Patriarchy at Work

Patriarchal and Capitalist Relations in Employment, 1800-1984

Sylvia Walby

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745601588
  9780745601571
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745668987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of 'patriarchy' is one which signals a sharp divide between traditions of feminist thought.  Sylvia Walby attempts to conceptualize 'patriarchy' in a way that takes account not only of the complexity of relationships of gender, but also of the subtleties of the interconnections of patriarchy and capitalism.

She rejects those accounts which treat patriarchy as a unified set of relations, or which confine the site of patriarchy to any one privileged sphere such as the family.  Instead, she elaborates a novel view of patriarchy as a set of 'relatively autonomous relations', the connections between which are spelled out through a variety of detailed case studies.  In contrast to many other views of 'capitalist patriarchy', Sylvia Walby characterizes the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy as a relationship, not of harmony and mutual accommodation, but of tension and conflict.

This thesis is substantiated through a comparative historical analysis of three contrasting areas of employment: cotton textiles, engineering and clerical work. These analyses show the shortcomings of much conventional literature in sociology, history and economics on women's employment, which pays insufficient attention to the independence of patriarchal relations. The book draws upon sociological, historical, economic and geographic materials to argue for an understanding of gender relations in terms of the specific tensions and compromises between patriarchal and capitalist relations.  Exploring the impact of the state on patterns of employment and unemployment completes a book rich in theoretical and empirical analysis.

Patriarchy at Work will be recognized as a major contribution to feminist thought and the social sciences.

1

Introduction

As the available pool of unemployed labour is expanded among men by their relative repulsion from industry and trade, it is expanded even more among women by their increasing attraction into industry and trade … The logical cumulation of these trends is the equalisation of the labour force participation rates of men and women.

(Harry Braverman)

We, as an organisation are opposed to the introduction of women as a general principle.

(Jack Tanner, President, Amalgamated Engineering Union, 1940)

Why has the extent and nature of women’s paid employment changed so markedly since industrialization? What are the implications of this for the position of women in society more generally? The theme of this book is the tension between the social forces which shape gender relations. As the quotations above suggest, there is on the one hand a tendency, thought by writers like Braverman to be overwhelming, for women to be drawn into the expanding industries, while on the other, there have been significant social forces, represented by Jack Tanner, the leader of the Amalgamated Engineering Union in 1940, to prevent this from happening. In assessing the practical and theoretical significance of these social forces, I will challenge many orthodoxies in social thought. This book will develop a view of women as significant actors in resisting their exploitation. It will depart from the dominant view of women as acquiescing in their fate. Conventional class theory, which pays little attention to gender relations, will be found wanting, and replaced by a more comprehensive and rigorous approach to the analysis of social inequality. Against the traditional view, that the position of women in the labour market is determined by their position in the family, I will argue for the importance of labour market structures in confining women to a subordinate position in the household.

The book is a challenge to conventional views on stratification in British society. The social division of labour, such a prominent part of most analyses of social stratification, cannot be understood without an understanding of the gender division of labour. It is not merely that an analysis of sexual divisions needs to be added onto the existing literature, but rather that on its own terms stratification theory, and especially narrowly defined class analyses, cannot be adequate without taking gender inequality into account.

I will not stop at merely criticizing orthodox accounts of social inequality but will engage with and revise feminist approaches to the analysis of gender inequality and propose an alternative. I will attempt to develop a theory of gender inequality, to build an adequate model of patriarchy and to demonstrate the significance of patriarchal relations in employment for the explanation of the position of women in contemporary society.

Chapter 2 starts with a review of existing theories of gender inequality. These fall into five types, according to whether gender inequality is viewed as: theoretically insignificant or non-existent; derivative from capitalist relations; an autonomous system of patriarchy, which is the primary form of social inequality; so intertwined with capitalist relations that they form one system of capitalist patriarchy; or the consequence of the interaction of autonomous systems of patriarchy and capitalism. While the last of these is the only one that I consider to be theoretically adequate, the existing formulations of this approach have severe problems. I try to construct my own model of patriarchy and its relations with capitalism, and this is to be found in chapter 3.

One of the major problems of existing models of patriarchy is that they either tend to treat patriarchy as a monolithic unity, and underestimate the significance of the relative autonomy of different sets of patriarchal relations, or they tend to include so many different aspects in an ad hoc way that they degenerate into mere description. My model of patriarchy tries to overcome these problems by constructing patriarchy as a set of relatively autonomous patriarchal relations which are interrelated in a definite manner. A further problem in existing models of patriarchy is the inadequacy of the analysis of the relationship between patriarchal and capitalist relations. Most approaches tend to give too much effectivity to either patriarchal or capitalist relations and, further, they characterize this relationship as one of harmony, which the empirical evidence does not support. I have characterized the relationship between patriarchy and captialism as one of tension and conflict and tried to assess the importance of both patriarchal and capitalist relations. Further, I have argued that patriarchal relations in paid work are of crucial importance in the articulation of the two systems.

Thus the first part of the book constructs a new theoretical model of patriarchy and its relations with capital. The remainder is an attempt to demonstrate the model’s effectiveness in a particular empirical area which is of central importance in the relation between patriarchy and capitalism; that of gender and employment. The quotations from Braverman and Tanner demonstrate the contradictory nature of the social forces affecting women’s employment. Braverman assumes that employers’ demands for cheap, deskilled labour will determine the pattern of employment. Here we see the delightful prospect of capitalists enforcing equality between men and women, at least in respect of paid work. Yet this scenario immediately strikes us as unlikely, even absurd. Why should this be so? What are the forces which prevent such a development? Tanner gives voice to patriarchal objections to women’s employment. It is patriarchal work-place organizations such as his male-dominated union that have been the immediate obstacle to Braverman’s vision of gender equality. Yet the question is only transformed, not answered. Why should these worker organizations be so opposed to women’s employment? This opposition is rooted not merely in men’s fear of women undercutting their wages and conditions of work, but also in a system of patriarchal relations which women’s employment threatens to disrupt. Yet again, this is too simple. The forms of patriarchal organization are varied and they intersect in complicated ways with capitalist relations and the technicalities of specific production processes. All these must be explored before an adequate analysis can be built up.

Women’s labour is a central issue in the conflicts and tensions between patriarchal and capitalist interests. Thus chapter 4 turns to an examination of the literature on gender and employment. By means of a historical analysis, the processes which have culminated in the present gender division of labour in employment are laid bare in chapters 5, 6 and 7. The analysis uses archive material of employers and unions as well as a range of secondary sources. It focuses on three contrasting areas of employment: cotton textiles, engineering and clerical work. In these three types of work, not only is patriarchal workplace organization found to be a major force in determining gender patterns of employment, but patriarchal organizations themselves take a variety of forms. The present pattern of gender and unemployment will be seen to be the outcome of overlapping of rounds of restructuring, a process in which these different patriarchal forms of workplace organization play a key role.

2

Theories of Gender Inequality: a Critique

Explanations of gender inequality are often classified either as radical–feminist or socialist–feminist (e.g. Coote and Campbell, 1982). Other writers have developed classifications with many complicated divisions (e.g. Sebastyan, 1979), while others reject any such classifications on the grounds that they are too constraining (e.g. Stanley and Wise, 1983). The dichotomy between socialist–feminist and radical–feminist, while picking up on an important division in writings on gender relations, fails to accommodate significant writings which do not belong on either side of such a divide, and which indeed explicitly attempt to make a synthesis out of the two opposing positions. This dichotomous classification is now surpassed by recent writings which themselves fall into two: some argue that dichotomy in the explanation of gender inequality should be overcome by saying that this inequality results from a single system of capitalist patriarchy; others argue that inequality is the outcome of an interaction of autonomous systems of patriarchy and capital.

This would produce four categories of writings on gender inequality–and a fifth, as well, for the sake of completeness, for those writings based on the theoretical insignificance or non-existence of gender inequality:

gender inequality as theoretically insignificant or non-existent;

gender inequality as derivative from capitalist relations;

gender inequality as a result of an autonomous system of patriarchy, which is the primary form of social inequality;

gender inequality as resulting from patriarchal relations so intertwined with capitalist relations that they form one system of capitalist patriarchy;

gender inequality as the consequence of the interaction of autonomous systems of patriarchy and capitalism (dualist writings).

The first category includes the writings of many mainstream sociologists. Gender inequality is theoretically insignificant for these writers because of their emphasis on class relations and their use of the family as the unit in analysis of stratification. Also included in the group are functionalists who characterize gender relations in terms of social roles which are considered different but equal. The second category is that of writings which seriously examine gender relations in their own right but conclude that they are ultimately, if not directly, derivative from capitalist social relations. The so-called ‘domestic-labour debate’ is an important example of this type of position. Writings of the third category make a decisive break with traditional ways of looking at gender relations and see patriarchy as a system of social inequality in its own right which is not derivative from any other. A wide range of social institutions are taken as the basis of patriarchy, but reproduction and sexuality are given particular importance. The fourth set of writings attempts a compromise between the previous two by arguing that capitalist and patriarchal social relations are so intertwined that they should be properly considered to be part of one social system of capitalist patriarchy. The fifth approach attempts this compromise differently, by arguing that patriarchy and capitalism are two separate social systems which can neither be reduced to each other nor conflated into one system. Here patriarchy and capitalism are seen to interact and affect each other whilst being analytically independent.

It is difficult to allocate some writers to categories, especially those working with similar theoretical frameworks but for whom the relations between gender inequality and capitalism are very different. For instance, Delphy (1977) views patriarchy and capitalism as autonomous systems, but says so little about capitalism that her place in the fifth rather than the third category is not immediately obvious, whilst Harrison, who develops a very similar theoretical concept to Delphy’s in the housework mode of production, attributes so much greater effectivity to capitalism, that his place in category five rather than two is again problematic. Yet to have placed Delphy and Harrison in different categories despite their similar usage of the notion of a housework/domestic mode of production would have been to accord too little significance to similarities of their important theoretical innovations.

Gender Inequality as Theoretically Insignificant or Non-Existent

Much mainstream stratification theory has treated gender inequality as theoretically insignificant, although this is now often recognized as a problem. Some sociologists have ommitted to consider gender inequality altogether, in part or all of their works. For instance Beteille (1977) ignores inequality between men and women. He simply states that

There are two major manifestations of inequality in contemporary societies … property and social class and race. (Beteille, 1977:21)

It has also been common in British sociology for samples to be drawn of only men for a project which purports to be of general significance for British society, as for instance, in studies of social mobility by Glass and Hall (1954), Goldthorpe et al. (1980) and Stewart et al. (1980). Sociologists have differed in the extent to which they have attempted to justify their near total focus on men. Attempts at justification are much more common in the recent works, while some of the earlier studies did not even attempt to defend the policy.

Goldthorpe et al.’s (1969) sample of affluent workers is entirely composed of men, yet despite a detailed explanation of how the sample came to be chosen there is no attempt at justification of the maleness of the sample. The authors do not consider women to be members of classes in their own right, implicitly assuming that a woman’s class position is determined by that of her husband. There are constant references to ‘workers and their families’ (e.g. pp. 7, 13, 19, 25, 26, 34, 44, 50, 51), while the worker is always referred to as male, for example when referring to ‘the class situation of the industrial worker in present day society’:

Despite these changes, he remains a man who gains his livelihood at the disposal of an employer. (Goldthorpe et al. 1969: 157; my emphasis.)

They do not attempt to justify this conceptualization.

It would not be correct to say that Goldthorpe et al. ignore gender altogether, since they do make references to the male workers’ wives. However, their noting of the evidence they have about the significance of these women is not incorporated into their theoretical understanding and this leads to contradictions. Thus they note that the greater household income of the white collar families than of the blue collar families in their samples was due to the greater tendency of women married to white collar men to be in paid employment.

It was the wives’ contribution that accounted for the slightly higher average family income of the white-collar couples. (Goldthorpe et al. 1969: 129a).

Yet the significance of this empirical evidence is contradicted in the conclusion which suggests that overtime working is the only way manual workers can increase their standard of living.

And indeed for men in most manual grades the achievement of affluence is likely to require some substantial amount of overtime working. (Goldthorpe et al. 1969: 158.)

Here the authors slipped back from considering the family as the unit to considering individual workers as the unit of the class analysis. If they had consistently taken the family as the unit then they would have been forced to conclude that the level of affluence was crucially determined by women’s employment status. It is only by taking individuals as the unit that Goldthorpe et al. can consider overtime and not women’s earnings as crucial to the level of affluence. Yet if individuals are the unit then the implicit justification for investigating only male workers (with women introduced only as wives of these men) must fall. It is only by inconsistent selection of the unit of the analysis that Goldthorpe et al. fail to note the significance of women for the shape of the class structure.

More recent work has usually attempted to justify the neglect of gender relations. Resource constraints are sometimes cited as the reason for the omission of women from the sample of workers drawn, but a theoretical justification for this major decision is not given. For instance, Blackburn and Mann (1979) do note the theoretical significance of the relation between male and female workers in determining the conditions of employment for both groups, and their significance for the internal structuring of the working class. However, they still exclude women from their sample of manual workers. They suggest that the reason for this is inadequate resources to study both men and women (Blackburn and Mann, 1979: 39) and that they chose the larger group to study. Given the significance accorded to sex barriers in their theoretical account of the workings of the labour market, their omission of women in the actual sample is inconsistent and inadequately justified.

Lack of resources is also cited by Goldthorpe et al. (1980) as one of their reasons for not looking at women’s mobility as well as men’s. A further way of justifying the exclusion of women from studies of social stratification is to say that this is done because everyone else has followed the practice. For instance Stewart et al. (1980) simply state that they will consider only male clerks and that the debates that they are concerned with have been about men.

In this chapter we shall be concerned with male clerks. The debates to which we are addressing ourselves have been primarily concerned with male employment and the data upon which we draw are for men. (Stewart et al., 1980; 93.)

This is quite extraordinary since they go on to state that the mobility of the men which is their primary concern is dependent upon the lack of mobility of women, that gender relations in clerical work are the key to understanding their central concern of male clerks’ mobility. Later in the book the authors reveal further their confusion and uncertainty as to how to deal with gender relations:

Whether women are proletarianised raises complex questions which we hope to examine elsewhere, but the answer seems to be no. They have always been employed in routine positions, mainly in specifically female jobs … They come from diverse backgrounds and follow different life-styles, which are largely determined by factors other than their own occupations. (Stewart et al., 1980: 193.)

The authors have not decided how the position of women clerks is to be determined, being unclear as to whether it is to be their own occupations or ‘factors other than their own occupations’.

Many social stratification writers of the 1970s and 1980s have attempted an explicit theoretical justification for leaving gender relations on the periphery of their work. This is typically done by arguing that the family rather than the individual is the basic unit in social stratification (for instance, Parkin, 1972; Goldthorpe et al., 1980; Westergaard and Resler, 1975). Parkin (1972) clearly sets out the main components of this argument, (although it should be noted that his later position (1979) is somewhat different and accords greater significance to gender). He argues that women’s position in the stratification system is determined primarily by their families and that the position of the family is determined by its male head:

for the great majority of women the allocation of social and economic rewards is determined primarily by the position of their families–and, in particular, that of the male head. (Parkin, 1972: 14–15.)

He states that the similarities of position that women share with each other are insufficient to override the divisions between women caused by their relationships with their fathers and husbands. He goes on to suggest that this is what the majority of women feel as well.

Likewise Goldthorpe et al. (1980) argue that the family and household is the unit in analyses of stratification and that men largely determine the position of the family (p. 67a). They go on to emphasize that they do not envisage many women occupying different class positions from those of the male heads of households (p. 188).

It is difficult to envisage any factors ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theories of Gender Inequality: a Critique
• 3 Towards a New Theory of Patriarchy
• 4 Theories of Women and Paid Work
• 5 Gender Relations in Employment: 1800–1914
• 6 The Two Wars and Between: 1914–45
• 7 Post-War Progress?
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• References
• Index