Precario, Serpica Naro and other visual tools. The visual work on gender in the EMP seemed to fill a gap between theoretical work on the feminization of affective and immaterial labour and the less predominant presence of gender. Visual icons seem to have been at least as successful as text messages in publicizing the precarity discourse and their production deserves further attention.     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

Landless but not assetless: female agricultural labour on the road to better status,evidence from India

Women's share of agricultural wage employment is rising across the Indian sub-continent. Studies examining this process of feminisation tend to be divided along the lines of an ideological debate following either the ‘poverty-push’ or the ‘demand-pull’ argument. This debate, however, has largely ignored the institution of patriarchy. In this study we revisit the debate with a focus on gender relations. The study is based on data collected from 291 households in the state of Andhra Pradesh. We find that, despite increased labour market participation, women's household status, her wages and working conditions remain acutely depressed. Women labourers with access to productive assets, however, are effectively expanding their agency within both the household and the labour market. Their experiences, we argue, have implications for transformative policies.     

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon's Travel Letters: performative identity-formation in epistolary narratives

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was a mid-nineteenth-century feminist, philanthropist and painter. This article examines Bodichon the female traveller as a way of discussing the process of identity-formation in letter-writing. It proposes reading letters through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of gender (1990). Following her concept of performativity, letter-writing is conceived as a performative act of identity-formation. The article argues that, conditioned by the addressee she wrote to, Bodichon gave written expression to her subjectivity in her travel letters via her epistolary persona. This autobiographical gesture acted as one means through which she constituted her identity as a female traveller. In turn, drawing on Butler's notion of subversive repetition, the article concludes that the resulting multiple epistolary ‘I's Bodichon developed in accordance with each of her addressees permitted her to venture into her subjectivity as a female traveller—ultimately prompting her epistolary challenge of normative codes.     

Gender construction at work in Icelandic fish plants

In this article we present the results of our studies of gender construction at work in Icelandic fish plants. Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of the processes involved in the gendering of jobs, labour and the organization of work and their interrelations. We argue that an examination of these factors can shed light on larger questions of gender segregation, women's lower position in the labour force and how gender categories and identities are constructed and reconstructed in the workplace.     

Gender,work and labour history: a response to carol morgan

Carol Morgan has proposed (Women's History Review, 6[3], 1997) that in future, rather than concentrating their efforts on studying gender conflict, labour historians should research men and women's mutual struggle in the workplace. She cautions those who ignore the implications of local labour markets, regional variations and change over time in order to maximise women's subordinate role at the point of production. These are important considerations. But in her critique, Morgan probably gives insufficient weight to the conclusions of earlier writers. Her case studies on cotton and chain-making have been previously well-researched and the rationale for investigating two such disparate trades is not fully developed. Morgan's arguments are also at variance with those historians who consider home and work to be separate but interconnected. The latter advocate the adoption of a household-centred labour history, analysing both the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres to investigate breadwinning patterns and union     

Shopping for Men: The Single Woman Narrative

Philips adresses a relatively new genre of fiction for women readers- including works by Jane Green, Freya North, Jane Gordon, Marian Keyes and the journalist Kathryn Flett- namely, that of the working woman romance narrative. These are novels that are addressed to a generation of young women who have independent incomes, are in work and are skilled consumers. The title, 'Shopping for Men', refers both to the consumption of men as objects of romance, and to the deployment of consumer skills in order to create a man worthy of the heroine's desire. In these novels, romance and sexual desire are contingent upon the reader and heroine appreciating and valuing consumer items. Using Bourdieu's argument that distinctions of taste are integrally related to class relations, the paper suggests that 'Mr Right' in these novels is required to display an awareness of consumer labels, and an ability to purchase them that surpasses that of the heroine. Philips will suggest that, while the heroines of these narratives assume all the gains of feminism, the romantic expectations are those of traditional gender relations, and that, while the female protagonist is assumed to be a working woman with a successful career, the romantic denouement depends on a hero whose work and social status are superior to hers.     

why queer diaspora?

‘Why Queer Diaspora?’ intervenes at the intersection of queer theory and diaspora studies to ask how the conditions of geographical mobility produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization. Instead, I posit that the work of ‘queering’ diaspora must be to examine the new articulations of normative and queer as they emerge in the transformations of the late twentieth century. To this end, the essay looks to two contemporary documentaries, Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) and Mariposas en el Andamio/Butterflies on the Scaffold (Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza, 1996), as models of alternative articulations of the queer and the diasporic. Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer.     

Borders,Conflict Zones,and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerini's important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerini's early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerini's insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.