Читать книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов - Страница 22

Although workers had protested against the introduction of new machines and even fought for higher wages in the eighteenth century, new ideologies and new forms of organization enabled unprecedented resistance to the injustices of industrial capitalism, and gender shaped the terms of that struggle. Women participated in strikes throughout Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tilly, 1981; Frader 1991, 2008; Canning, 1996; Farnsworth‐Alvear, 2000; French and James, 1997; Balsoy, 2009). However, although the thinkers and activists who inspired workers to organize supported justice for all workers, they directed their appeals mostly to men, and despite women’s growing presence in the labor force and in labor protests, male workers largely ignored gender equality. There were of course, exceptions to this general pattern. Women dominated some twentieth‐century trade unions and succeeded in defending their goals in “feminine” occupations such as textiles (Canning, 1996).

Nor did the World Wars substantially alter gender divisions and inequalities despite women’s entry into new jobs and responsibilities. During World War I in Europe and the US, large numbers of women worked in “male” jobs, including armaments manufacture and metal‐working, but employers broke down the labor process and hired women for newly simplified jobs (Downs, 1995). Men and their unions assumed that women’s presence on “male” jobs was temporary and that women would leave once men returned from the war (Thébaud, 1986; Grayzel, 1999). Yet new forms of gender division emerged. When employers “modernized” workplaces to increase outputs in the 1920s and 1930s, women overwhelmingly filled the newly created unskilled jobs, leading to unintended consequences in the labor market.

The worldwide Depression of the 1930s threw gender divisions into sharp relief all over the world. Everywhere, as economies weakened, workers were laid off and unemployment soared. In many industrialized countries, such as the United States, England, Germany, and France, where heavy industry slowed down, highly paid male workers were among the most numerous among the unemployed. Ironically, women’s work in the service sector as nurses and teachers, or as low‐paid, unskilled workers, allowed them to hold on to jobs. Public criticism of women who remained employed while male “breadwinners” were out of work appeared almost everywhere. In France, the government restricted the employment of foreign workers to preserve employment for French nationals (Frader, 2008). Renewed questioning of women’s right to work had implications that lasted beyond the Depression and World War II, when at the end of the war in Europe and the US women were told to go home and bear children.

Revolutionary and nationalist movements, on the other hand, provided women with new opportunities for work. The Soviet Union’s need for labor following the Russian Revolution of 1917 was so acute that the government recruited women for work, often in the same unskilled jobs as men; women also entered the professions (especially medicine) at a high rate. Communist leaders celebrated women’s labor as a contribution to building the new Soviet economy. The same occurred during the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s, when communists promoted women’s labor as teachers, industrial workers, and agricultural laborers. Chinese women made substantial contributions to the rural household economy as they had in earlier centuries, irrespective of the gender division of labor (Kung and Lee, 2010). Non‐communist nationalist movements in Egypt and India likewise promoted women’s employment in the professions as well as in industrial work, especially textile manufacturing. And the 1917 constitution following the Mexican Revolution established an 8‐hour day for working women, maternity leave, and guaranteed job security (Blum, 2004).

Labor in Late Capitalism

Gender inequalities at work persisted in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries under the impact of globalization, particularly in the industrializing economies of the Pacific Rim of Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, which drew on the cheap labor of women and children in Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Mexico (Boris and Prügl, 1996; Prügl, 1999). Two sets of initiatives have recently been promoted as potentially empowering for women and reducing gender inequality at work: foreign‐owned export manufacturing sectors and microfinancing. Both have had mixed results.

In export manufacturing sectors, states give multinational corporations tax exemptions, buildings, the promise of an available labor force, and often exemption from local labor laws (Enloe, 1990; Ong, 1991). Although the World Bank has argued that such sectors provide important job opportunities for women, feminist analysis suggests that in order to be profitable, such work actually maintains gender inequality, by keeping wages low and employing workers on short‐term contracts (Pepper, 2012). Employers in garment production, textile factories, and the electronics industry in locations as diverse as the sweatshops of Malaysia and the maquiladoras of Mexico, harbor the same gendered views of men’s and women’s abilities. They view women as desirable workers for their dexterity and alleged ability to withstand monotonous, routinized work. But in addition to their low wages (ten to twenty percent lower than men’s), women are subject to sexual exploitation on the job to a far greater extent than in Western industrialized countries, due to the absence of state controls and labor legislation (Bradshaw and Wallace, 1996). Likewise, the practice of providing small loans (microfinancing) to women in India, Bangladesh, and African countries, touted as a road to economic independence, has been subject to intense debate since it often creates indebtedness. In some cases, it so rapidly disrupts traditional gender norms that female entrepreneurs have been attacked, even killed, as punishment for their “success” (Yeboah, Arhin, Kumi, and Owusu, 2014).

In other settings, global labor markets benefit from the migration of desperately poor rural women to work in the sex trade, as in Thailand, where the recruitment of Burmese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian women and girls is a product of economic inequality and indebtedness in the region. Although prostitution is indeed one of the oldest occupations, the commercialization and commodification of sex for tourism occurred to an unprecedented extent by the end of the twentieth century (Human Rights Watch, 1993). In these cases, under late capitalism, states either have been facilitators or complicit in maintaining gender exploitation in developing economies. Elsewhere women from Latin America, Haiti, and the Philippines who migrate to the United States constitute a steady labor supply for domestic service and nursing (Chang, 2000; Sasson, 1998).

Despite these inequalities and forms of exploitation, it is undeniable that under late capitalism, the interventions of states, human rights organizations and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have also worked to mitigate such conditions. Equal pay and affirmative action legislation in the United States, the gender equality legislation of the European Union, and conventions of the International Labor Organization have lessened gender discrimination at work in many parts of the world. On the other hand, the adoption of legislation does not mean enforcement. For example, South Africa has probably the most gender‐equal constitution of any nation, but enforcement of the law to ensure women’s rights has been slow in coming.