SOSC 102U

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SOSC 102U

• Lecture Note 3
• Gendered Work in Time and Place

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The Sexual Division of Labor in Preindustrial
Europe (1)

• Agricultural Work
• Mens work plow, threshed, harvest, build
  houses, hew timer, harrow, dug ditch, and cut
  hedges
• Womens work weed, harvest, raise domestic
  animals (milk, churn butter, make cheese and
  butcher these animals), make bread, beer, cloth
  and clothing.
• Manufacturing Work
• Men in manufacturing substantially earned more
  than women and enjoyed more autonomy.
• Womens workshops most female labor in these
  workhouses were slaves of nobility or the
  monasteries or the wives and children of slaves.
  Others were serfs or prisons. They received their
  board and room in exchange for their labor. These
  womens workshops became extinct before
  industrialization.
• Artisans almost all artisans were men. They
  earned an income from the products they made and
  sold.

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The Sexual Division of Labor in Preindustrial
Europe (2)

• Cottage industry (or putting-out system) before
  industrialization, women and children
  manufactured some goods at home through a system
  of cottage industry.

Source Cited from Gerhard Lenski, Jean Lenski,
Patrick Nolan, Human Societies An Introduction
to Macrosociology (New York McGraw-Hill, 1991),
p. 228.
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The Industrial Revolution

• Major impact on the sexual division of labor the
  changing economic role of a householdFamily
  production was replaced by market production in
  which capitalists paid workers wages to produce
  goods in factories and mines.
• Labor force people work for pay or actively
  seek paid work
• 1. Wage workers
• 2. Unemployed persons
• 3. Nonemployed not privileged classes who can be
  exempt from productive work but a growing group
  of unpaid workers. They cooked and cleaned for
  family members, raised children, cared for sick
  relatives, and provided social and emotional
  support to family, friends and community.
• The distinction between paid work in the labor
  market and unpaid domestic work by the
  nonemployed has important consequences for
  gender inequality, because for the past 200
  years, men have been more likely than women to
  belong to the labor force, and women have been
  more likely than men to be unpaid workers
  (Padavic and Reskin, p. 20)

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Textiles Works in Halstead, England, 1825

• Based on Carol Adams, Paula Bartley, Judy Lown,
  Cathy Loxton, Under Control Life in a
  Nineteenth-century Silk Factory (Cambridge
  University Press, 1983)
• Case study in Samuel Courtaulds silk mill in
  1825, Halstead, Essex (Southeast England)
• Compare the wages for mens jobs compared with
  the pay for the womens jobs (p. 17)

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Wages of Male Workers in Courtauld

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Wages of Female Workers in Courtauld
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The Sexual Division of Labor between Paid and
Unpaid Work (1)

• The labor force became increasingly male
  throughout the nineteenth century (the
  masculinization of labor force)
• Urbanization and the fall of womens labor force
• Statistics in the U. S.
• 1840 40 industrial workforce was contributed by
  women and children
• 1890 only 17 of women was in the labor force
• Protective labor laws institutionalize the
  masculinization of labor force

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The Sexual Division of Labor between Paid and
Unpaid Work (2)

• The interplay between gender and class
  inequality
• Upper and middle-class family The Ideology of
  Separate Spheres Workplace vs. Family Life
• But labor force participation was a necessity for
  the poor and working-class women. The ideology of
  separate spheres hurt working-class wives, whose
  families need to be supported by double incomes.
  Many working-class women therefore took up the
  work such as doing piecework or taking in
  laundry, sewing, or boarders to earn money at
  home. The work usually has lower pay and longer
  working hour than a real job.
• The ideology changed after the 1970s, when the
  gap between mens and womens labor force
  participation rates narrowed considerably.

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Question

• According to Padavic and Reskin, womens
  participation in unpaid domestic work (the
  nonemployed work) has serious consequence to
  gender inequality, would their status be improved
  by increasing their contribution to household
  income?

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Sexual Division of Labor in Late Imperial China
(1)

• Based on Kathy L. M. Walker, Economic Growth,
  Peasant Marginalization, and the Sexual Division
  of Labor in Early Twentieth Century China
  Womens Work in Nantong County, Modern China,
  Vol. 19, No. 3 (July, 1993), 354-386.
• Nantong, a county in northwestern Shanghai.
• 15th.early 19th.centuries
• The sexual division of labor in Nantong men
  till, women weave.

Raw cotton
Yarn
Cotton Cloth
spin
weave
Mens work
Womens work
Sexual division of labor within a peasants
household (the Nantong case, 16th. C.-19th. C.)
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Figures of the men till, the women weave (????)
in China
Wearing blue kerchiefs, women are busy with
weaving,Cotton balls burst and they start to
pick cotton,At market, the cotton cloth they
have woven is very popular,Their products are
well-respected, so are their customs.--Gu Lan
Miao (preliminary translation by Jane Zhang)
Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender Fabrics of
Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1997), p. 220.
http//www.ucalgary.ca/library/SpecColl/Chinese/pa
ge31.html
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Sexual Division of Labor in Late Imperial China
(2)

• Economic significance Womens cotton production
  geared the overall economic growth in China
  cloth made in the Yangzi Delta district became
  the leader of cloth production in the country.
  These products were sold in northern, southern
  and inland market.
• Impact on womens status Womens production for
  the market became crucial to family maintenance.
  However, womens new profitability did not
  improve their position in the family. The income
  they generated was controlled not by the women
  themselves, but by the family head (the father,
  the husband or the father-in-law)

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Sexual Division of Labor in Late Imperial China
(3)

• After the Opium War (1840s) the introduction of
  inexpensive foreign imported machine-spun yarn
  made peasant households could weave more cloth.
  But the foreign yarn changed the production
  process of cotton cloth.
• 1. For weaving peasant families adoption of
  machine yarn deepened their market dependency.
  Previously the wove the cotton grew locally, now
  they had to sell raw cotton formerly used for
  spinning to obtain the cash necessary to buy
  yarn. Peasants with insufficient land to provide
  (through the sale of harvested crops) for yarn
  purchase and for the expense of loom could not
  afford to weave. If they really wanted to weave,
  they had to obtain yarn on credit at usurious
  rates.
• 2. For merchants they could control raw
  materials and marketing. Merchants gained new
  leverage in determining both terms of trade and
  the type of cloth produced. These changes marked
  the beginning of a series of developments through
  which over the next decade Nantongs
  merchant-industrial elite gained growing control
  over the forms and conditions of peasant
  production without undertaking its direct
  supervision.

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Sexual Division of Labor in Late Imperial China
(4)
Womens work
Men and womens work
These changes resulted from 1) expansion of rural
industry 2) growth of the cotton trade 3) new
modes of obtaining the rural surplus through the
operation of usury-merchant capital. Also because
the merchants could determine the terms and
conditions of trade, they offered cloth producers
with less than subsistence wage-equivalents. The
peasants therefore had to make ends meet by
incomes from both farming and weaving.
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Sexual Division of Labor in Late Imperial China
(5)

• Impact on sexual division of labor new pattern
  of sexual division of labor between men and women
  from the early 20th. Century
• Women farmed and wove, while men moved into
  various forms of permanent, seasonal, or
  part-time wage work. When at home, if possible,
  the busiest farm seasons, men also engaged in
  farming and weaving. The change was a new method
  and strategy to forestall further land division
  so that cloth production and family subsistence
  could be maintained.

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Sexual Division of Labor in Late Imperial China
(6)

• Was Nantong womens status improved?
• Despite the changes in their labor roles, women
  remained under the control of male family members
  and, by extension, the supervision of
  mothers-in-law who owed their position and
  primary allegiance to husbands and son. Even when
  womens work became the mainstay of family
  subsistence, it was in major respects invisible
  since men controlled the marketing of the
  commodities and the income women generated.
• Related, the worst abuse of the family
  systemfemale infanticide, child marriage,
  contract prostitution, and the buying and selling
  of womennot only continued but in fact may have
  been on the rise.

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The Women Issues in Developing Countries Today (1)

• 1. As western countries, those who are expected
  to do the unpaid domestic work in their homes are
  predominantly women
• 2. From the 1970s, womens participation in the
  labor force has been increasing. Most of the
  growth has been in the informal sector of the
  economy where income, benefits, and job security
  are precarious
• 3. Womens work is less valued than mens work.
  Womens work is paid less than mens. Those doing
  unpaid domestic work receive lower prestige and
  power.

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The Women Issues in Developing Countries (2)

• Informal Sector work under family business or
  family farms self-employed work sub-contracting
  piece-work (paid by productivity but not by
  wageno guaranteed minimum income)
• Three-quarters of all workers in Africa and Asia
  and almost one-half of workers in Latin American
  are working in informal sector.
• Globalization mobile capita investment from
  country to country MNCs Deregulation of state
  policies migrant workers