Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in The

THE STAFFORDSHIRE POTTERY INDUSTRY 135 Pay, women continued to be paid considerably less than men in the industry. The 1970 Equal Pay Act has not altered the situation: because of the particular division of labour within any one factory, men and women rarely do exactly the same work on one potbank, and women’s average earnings continue to be lower than men’s.24 As has been women’s experience in other trades, there are difficulties in comparing the value of different work. Ever since women stopped doing heavy work, this has become the crucial justification for men’s higher rates of pay. One cannot escape the suspicion that whatever are the characteristics of men’ s work, they will be the ones to which value is attributed, because it is men’s work which is considered important. Why should this be so? In the Potteries, the idea of the male breadwinner seems out of step with an industry which has relied so heavily on female labour. One would expect a certain pride and independence in the culture of women who have followed one another, mother and daughter, into skilled work. But the middle-class ideal of the woman at home is very powerful. One might argue that fine china itself, the product which is the pride of the Potteries, carries with it the image of a genteel way of life, of tea parties and dinner parties glowing with gilded tableware, and of fine things over which women hold sway comfortably at home. Reminders of this middle-class ideal are ever present under their fingers. Elizabeth Roberts, however, has suggested that Lancashire women also shared the same ideal, and did not go out to work when there was ‘more opportunity for them to indulge their ambition of staying at home’.25 One might argue equally well that the decisive factor is the image of work itself. These are areas of heavy industry, of pits as well as pots, and Potteries women have a respect for the hardness and heaviness of men’s work in coalmining and other heavy industries. The idea that heavy work is ‘real’ work could help to explain why women accept their lower wages now. The weight of tradition certainly does not help: the pottery industry has existed continuously over two centuries and more. Women were always paid less than men, just as they were, for centuries, in agriculture, and the justification for farm-women’s lower wages was that, like boys, they did not have the strength to do the work of men— often, of course, precisely because they were on starvation wages.26 The Posher Part Nowadays, the idea that women are ‘better off at home’ has a sequel, that they are better suited to clean, quiet, ‘ladylike’ jobs, sitting quietly in the decorating end, rather than ‘bashing the clay about’ in the clay end. The clay end is noisy; it can be mucky or dusty. People stand to their work and wear overalls. A noisy, mucky place is also essentially a ‘man’s place’, and the idea of the woman as an independent worker in the clay end has been resisted in the industry throughout the twentieth century. A woman is considered to be more suited to ‘finishing’— fettling, sponging, smoothing the ware as she has always done, recalling her role 136 JACQUELINE SARSBY as the wife-attendant to the nineteenth-century craftsman. In this role, of course, she does not threaten the job security of male workers, or their solidarity in the face of the threatened loss of their particular skills. Men do not seek to invade this area. The other preferred image of the female worker—to men throughout the industry including those at union headquarters, and to many women—is as a worker in the ‘feminine’, decorating end of the pottery. In reality, women have no monopoly of hand-crafted decoration such as freehand painting, and are mostly employed sticking water-slide transfers onto the ware. In the sense that lithographing has largely replaced painting in the pottery industry, women have been deskilled to a very great extent in the decorating end during the course of this century. When it comes to freehand painting, men are employed as artists at least as frequently as women. Women still do enamelling, which is painting within printed patterns, and they do gilding, and also lining and banding, but one finds only an occasional worker who may exercise these skills, and elsewhere she is replaced by an automated machine. In spite of this, the idea persists that the largely deskilled, monotonous jobs in the decorating shops are ‘nice’ jobs for women, and there is still a certain superiority attached to these ‘feminine’ jobs away from the mucky, noisy world of men. The fact that male artists are employed to do freehand painting seems in no way to detract from the integrity of this image of the feminine world of the decorating end. This superiority through sexual segregation is, of course, no new idea. Middle- class attitudes to the segregation of the sexes were very prominent in the accounts of the nineteenth-century Royal Commissions, which looked at the work of women and children in both agriculture and manufactures, and the idea that it was better for women and girls to be segregated in the pottery factories was voiced by witnesses to Scriven, the Commissioner who took evidence in the potteries in 1841. At that time, there were separate painting-rooms for girls and boys, and Eliza Beech, aged 28, was careful to point this out: They do not associate with the boys, but are kept exclusively to themselves. We have no men in the same department From the experience of many years I can form an opinion as to the general moral and religious character of potters’ children in my department’, compared with others, I think them superior. I never hear anything like vulgar or improper language from any of them; they are respectful, clean and well- conducted.27 In the printing-room, by contrast, the association of men and girls attracted criticism from Sarah Proctor: Their language is often indecent and profane; this is I think attributable to their associations with young and vulgar men. The printing-room is indeed a bad school for children.’28 A paintress, born in 1907, had this to say to me about people in the clay end, as she remembered them THE STAFFORDSHIRE POTTERY INDUSTRY 137 a hundred years after Scriven: The people are different, shouting and gawping at each other—where we have got to be nice and quiet. It’s the posher part, you know what I mean? You are quiet and painting.’29 Mrs Rugeley, a caster-sponger born in 1939, gave the view from the clay end: Decorators go to work all make-up and best clothes and high heels, and totter up and down. Clay end don’t: they go tidy, but change—trashers [old shoes] and something as is comfortable, because we have to stand all day, you see, whereas they sit all day.30 In spite of the characterization of the clay end as ‘rough’ and the decorating end as ‘posh’, many women still work in the clay end, fettling and sponging, handling (which means sticking in handles), and casting. Mechanization has come to casting on many potbanks. Belt casting has further taken away any possibility for workers to feel they are more than a cog in a machine: where this method is used, one group of workers fills the moulds with slip, others tip it out, and others extract the ware from the moulds. In some of the factories in the big groups, plates are made by dust-pressing: there is more mechanization on those firms which must bear the added expense of numerous managers. The Clean Air Act of 1960 sounded the death-knell of the bottle oven, whose pollution had covered the Potteries with soot throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Tunnel kilns began to come in from 1912, fired first by coal and then gas. In the 1960s, some factories were still going over from steam to electricity, facilitating further technological change and mechanization of processes. From the 1960s onwards, amalgamations and takeovers have led to a situation in which a few large international groups dominate the industry. But with the recession of the 1980s and early 1990s, little firms are mushrooming again, able to respond quickly to changes in taste, able to do small orders and to fulfil the demands of up-market trade. Once again one can find owners capable of turning their hand to almost any process in their works. Mechanization is sometimes minimal, and freehand decoration, particularly sponging, is in fashion again. As the little firms try to find their feet, the giants shed workers, bemoaning the state of the economy both in Britain and abroad. As the pottery industry tightens its belt, men have won back jobs in the clay end, but as machine-minders. Women, however, do much of the craft work in the clay end. Paradoxically, women are considered suited to the decorating end, but men do much of the most prestigious work in decorating. Management is largely made up of men. The Women’s Advisory Committee of the union no longer meets (at the time of writing). Women continue to be paid less than male workers, and to combine paid work with what are seen as their domestic duties. Older workers and part-timers (women) are the first to lose their jobs in a recession. Those that remain work longer hours.

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