A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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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.
Resistance, War, and Revolution, and the State
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