Unpicking Gender

The Social Construction of Gender in the Lancashire Cotton Weaving Industry, 1880-1914

Jutta Schwarzkopf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351143660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Lancashire cotton industry doubtless counts among the most thoroughly researched industries in Britain. Cotton processing has attracted attention both as the pioneer of industrialization and the harbinger of industrial decline, in many ways typifying the development of the British economy from unchallenged global leader to the demise of large sectors of its manufacturing industry. Yet among the spate of book and articles published about the industry, there is a conspicuous lacuna. Gender, though rarely addressed specifically, permeates the industry's historiography nonetheless. This study tackles head-on the notion of gender within the cotton industry during the period 1880-1914, not so much to trace its effects on the industry itself, but instead concentrating on the ways gender radicalized particularly the female workers in the Lancashire mills. In so doing, it promotes the view that it was women weavers' experience of the way in which gender inequality in the labour process clashed with varying degrees of inequality in the other spheres of their lives that caused many of them to organize for the franchise. Their experience of equality in the labour process both sensitized them to inequality elsewhere and empowered them to fight against it by showing it to be a product of society rather than nature. 'Drawing on the examples provided by disenfranchized working-class men and middle-class women alike, they accounted for inequality in terms of their exclusion from the polity. In the process of holding their own against male co-workers, supervisory staff, employers, labour activists, politicians, and even many middle-class women, they evolved their own version of working-class femininity, which differed in important ways from the female domesticity that had a vibrant existence in labour rhetoric, but rarely beyond.

Chapter 1
Unpicking Gender: Introduction

This study is concerned with unravelling gender in a way not dissimilar to the weaver who, unpicking a fault in the cloth, neatly has to disentangle warp from weft. The legitimacy of, if not the need for, placing gender at the centre of this investigation derives from the fact that, along with class and ethnicity, gender is one of the chief axes along which inequalities of power are organized. Despite the wide variety of forms which it has assumed over time and across cultures, gender as a principle of classifying human beings is a universal, all-pervasive characteristic of society, in fact so much so that referring to human beings obscures the fact that they are always perceived as gendered. Consequently, history is understood as a series of events shaped by groups of gendered beings over time.

A significant advance in both the theory and practice of gender history is marked by Joan Scott's 1986 article on gender as a category of historical analysis,¹ in which she proposed a concept of gender that is divested of the last vestiges of essentialism and has the potential of revolutionizing the writing of history. Influenced by French post-structuralism, she has put forward a definition of gender as a volatile system of classification which results from a continuous struggle for the power to determine meanings. Following Michel Foucault, she conceives of knowledge as the socially produced understanding of human relationships, including those between women and men. According to this view the uses and meanings of knowledge are contested as well as being constitutive of power relations. Thus gender denotes both the knowledge of sexual difference and the social organization of that difference. By producing knowledge of the changes in that system of classification over time, historiography itself becomes embroiled in the contest for power.

Thus a concept of gender as a discursively produced construct has emerged. Following Jacques Derrida, methods of textual analysis, mostly borrowed from literary criticism, are employed to unravel - deconstruct - a multiplicity of meanings of masculinity and femininity, meanings that derive from both terms being oppositional rather than from signifying actual men and women.

Previous understandings of gender are marred by their grounding in an ahistorically conceived 'nature'. In this view gender denotes a social status acquired in the process of socialization and attaching to sex as the biologically given and hence immutable physical essence or core. As a result an unproblematized parallel is assumed between male and masculine as well as female and feminine. Yet sex, as a biological or physiological category, does not exist outside the social. Like gender it is similarly constructed socially,² their relation being one of contingency.

Once recognized as a construct, gender can and must be historicized. As a binary opposition, gender evolved comparatively recently. As Laqueur, among others, has shown, in the early modern period, for instance, masculinity and femininity were thought of as being on a continuum. This notion of gender was buttressed by contemporary physiology, which saw no stable or uniform opposition between male and female bodies. In accordance with humoral understandings of the body, maleness and femaleness, in the bodily sense, were seen as being at least in part the result of regimen, diet and exercise.³

In the modern period, by contrast, an understanding has come to predominate according to which gender as a binary opposition is grounded in a 'natural' difference that inheres in the body. According to this naturalization, which the sciences have played an important part in legitimizing, human bodies bear unambiguous markers of either sex. Yet differences that are constructed as binary opposites introduce oppression and are a device for exercising power in a multiplicity of ways. The suffering inflicted on intersexuals, who are made to fit either category by a variety of interventionist methods, including physical mutilation, is but a particularly glaring example of the way in which conformity with binary opposition is enforced by arbitrarily defining the point of transition between sameness and difference.⁴

Despite its adherence to a concept of gender as a relational category which is socially produced, it is in its rejection of the emphasis placed on language and textuality and the concurrent recourse to methods of literary analysis that this study parts company with those historians whose work has been inspired by the linguistic turn. For them experience and agency have become questionable as concepts of a historical analysis which is concerned with representation rather than with the pursuit of a discernible and retrievable historical reality.⁵ Though steering rigorously clear of any psychological and sociological reductionism, these historians, as Toews has argued, stand guilty of a new kind of reductionism, which dissolves experience into the meanings shaping it. For Toews this approach signals the emergence of a new form of intellectual hubris, 'the hubris of wordmakers who claim to be makers of reality'.⁶ This study, by contrast, emphatically maintains that is is people rather than discourses that make history.

Agency is therefore crucial to the concept of gender informing this study. Gender is understood here as denoting both inter- and intra-relations of men and women, thus facilitating exploration of the ways in which gender, class and ethnicity are interlinked with, and fractured by, each other. These relations are evolved in an interactive process in which people relate to each other as masculine or feminine, thereby producing masculinity and femininity in their specific forms. This process has come to be known as 'doing gender',⁷ which involves men doing dominance and women doing deference. Everyone's active involvement in this process is emphasized here in contrast to the belief according to which women passively let themselves be acted upon by men intent on rendering them subservient to their interests, thereby making women the helpless victims of a greed for power believed to inhere in all men.

The emphasis on doing gender as an interactive process draws attention to the multiplicity of masculinities and femininities thus created - or constructed - in the various spheres inhabited by the individual. This entails the possibility that the way gender is being done - the specific masculinity or femininity enacted - may vary with social sphere. Differing versions of masculinity or femininity may interact in a variety of ways, reinforcing, coexisting, but also clashing with each other. The potential conflict arising between different versions of gender introduces an element of dynamism into what might otherwise appear as a closed system reproduced indefinitely.⁸ By highlighting the multifaceted, not of necessity exclusively linguistic, process of social construction, gender is focused as an arena of struggle in which the meanings of femininity and masculinity are contested and negotiated. Despite the varieties of masculinity and femininity produced in this manner, the line of demarcation may shift, yet does not dissolve. This is because difference is inextricably linked to hierarchy.⁹ Consequently, deconstructing difference, breaching the 'sameness taboo',¹⁰ always implies deconstructing hierarchy as a prerequisite of a more egalitarian society.

In this study the social construction of gender is explored in the context of the Lancashire cotton weaving industry, which is particularly suited to an investigation of this kind, affording as it does the opportunity of catching the constructors of gender in the act, as it were.¹¹ Lancashire cotton weaving, it should be stressed, has not been selected for study on grounds of representativeness. On the contrary, both the notions of masculinity and femininity current in the working-class communities of the cotton district and the conditions in which they had been fashioned were quite exceptional in the context of the late nineteenth-century British working class. Equally singular is the clarity with which processes of the contruction of difference become apparent.

Given its working-class setting, this investigation, apart from historicizing gender, also contributes to the writing of a labour history that is informed by gender.¹² Unlike women's labour history, which has yielded important insights into the significance as well as the diversity of women's participation in economic life and collective protest,¹³ this study aims to contribute to a labour history which uses gender as a core analytical concept. It moves beyond the concerns that have been central to women's labour history by considering those social groups that form the subject matter of labour history - workers and employers and their respective organizations - as made up of gendered beings in whose actions mesh concerns shaped by both their class and their gender positions. In particular this study explores the ramifications of the extent and conditions of their employment for women weavers' identities and for the understandings of femininity and masculinity current in the cotton communities. Ultimately, it reveals women weavers taking collective action for a gender-specific demand (women's suffrage), thus claiming for themselves a subjectivity that encompassed the allegiance to both class and gender. Their self-conception as being socially positioned in terms of both class and gender is traced back to the way the labour process in cotton weaving was organized.

This allows the investigator to observe the various social practices resorted to in constructing difference. In the heartland of the cotton-weaving district of Lancashire, men and women were working side by side, producing the same types of cloth on the same kind of machines. Moreover, these identical tasks were remunerated on the basis of identical piece rates, which varied, not with the gender of the worker, but with the type and quality of the cloth produced. The specific organization of the labour process thus failed to offer any of the opportunities present elsewhere of anchoring differentiations by gender as a way of bestowing on them a seemingly objective quality.

Firstly, there was no division of labour by gender, which is one of the powerful mechanisms by which relations between men and women are structured. As a result of the large body of work produced over the years it has become clear that the allocation of tasks by gender, far from being a 'natural' given, has been in constant flux.¹⁴ The changes that have occurred in the distribution of paid work range from inversion - as in cotton spinning in the course of industrialization¹⁵ through the tenaciousness of male domains in the face of technological innovation, as in typesetting until the comparatively recent introduction of computers,¹⁶ to the opening up of new fields of female labour, as in office work.¹⁷

Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that definitions of what constitutes the gender-specificity of a given job are quite unstable, and that not only historically, but also concurrently. Characteristics allegedly making a given job particularly suitable for women may serve at the same time to claim some other task to be cut out for men.¹⁸ The division of labour by gender is enforced by social practices that aim at giving the arbitrary allocation of tasks some seemingly objective grounding. The effectiveness of these practices is demonstrated by workers' own belief in their tasks being an expression of their inherent natures, a belief adhered to in even the most unlikely circumstances.¹⁹

Secondly, the gendering of machinery, equally absent in Lancashire cotton weaving, has been a potent mechanism of allocating work by gender. Male workers, in collusion with employers, may give preference to a machine design that can be accorded masculine connotations. One example from the cotton industry is the spinning mule, operating which, male spinners claimed, required strength and skill beyond the scope of women.²⁰ This claim was buttressed by machine designers expanding the length of the mule as a way of increasing the number of spindles mounted on the frame. The throstle-spinner, by contrast, was operated exclusively by women. When the ring-spinning machine was introduced, which represented an advance on the throstle-spinner's design, the new machine appears to have inherited its feminine connotation from its predecessor and was thus operated by women alone.

Cynthia Cockburn has analysed what she has termed the 'technological sexual division of labour' with particular regard to typesetting. In this trade men eager to obliterate the similarity between their machines and 'feminine' typewriters opted for a machine design underscoring the desired difference. Cynthia Cockburn's findings show how the gendering of technological competence, whereby competence correlates strongly with masculinity and incompetence with femininity, shapes technical artefacts.²¹

Finally, piece rates failed to vary by gender in the Lancashire cotton industry. In her exploration of the various meanings 'a woman's wage' has assumed in the United States in the course of the twentieth century, Alice Kessler-Harris has emphasized the ways in which gender is inscribed into the wage and how the wage helps to construct gendered expectations for both men and women.²² Her findings render the absence of gendered piece rates in cotton weaving even more salient. Payment by the piece, generating as it does the illusion that each worker can determine his or her earnings by the amount of effort dispensed, is a potent mechanism of increasing productivity and undermining solidarity by pitting worker against worker. In cotton weaving the outcome of setting the male weaver against his female counterpart was no foregone conclusion and had important repercussions on the versions of masculinity and femininity created by the cotton workforce.

In the absence of any of these possibilities for objectifying gender difference, male weavers, and the equally male t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Unpicking Gender: Introduction
• 2 Setting the Scene: the Indian Summer of the Cotton Industry
• 3 The Trouble with Weaving: Deriving Satisfaction from Work
• 4 The Weaver's Rest: the Ultimate Escape from Weaving
• 5 Making a Bid for a Family Wage: the Struggle around the Automatic Loom
• 6 Weaving Fair and Weaving Free: England's Web of Destiny Interweaving Shopfloor, Home and Street
• 7 Gender Unpicked: Conclusion
• Glossary of Technical Terms
• Bibliography
• Index