Women Workers And Technological Change In Europe In The Nineteenth And twentieth century

Front matter

Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Edited by

Chapter 1 General Introduction

Gertjan de Groot and Marlou Schrover l Chapter2 Frames of Reference: Skill, Gender and New Technology

in the Hosiery Industry

Chapter3 The Creation of a Gendered Division of Labour in the

Danish Textile Industry

Marianne Rostgård 35 Chapter4 Foreign Technology and the Gender Division of Labour

in a Dutch Cotton Spinning Mill

Gertjan de Groot 52 Chapter 5 ‘The Mysteries of the Typewriter’: Technology and

Gender in the British Civil Service, 1870-1914

Meta Zimmeck 67 Chapter6 ‘A Revolution in the Workplace’? Women’s Work in

Munitions Factories and Technological Change

1914-1918

Deborah Thom 97 Chapter 7 Gender and Technological Change in the North

Staffordshire Pottery Industry

Jacqueline Sarsby 119 Chapter8 Periodization and the Engendering of Technology: The

Pottery of Gustavsberg, Sweden, 1880-1980

Ulla Wikander 135 Chapter9 Creating Gender: Technology and Femininity in the

Swedish Dairy Industry

Chapter 10 Cooking up Women’s Work: Women Workers in the Dutch Food Industries 1889-1960

Marlou Schrover 170 Notes on Contributors 193 Index 195

Acknowledgments

Photograph on p. 4 reproduced from Malcolm Graham (n.d. prob. 1908), Cup & Saucer Land, London.

Imperial War Museum, Woolwich Arsenal, with thanks to the Trustees for permission to reproduce the photographs in figures 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3.

Photographs in figures 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 reproduced from Malcolm Graham (n.d., prob. 1908), Cup & Saucer Land, London.

Photographs (1939) in figures 9.1, 9.4 and 9.5 reproduced by permission of Aral Dairy Company, Stockholm.

Photograph in figure 10.4 reproduced with permission of the municipal archive Helmond.

Photograph in figure 10.9 reproduced from Public Record Office North Holland; archive Van Houten.

Photograph in figure 10.12 reproduced from Spaarnestad photo archive Haarlem/ NFGC/2311-3 502-7.

vi

List of Tables

2.1 3.1

3.2

Number of power frames operated by men and women, 1863 Number of men and women employed in cloth mills in Odense, 1872-1910.

Number of men and women employed in cotton mills in Odense, 1872-1910.

24 40 vii

3.1

4.1

6.1

6.2

6.3

7.1

7.2

7.3

9.1

9.2

9.3 viii

List of Figures

The number of men and women employed in the textile industry in Odense, seen in relation to the degree of mechanization, 1855-1930

Number of men and women employed at the Dutch Cotton Spinning Mill, 1867—1940

Women workers on cranes working with large shells, one of the few groups who got equal pay because they were so visibly doing men’s work, in trousers.

Women workers in the tailoring shops, doing work traditionally defined as skilled men’s work (although it involves sewing and is very like other sorts of women’s work) but paid at equal rates by trade union agreement.

Women in the danger buildings with the welfare superintendant, Lilian Barker. Although this was danger work it was actually not men’s work; it had been done by women in the district before the war, so it was paid the women’s rate. Wedging the clay: a young woman throws a large piece of clay down to another over and over again, until all the air has been knocked out of it.

Jiggering: the woman attendant turns a wheel for a man making pots.

Paintresses and lithographers: these women in the decorating end, dressed in smart pinafores like parlour maids, are the elite of the female workforce.

A dairymaid in Rimbo empties a large, mechanical churn. Note the characteristic dairymaid’s cap. The white cap — often tied with a blue and yellow ribbon — was the professional sign of formally trained dairymaids.

Dairymaids and dairymen in the Swedish dairy industry, 1913-1939.

Swedish counties with respectively more or less dairymen than should be expected from the level of industrialization and the type of production of individual dairies, 1930.

9.4

9.5

10.1

10.2

10.3

10.4

10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8

10.9

10.10 10.11

10.12

List of Figures

A female dairy assistant monitors the pasteurizer in a large Stockholm dairy in 1930.

A dairymaid operates the butter churns in Eskilstuna dairy, a fairly large, urban dairy in central Sweden in 1937.

Total number of workers in the food and allied industries, 1889-1960.

Percentage of women workers in the food and allied industries, 1889-1960.

Percentage of women workers in the dairy industry, 1889-1960.

Woman churning and man playing with a child in a walking frame. This photograph was staged in 1938 to show the way things were in the ‘good old days’. The impossibility of combining buttermaking and cheesemaking with childcare, as had been done at home, is often given as an explanation for the failure of women to move to factory dairying. In reality this was, however, not the reason why women did not work in the factories.

Number of workers in the beer industry, 1889-1960.

Percentage of women workers in the beer industry, 1889-1960.

Number of workers in the cocoa and chocolate industry, 1889-1960.

Percentage of women workers in the cocoa and chocolate industry, 1889—1960.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the chocolate bar became the most popular chocolate product. Unlike the more fancy-shaped chocolate products, the bars could easily be made and wrapped by machines. Women were the main employees on both types of machine. The photograph shows a woman feeding bars of chocolate into a wrapping machine at Van Houten’s factory, around 1900.

Number of workers in the margarine industry, 1889-1960. Percentage of women workers in the margarine industry, 1889-1960.

In 1914, there was a sudden influx of women into the margarine industry. This influx was related to introduction of a machine which looked like a large egg-slicer. The machine, shown here, cut slabs of margarine into pieces of the same size.

The invention made packing margarine much simpler. The photograph was taken in the Jurgens factory in Oss in 1914.

175 179 180 181

183 186

Chapter 1

From the traditional stereotyped viewpoint, femininity and technology clash. Men are traditionally seen as technically competent and creative. Women are seen as incompetent — suited only to work with machines that have been made and are maintained by men. Women use machines, in the home or at work, but are depicted as depending on men as soon as the machinery falters. This negative association between women and technology is one of the features of the sex-typing of jobs. Technological insight has partly replaced strength as a segregative concept, since the advent of the machine era. Men identify themselves with technology, and technology is identified with masculinity.'! The masculine image of technology is reserved for certain types of technology. Sewing and knitting, requiring knowledge, training and sometimes the use of machines, do not have a technological ‘ring’. Moreover, technical competence is part of the male gender identity, but not part of each man’s identity. Furthermore, it is classrelated. In the lower classes men are expected to be knowledgeable about car mechanics. The higher classes take their cars to the garage.

Technological change is commonly seen as leading to deskilling, opening up possibilities for the replacement of men by women.” The relationship between technology, technological change and women’s work is complicated. If the concepts ‘skill’ and ‘technology’ are regarded critically, this relationship becomes even more complicated. These concepts have been widely used to describe, explain and justify the segregation of work. Studies in this book show that, on the micro level, the interaction between women’s work and technological change is much more complex than has hitherto been recognized. The impact of technological change on women’s work cannot be generalized. It needs to be examined at the level of individual industries and individual innovations.”

This book sheds light on the complicated relationship between work and technology through studies at micro level, examining technological change and its consequences in their social settings. Focusing on specific developments helps to trace the origins of gendering. Technology as such does not determine anything, but its introduction, and the social setting in which it is introduced, do. Technological change can lead to the regendering of existing work, to the disappearance of work, or to the creation of new work. We argue that l technological change facilitates the regendering of work. It does not necessarily cause it, but without it regendering seldom occurs. Specific historical and social settings may lead to the gendering of certain techniques, and thus to the creation or abolition of women’s work, which may find its repercussions in completely different historical and social settings. Developments in England, with its early industrialization, are contrasted with those in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, where industrialization took off much later.

The textile industry is the traditional field for studying the gendering of work. The idea that the segregation into men’s work and women’s work was passed on from the cottage system to the factory stems from this field. In this book, Harriet Bradley describes the work of women in the British textile industry; Marianne Rostgard does so for Denmark, and Gertjan de Groot for the Netherlands. Office work is a field now strongly dominated by women. Typing was, however, not women’s work from the start. Meta Zimmeck shows that it was first allocated to men and boys, then to boys only and finally to women and girls. In pottery, ‘skill’ is not the only concept used for segregating work between the genders: ‘strength’ and ‘health risk’ may also be used to justify it. Jacqueline Sarsby writes on the pottery industry in England, and Ulla Wikander on that in Sweden. During the First World War, there were rapid changes in the nature of women’s employment. Deborah Thom shows that, in England, this did not lead to a permanent modification of ideas about segregation, although it did prove that changes were possible if enforced. Women played an important role in the production of food, both for the family and for the market. The nineteenth century saw radical changes in this field, with the industrialization of food production and the rise of new industries. Women ought to have had a head start as far as ‘skills’ were concerned. In an attempt to explain women’s place in these industries, Lena Sommestad looks at Sweden, and Marlou Schrover at the Netherlands.

Although skill and technology are important concepts in the explanation of the segregation between men’s work and women’s work, there are many other factors to which the segregation can be attributed.4 Waged work is sharply differentiated along gender lines. Men’s work in one region can be women’s work in another, but in virtually all cases there is a clear distinction between ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’. According to Phillips and Taylor, sexual demarcations were rigidly maintained, even when men and women worked in the same industry. Although this is true, demarcation lines were not inflexible over time, and differences were often minute, as the studies in this book show. Bradley, for instance, describes how in hosiery women worked the smaller specialized machines, and men the larger ones. Rostgard shows that in the Danish textile industry there was hardly any difference between male tacklers and female twisters, except for the name.

General Introduction Cheap Labour

An important reason for employers to hire women was that they were cheaper than men. Low wages were, however, never the only reason for employing women. Most occupations were gender-segregated, at least for a single time and place. There was little possibility of substituting female for male workers as wage differences changed, unless there were other contiguous changes.’ When discussing wages, age differences between the male and female workforce have to be taken into account. The average wage of men was higher than the average wage of women, but so was the average age of male employees. In general, however, the low women’s wages explain the crowding of women in labour-intensive sectors of production. It is not that women were paid less than men for exactly the same job. Women hardly ever did exactly the same job as men, although differences may have been small. If an employer succeeded in qualifying a certain task as feminine, he could employ women, who were generally paid less. The fact that women were paid less than men is a historical constant, going back before the onset of the industrial era. Even the ratio between women’s wages and men’s wages hardly varies: women’s wages are half to two-thirds of those of men.® The explanation for the difference varies. The reason employers gave for paying women lower wages was that women were inferior workers: their production was lower, and they lacked a sense of responsibility. This argument is generally hard to counter, because men and women seldom did exactly the same work. Even when both men and women did do the same work, as Bradley describes for weavers and knitters, women got to work fewer or older machines, thus reducing their output.

The physical strength needed for a job was often used as a justification for higher wages and a preference for men. Women were not considered to be suitable for all jobs, because they allegedly lacked strength, and strength is an ability to be valued, whereas nimbleness is not. The justification is based on two assumptions: that all men are strong and that all men’s work requires strength. Most work does not require more strength than women have, and work that requires a lot of strength cannot be done by all men, but only by the stronger ones. Furthermore, the strength required for certain tasks depends on choices that are made. Why should cement or cocoa beans be packed in sacks of fifty kilos? Sarsby shows that in pottery the physical strength argument was only used after men took over tasks requiring strength.

The so-called family wage has been an important factor in sustaining the segregation between men’s work and women’s work. Employers have assumed that working women lived in families, with working men providing them with support.” Both employers and trade union representatives have defended the fact that women were paid less with the argument that women were not the main breadwinners.'!? Women themselves also tended to see their wages in this way, as described by Sarsby, even if they were the main breadwinners during long periods of time while their husbands were unemployed. Pay was related to the social position of the earner, and not to performance.

‘Scrap Carriers’: young workers carrying clay. In pottery physical strength was only used as a justification for gender segregation after men took over tasks requiring strength.

Tilly has argued that women were excluded from certain jobs, and from career progression through jobs, because of the expectations that they would marry, have children, and take responsibility for raising them. Employers, according to Tilly, were segregative and inflexible about their designation of the appropriate gender for jobs, because their utilization of fixed capital and organization of work were closely linked to the process of sex-typing of jobs. With a higher concentration of capital, large-scale industrial production, wage labour, and radical spatial separation of home and work, formal or informal gender qualifications for employment affected more and more individuals."’ Kessler-Harris argues that the sexual division of labour is widely assumed to rest on social conceptions of appropriate male and female work which legitimate the prevailing economic system. Men and women are considered to have different needs of, and requirements in, the workforce. This makes the sources of these conceptions oppositional, and thus self-reinforcing. The economic inefficiency that defined the sexual division of labour was sustained by an ideological conviction that the separate spheres were naturally ordained. !?

The approaches of Tilly and Kessler-Harris, with their stress on opportunistic choices of both workers and employers, are similar to what Thompson has called the rationalization of wage differences through the concept of the breadwinner in the neo-classical economic theory.'? Neo-classical economic theory rests on the assumption that economic behaviour is governed by the free choices of individuals attempting to maximize their utility. People marry to increase their utility, and the resulting division of labour between breadwinner and home-maker is based on an assessment of the likely returns from the work of each partner on the market. This circular reasoning is supplemented by the human capital theory. From this perspective, sexual inequalities are not the result of structural discrimination, but of the voluntary smaller investments in their own capital by women, which results from their ‘choice’ to spend more time in the family. Employers, according to Thompson’s summary of this theory, take note of this and place men in the best jobs. It was not only the cheapness that made female labour attractive to employers. A factor of importance was also their high turnover. Women were expected to be ready to accept jobs with little or no career prospects, since marriage, accompanied by withdrawal from paid work, was assumed to be their universal destiny. !4

We now turn to a key concept in the segregation between women’s work and men’s work: ‘skill’. It is almost impossible to discuss work without referring to this concept.

Skill as a Social Construct

Skill is the ability to perform a certain task. Training, time, and transfer of knowledge can all make somebody better at a certain job. However, whether a job is called ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ is mainly determined by the social negotiations that surround the definitions of jobs and skills. Social negotiations are more important than any measurable ability. Women workers have generally been denied access to formal training in traditionally masculine areas of work. Comparing the skill required in women’s and men’s work is therefore not simply a technical matter. Work is designated as skilled as a result of the workers’ collective efforts to protect and secure their conditions of employment, often by excluding outsiders. These efforts have predominantly been made by, and on behalf of, the male working class.

There are hardly any jobs that require no training at all. However, it is not the number of weeks, months or years of training that distinguish a skilled worker from an unskilled one. Jobs that require a training period of a few weeks are sometimes regarded as more skilled than others that require a few months’ training. Women’s work tends to fall into the unskilled or semi-skilled categories of official classifications.'!> Cooking, for example, which involves complex competencies, is not conventionally defined as skilled unless performed by chefs.'© The concept ‘skill’ is saturated with sexual bias, as Phillips and Taylor have shown. Not all unskilled work was women’s work, but most work that was considered typically feminine was also considered unskilled. Sommestad shows that there were of course exceptions, such as the dairymaids who were machine operators and not machine assistants. In general, however, most women’s work was considered unskilled. Far from being an objective economic fact, Phillips and Taylor claim that skill is an ideological category imposed on certain types of work by virtue of the sex and power of the’ workers who perform it. Few categories of women’s work are designated as skilled, because of the pervasive belief that women’s work is by definition unskilled. The male cotton spinners in Lancashire successfully retained their skilled status, and the high earnings which differentiated them from unskilled groups, and they assumed the position of an elite in the cotton industry. Women spinners in the Glasgow cotton industry had no such status, and were generally regarded as socially and morally inferior."’

Female skills are considered complementary to male skills. If women lack a certain skill, men are supposed to possess it, and vice versa.'® All jobs done by men, simply by virtue of that fact, are seen as more skilled than those done by women. Women’s skills, such as cooking, caring and sewing, are seen as ‘natural’ .'? This also applies to complicated tasks in which the ‘natural’ aspect is difficult to detect. In hosiery, closing the toes of stockings was the task of women. This was a demanding job, that required expertise and experience if it was to be done effectively and with sufficient speed. The ability to do this work, however, was seen as ‘natural’. The ‘skill’ was seen as hereditary, passed on from mother to daughter, as it seemed impossible to acquire it in the training period that was customary for this work.?° In the hosiery industry, women’s jobs required skills comparable to or even superior than those of men. Although women’s qualifications were recognized, they were referred to in different terms from those used with regard to men. Male qualifications were referred to using terms such as skill; female qualifications were specified as speed and accuracy.”! Even the women themselves, while recognizing that their work was skilled, refrained from using this concept. As Bradley describes, women acknowledged that it took time and effort to become good and quick at certain tasks. Female flatlockers in the hosiery industry considered themselves highly skilled, although their job was one of the lowest paid. Even employers acknowledged the skill of these women, but the women did not use the word skill or craft when they described their work. Zimmeck, however, shows that women typists explicitly stressed the skilled nature of their work. According to the typists, it was not difficult to manipulate the machine, just as it was not difficult to learn to sew, but to produce a finished piece of work was quite another matter.

Language is not simply an innocent instrument through which we express our ideas. It does not express our pre-existing thought, but shapes it. Take the term ‘working mother’. Embedded in the phrase are a whole host of shifting, value-laden, gendered and classed characteristics. The term ‘working mothers’ does not simply stand for working women with children. Rather it stands for women who refuse to give up their jobs to keep house and look after the children. Working men are not split into fathers and non-fathers; their children are not harmed by the fact that they are not around most of the time, and they would be called unemployed if they were ‘just’ to keep house and look after children.”

Skill, as a social construct, must be seen in the light of language. The concept of skill is used to distinguish between men and women. In this book we have attempted to show the ambiguous nature of the concept. We do not, however, advocate replacing it with a different concept, as this would automatically inherit the biased nature of its predecessor.

Denying the existence of an objective meaning of skill has far-reaching consequences for what has for a long time been seen as a major outcome of technological change: deskilling. If skill has no meaning, neither does deskilling.

Deskilling, Reskilling, Upgrading and Feminization

Although the effects of technological change have been studied, these studies are predominantly about men, either because industries were chosen in which men formed the main part of the workforce, or because women were explicitly excluded from the studies.”

Two authors have dominated the discussion in how work is influenced by technology and technological change: Marx and Braverman. In Marx’s vision, the application of machinery enabled the employer to increase production, and to substitute for men workers with less muscle power: women and children. Thus production costs were reduced, and the workforce became more docile. With the introduction of machinery, the virtuosity with which the worker handled his tools was transferred to the machine. Improvement of machinery led not only to a decrease in the number of adult workers, but also to the substitution of one category of workers by another: skilled by unskilled, adults by children, men by women. Marx’s classic example is the introduction of the sewing machine, which caused the originally predominantly male industries involved in the production of wearing apparel to become almost exclusively female. With the introduction of the sewing machine the position of young women, working on the machines, improved. That of male workers, children and old women worsened.

Unlike Marx, Braverman took a gender-blind approach, interpreting the social relations of technology exclusively in class terms.” He considered the participation of women to be an extension of the unfinished process of homogenization of labour. Due to changes in production, workers are discarded as well as deskilled. Braverman’s ideas about skill and deskilling derive from a conception of the male artisan or mechanic, who is regarded as the ‘original’ kind of skilled labourer, whose skills have been wrenched away from him. A more complete account could be given if it were recognized that the labour process was gendered. That is, that capitalists created ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ jobs when they introduced new techniques and reorganized production. They did so on the basis of characteristics that were socially ascribed to men and women as workers: the ‘skill’ and ‘technological expertise’ of men, the ‘cheapness’ and ‘adaptability’ of women.?°

The effects of the combination of deskilling and replacement also differ for those who are replaced and the newcomers. The process has often been described from the position of the replaced person. A sense of wrath may have led to the element of deskilling being overstressed. Women’s work in printing 1s, for example, often far more skilled than is formally recognized, and the jobs women do call for more sustained and exhausting effort than those of the men. However, the pay and the terms and conditions of employment severely deteriorated as women came in. In general, deskilling has received more attention than changes in the job justify, as Zimmeck points out. Women typists may do boring work, often referred to as unskilled, but their work does not differ much from the work of the male copyist who preceded them. Zimmeck shows that the transition from hand copying to typewriting cannot be characterized as ‘deskilling’. Hand copying already had the low prestige that was transferred to typewriting and typists. Typing, requiring more training than hand copying, can easily be recognized as more skilled.

The deskilling effects of technological change were stressed and feared, not so much because of their effect on male workers, but because they could lead to feminization. Feminization refers to a process whereby an association develops between the low status, the reward for the job, and the fact that it is performed by women. The orthodox Marxist account suggests that feminization takes place as a result of certain jobs being deskilled, or degraded in a way which facilitates the employment of women as cheap, replacement labour. According to Sullerot’s thesis, the image of a job devaluates as women move in.”° This can be illustrated by the medical profession. Doctors in contemporary Western society usually have quite high prestige. By the mid 1970s in the former USSR, three out of four doctors were women, a figure often cited as proof of women’s success in entering male dominated professions. However, following women’s entry into this profession its status decreased accordingly.”’

Feminization can have indirect links with technological change. Hand knitting used to be done by both women and men. Now, with no change in the hand knitting technique, it is mostly done by women, and it has a distinct feminine image. With the introduction of machine knitting, there was a shift from considering knitting in terms of productive labour, to knitting as a leisure activity.

Phillips and Taylor argue that it is rare for women to be introduced directly into male-defined jobs. New jobs are created, the low status of which is evident from the fact that they are performed by women. The work is not feminized because it has been degraded, but is degraded because it has been feminized. Phillips and Taylor argue that the degrading takes place subsequent to jobs being defined as women’s work. There is, however, considerable evidence for work having been feminized after it had been deskilled and degraded, and having been feminized during periods in which there was overlap with the employment of men. Rationalization in terms of the feminine virtues of dexterity and patience only came after a job was feminized. Both types of feminization, before and after work has been degraded, may take place, even within a sector.

Skill is a key concept in the discussion on women’s work and men’s work. Skill, however, is not something that can be measured. It is a social construction; it reflects segregation, but does not explain it. As skill is not a workable concept, the effects of technological change should not be discussed in terms of deskilling, as has widely been done. Regarding technological change, it is important to distinguish between different groups of workers: the replaced and the replacers, the established and the newcomers. The effects of technological change differ for each group.

New Opportunities

The effects of technological change on women’s work are often judged with regard to work already in existence. However, technological change also led to the creation of new work, into which women were directly introduced. In the 1920s and 1930s, women were drawn in large numbers into what have been called the new industries. The new industries carried a new range of products, and used new methods of production. They produced consumption goods for the family, rather than heavy capital goods or traditional products. The new industries distinguished themselves by mass-production in plants of unprecedented size. Assembly lines, moving conveyor belts and flow processes assured a fast and continuous output. These industries were characterized by mechanization and rationalization of the production, as well as of the supervision and management. There is a tendency amongst historians to associate women’s employment with declining and backward industries. Women’s work is associated with less mechanized home-bound work, men’s with factories and technical advance. The case of the new industries invalidates such associations. Women held highly mechanized jobs. Rather than regarding these jobs as feminized, they have to be seen as feminine from the start.

Not only in the new industries have women found new opportunities for employment. The administrative sector also saw a massive expansion of work. Opportunities for women in office work have been attributed to new office machinery, primarily typewriters. However, as Zimmeck shows, typewriters were not seen as feminine from the beginning. It was the combination of the rising demand for office workers, and the availability of young women seeking employment, that led to the influx of women.