Читать книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов - Страница 21

The development of industrial capitalism over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries greatly influenced the relations of gender and labor and accentuated gender inequalities, as production increasingly moved into the factory – a process that occurred in different periods over the globe. Beginning in England in the 1750s, industrial capitalism spread quickly to France and North America and, by the end of the 1800s, to Germany, Russia, and Japan. Hundreds of men, women, and children flocked to new jobs that capitalism production created. Production in small workshops or homes gradually gave way to the employment of workers in factories where employers could organize work more efficiently and regulate labor. In the same period that these countries industrialized, protoindustrial economies continued to flourish in China, the Ottoman Empire, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and sub‐Saharan Africa. Yet, these regions were all connected to the development of European and North American industry through imperialism and global trade networks. Cotton from Britain’s North American and Indian colonies and from its Egyptian protectorate provided the raw materials and markets for Britain’s pioneering textile industry. France’s colonial possessions in North Africa and in Indochina served similar functions.

Under industrial capitalism, gender divisions sharpened. In the British, French, and German textile industries, women worked as machine tenders, whereas men worked as machine operatives and overseers. In Japan, where women made important and valued contributions to the household economy prior to the appearance of industrial capitalism, rapid industrialization in the 1870s and 1880s likewise brought thousands of women into textile factories to tend spinning machines, partly thanks to the Meiji state’s encouragement (Cole and Tominaga, 1976: 60). In Argentina, men worked in railway‐building and in cattle‐ranching, whereas women made up almost 80 percent of the textile and clothing workers before World War I. And in one of the largest Ottoman tobacco factories in Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century, young boys and girls worked in sex‐segregated occupations. Men and boys prepared the tobacco mixes and girls packed tobacco into cigarettes. In the Turkish tobacco industry as elsewhere when new machines were introduced, men used them; mechanization was associated with masculinity (Balsoy, 2009). Ideas about the masculinity of skilled working men also figured in gendering work in the US printing industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Men argued that only skilled men should work on the new linotype machines, and displaced women typesetters. Similarly, the introduction of advanced knitting machinery in late‐nineteenth‐century Britain and France forced out women frame‐knitters, as men claimed “ownership” of new machines. Thus, although mechanization removed the need for muscular strength often associated with work defined as “male,” in many cases the introduction of new machines accentuated the division of labor (Rose, 1992; Baron, 1989, Farnsworth‐Alvear, 2000; Chenut, 2005). More than any previous set of economic arrangements, industrial capitalism exploited gender ideology and crystallized gender inequalities. Employers benefited from the belief that women’s labor was worth less than men’s, and in addition to low wages, factory women endured sexual harassment from male employers, overseers, and co‐workers.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discourses idealizing a domestic, familial role for women, and a public, breadwinning role for men, accentuated the structural effects of labor differentiation and spread over the globe. In industrializing Chile in the first third of the twentieth century, although women labored in textile factories, male workers, elite women, and left‐wing political leaders challenged their labor as unfeminine and campaigned to return them to the home (Hutchison, 2001). Such discourses, while they did not prevent women from working, had tremendous power to shape the reality of work. Because employers and male workers believed that women really belonged in the private domain of the home rather than in the labor force, and because skilled male workers wished to preserve their own privileged position, they excluded women from the training and education that could have enabled them to obtain highly paid skilled jobs. The practice of paying women and children significantly less than men occurred everywhere, from Latin America to Asia. In Osaka, Japan, as in Manchester, England, women earned about half men’s wages in textile factories.

The factory was not the only site of labor under industrial capitalism. Even within industrializing countries, industrialization occurred unevenly. Alongside the emergence of factories, domestic production persisted and facilitated industrial development. In late‐eighteenth‐ and early‐nineteenth‐century Ireland, for example, rural women’s spinning of linen thread at low piece rates allowed the Irish linen industry to expand and remain competitive internationally (Gray, 1996). All across Europe, Asia, and the Americas women sewed shirts, bound shoes, or made artificial flowers at home. Persian boys and girls wove and knotted carpets on small looms. Immigrant Russian Jewish men sewed suits in New York City tenements and Parisian home workshops around the turn of the twentieth century (Green 1984, 1997). Because industrial homework was paid by the piece, it could be just as exploitive as factory labor. And the very profitability of women’s cheap labor encouraged the persistence of gender inequality.

Many observers were shocked by the working conditions of women and children in factory industry, and in Western Europe and the United States, governments attempted to regulate their labor. Protective labor legislation from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries limited working hours, banned underground work in mines, and prohibited night work. Such legislation ironically reinforced gender divisions. Proponents of protective labor laws argued that women’s weaker constitutions and their reproductive systems meant that their health needed to be more carefully protected and monitored than men’s. Yet, by defining women as a separate category of worker needing special protection from the state, reformers perpetuated already well‐established gender discourses and ironically helped perpetuate gender inequality (Rose, 1995; Zancarini‐Fournel, 1995; Stewart, 1989; Canning, 1996).

Capitalism also led to new service occupations, as schools, hospitals and expanding businesses required clerks, secretaries, nurses, and sales workers over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction of the typewriter and the adding machine combined with beliefs about women’s allegedly “nimble fingers” opened jobs to women around the world in secretarial and clerical work. In Europe and the United States, clerical and secretarial work, formerly “men’s work” became “women’s work” as women’s education and literacy increased in the 1870s and 1880s. Women could also now work in government and private sector bureaucracies, teaching, and nursing. Beginning around the middle of the nineteenth century, nursing feminized, playing upon cultural discourses that promoted women’s allegedly “natural” caring and nurturing qualities. Yet over time the feminization of nursing also resulted in the downgrading of the profession.

In the same period, domestic service increased enormously as a result of the new wealth engendered by industrial capitalism. Middle‐class women in North America, Latin America, and Western Europe maintained their class status by employing working‐class women who cooked, cleaned, and waited on them. In the nineteenth‐century United States, Irish and other immigrant women worked as servants in the homes of wealthy New England entrepreneurs. In the US before the Civil War, African American slaves toiled as servants, cooks, and wet‐nurses on southern plantations. Well after the US Civil War, African American women made up the largest proportion of domestic workers, until Latin American and Hispanic women gradually entered the ranks of domestic workers during the twentieth century (Glenn, 1992).

In other parts of the world as well, racial and ethnic difference overlapped with gender in service jobs. Within the European colonial empires in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia, colonial people of color constituted the vast majority of servants employed by white Europeans (Stoler, 1991; Gouda, 1995). Moreover, as colonial subjects migrated back to Europe in the twentieth century, racialized gender divisions of labor prevailed. In Britain, former colonial subjects such as Indian women toiled as cleaners and cooks for low wages, and Indonesians did the same in the late‐twentieth‐century Netherlands. Although men also entered domestic service, women of color performed (and still perform) the vast majority of low‐paid domestic and social‐reproductive labor as house cleaners, janitorial staff, childminders, and caregivers (Glenn, 1992). In Latin America, some women escaped rural impoverishment by traveling to cities to work as maids in the homes of both middle‐class and working‐class families. These low‐paid jobs have also enabled middle‐class (often white) women to work in other domains of the service sector and the professions.