A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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the decline of women’s status as farmers and trappers among the Cherokee in the US, when men used their military expertise to protect their communities from the government’s encroachment on their land.
In many parts of the world, religion continued to influence social attitudes toward the gender dynamics of labor. In China, Confucianism required the separation of the sexes; only work within the home was considered “virtuous.” The Catholic Church’s views of women as the subordinate sex whose vocation should be limited to child‐rearing and the family persisted in Protestantism despite all Christian denominations’ formal acceptance of women’s spiritual equality. Christian missionaries brought these ideas to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where orthodox Islam already demanded women’s seclusion and segregation from men and severely limited women’s work. Yet these views of women were not determinate everywhere. Muslim women controlled the funds of charitable institutions in Egypt and other Muslim areas (Fay, 2005). In the Songhay Empire of West Africa in the fifteenth century, women freely circulated publicly, unveiled on the street and in markets where they worked as traders and sellers of cooked food. Moreover, the Islamic toleration of polygamy facilitated the development of a family labor system in agriculture where a farmer’s multiple wives could provide a source of labor (Cambridge History of Africa, 1985–86).
Slavery, common throughout the world since ancient times, complicated the meanings of gendered labor. In the early modern period, slavery shaped the economies of sub‐Saharan Africa, North Africa, North America, and parts of Europe. The first African slaves were captives taken in wars and raids and, from roughly 1550 to 1850, were sold across the Atlantic. Men dominated the Atlantic slave trade, whereas women constituted the majority of slaves in Africa itself (Ugo‐Nwokeji, 2001). In Egypt, male slaves (mamluks) served in Ottoman armies, earned their freedom, and acquired property and political positions (Philipp and Haarmann, 1998). African slaves toiled in European cities, where women worked as domestic servants and men as heavy laborers. Slavic peoples (from whom the word “slave” comes) provided coerced, unpaid labor as slaves on the estates of wealthy Europeans and in cities. White Europeans assumed that slave women could be subject to harsh, unrelenting work, just like men, in contrast to elite Western European women. Thus, gender differences in work appeared less profound among enslaved people than among free laborers or even serfs.
Over time, with the development of European empires from the seventeenth century on, racial difference took on increasing importance as the foundation of labor systems. The tobacco and cotton plantations of colonial North America show how race and gender shaped the experience of men and women at work. Although African slave women may have performed more domestic labor than men, both men and women performed backbreaking fieldwork. Racial and gender divisions of labor intersected in other colonial labor regimes, where in the Caribbean, India, Africa, and Indonesia, colonized men and women of color worked as servants, cooks, and housekeepers in the homes of colonial officials and administrators (Gouda, 1995; Stoler, 1991; Franklin, 2012). These systems persisted long after European countries abolished the slave trade and, as scholars have shown, their effects continue to be apparent even in contemporary societies where racial segregation at work persists (Glenn, 1992).
Industrial Capitalism, and Public and Private Labor
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.
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