Clio Women, Gender, History

38 | 2013 Working Women, Working Men

Xavier Vigna and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/279 DOI: 10.4000/cliowgh.279 ISSN: 2554-3822

Publisher Belin

Electronic reference Xavier Vigna and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (dir.), Clio, 38 | 2013, « Working Women, Working Men » [Online], Online since 15 September 2014, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/279 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cliowgh.279

This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020.

Clio 1

This issue of Clio aims to give visibility to the women and men who have become invisible during the de-industrialization of the West. By reintroducing the dimension of gender to a history of industrialization on a global scale, it draws attention not only to the double domination undergone by female workers, both as wage-earners and as women, but also to their practical actions in the « arts of resistance », as well as to mutations in the forms of working class masculinities. Ce numéro entend donner une visibilité à celles et ceux qui sont devenus invisibles avec la désindustrialisation occidentale. En réintroduisant la dimension de genre dans une histoire de l’industrialisation envisagée d’une manière globale, il souligne la double domination subie par les ouvrières, en tant que salariées et en tant que femmes, mais aussi leurs pratiques des « arts de la résistance » comme les mutations des masculinités ouvrières.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Editor for the English online edition: Siân Reynolds Clio’s book reviews [“Clio a lu”] are not translated into English. They are available in French on the website of Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire : https://journals.openedition.org/ clio

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Xavier Vigna and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel

Gender and machine-breaking: violence and mechanization at the dawn of the industrial age (England and France 1750-1850) François Jarrige

Gender, collective bargaining agreements and skills in French industry in the first half of the twentieth century Laure Machu

The revenge of the bra. Seamstresses’ bodies in the lingerie industry (1968-2012) Fanny Gallot

Filmed images of women factory workers: work, gender and dignity, variations on a classic trilogy (1962-2011) Nicolas Hatzfeld

Italian working men’s masculinities in the latter half of the twentieth century Andrea Sangiovanni

Making Men, Making History: remembering railway work in Cold War Afro-Asian solidarity Jamie Monson

Complementary points of view

Hazing amongst blue-collar workers in France in the contemporary period Xavier Vigna

Working-class against their will: “Recognized” refugees in France and Bulgaria in the early twenty-first century Albena Tcholakova

Current research

Gender history and labour history: intersections Xavier Vigna and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel

Women workers in South America (nineteenth-twentieth centuries) Mirta Zaida Lobato

Documents

Women as “wool-workers” and “sex-workers” in Athens (fourth century BCE) Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet

The Worst of Adventures: the Knight Yvain and the silk weavers (late twelfth century) Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet

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Wives, mothers, and property owners: women artisans in early modern Turin Beatrice Zucca Micheletto

Testimony

Paper-making in Scotland in the twentieth century Texts introduced by Siân REYNOLDS Siân Reynolds

Appreciation

Gerda Lerner (1920–2013). Pioneering Historian and Feminist Linda Gordon, Linda K. Kerber and Alice Kessler-Harris

Varia

Gender and written culture in England in the Late Middle Ages Aude Mairey

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Editorial

Xavier Vigna and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel Translation : Siân Reynolds

1 On 24 April 2013, in a suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, 1,127 workers of both sexes died when the Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed. Over 1,000 further workers were injured (many had limbs amputated). This tragic event, which was by no means inevitable, tells us that these garment workers, who were extremely badly paid (between 28 and 53 euros a month on average in 2012) were employed in appalling conditions at the risk of their lives. And yet the employers’ spokesman from the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers’ and Exporters’ Association was brazen enough to declare in public that the death of the workers was less important than “the interruption to production caused by disturbances and strikes”. The wage-earners of the Rana Plaza factory were the victims not only of firms sub-contracting for huge multinational companies, but also more generally of the means of production, marketing and consumption characteristic of globalization in the twenty-first century.1 In this case however, there is a degree of complexity behind the problem. Kalpona Akhter, a former child worker from the age of twelve in the garment industry, who was sacked for her union membership and now runs the Centre for Worker Solidarity in Bangladesh, argues that despite the very low wages, working in a textile factory enables women to escape from patriarchal authority, and is thus a source of empowerment, giving them a degree of autonomy.2 This example indicates, should anyone doubt it, that we have to venture outside the French or French-speaking context, if we are to have a sense of the diversity of conditions in the world of industrial work, and prompts us to interrogate this history by considering different timescales and levels.

Labour history: a new lease of life?

2 After a period in the wilderness, labour and working-class history appears to have regained legitimacy in the French social sciences: two special issues of sociological journals were devoted to it in 2013,3 and the present volume is our contribution. Like all our issues, this number of Clio FGH has been in preparation for some time, and the

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original intention was to survey new developments in historical studies of working men and women during the fifteen years since the third number of Clio (1996) entitled “Métiers, corporations, syndicalismes” [Trades, guilds and unions]. The change of heading – from organizational structures to individuals – is significant. Until the late 1980s, the principal question being discussed within labour historiography was class formation, a topic revolutionized by studies of the nineteenth century, in books which have become classics (by E.P. Thompson, Michelle Perrot, Yves Lequin) and prolonged into the twentieth by Gérard Noiriel. Among English-language historians, research was thereafter stimulated by the debates surrounding the linguistic turn,4 while on both sides of the Atlantic, many studies of working people appeared, taking the form, among others, of monographs devoted to particular firms, industries, cities, or industrial areas. We intend therefore to extend the move away from the history of class formation and labour organizations, and towards that of groups and individuals caught up in the many varieties of domination and subordination. In this context, a gendered approach enables us to restore the complexity of social configurations and types of action. A further original feature of this collection of articles lies in its special attention to the use and representations of workers’ bodies.

3 The revival of labour history deserves recognition and welcome, since this field of study pioneered a historical approach aiming to rescue working men and women, their work, practices, beliefs, hopes and struggles, from “the enormous condescension of posterity”, as E.P. Thompson put it.5 That is why historians writing about women, in particular Michelle Perrot and Joan Scott – but also those who have worked on subaltern studies like Dipesh Chakrabarty6 – did their early research in this area. In a related field, one where the dynamic of gender was not initially taken into account, historians of the transition from slavery to wage labour have in recent times insisted on the importance of gender in this revolutionary change in the organization of work.7 Labour studies were and are indeed full of promise, through the light they can shed on certain dominated segments of social formations, but also because of the historiographical rethinking they have prompted.

4 This renewal of interest also allows us to dispel some confusion, fostered by the undeniable de-industrialization which for almost forty years has been taking place in Western Europe. That confusion lies in linking the numerical decline of the working class with its disintegration, for while the numbers of industrial workers of both sexes have fallen, that by no means signifies that the working class has disappeared from all branches of activity, in particular in the service sector and in publicly-owned enterprises,8 (difficult though the definition and borderlines of the category “working- class” may now be). We might point out too that certain countries undergoing rapid industrialization may also experience local closures and/or sectorial crises: examples include the Indian textile centre of Kanpur, once considered the Manchester of eastern India,9 a clothing factory in the central Mexico, 10 or the traditional heavy industry region in north-east China, where ironworkers, faced with unpaid wages or unemployment, have mobilized and in some cases rebelled.11

5 On the other hand, the disintegration of the western working class has undoubtedly had an impact on the kind of questions historians ask. That is why, rather than specifically tackling the large, often all-male, occupational groups, from miners to dockers, printers or metal workers – the likeliest groups to make up the big battalions of the labour movement, and traditionally seen as icons of masculinity – this number of Clio

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devotes considerable space to some very contemporary phenomena, and/or to practices often disowned by the labour movement, such as hazing/ragging (le bizutage) or machine-breaking. Similarly, trade unions will not be analysed as such, even if in the interests of a globalized history it would no doubt have been useful to reconsider their role, as is suggested by the torture and death in April 2012 of one of the leading organizers of the Bangladeshi Centre for Worker Solidarity.12 Nor have we moved far beyond Nayan Shah’s approach in Clio HFS, back in 1996, to the interplay between class, gender and race:13 his analysis of the conflict between the US trade unions and Chinese immigrants seen as a threat to white unionized workers, brought together the ideas of racial danger, gendered roles, and the consumption practices of white women.14

Viewing labour history through the prism of gender

6 The French edition of this issue is entitled “Ouvrières, ouvriers”, [literally Women workers, men workers: the French term often carries the connotation of industrial or factory work]. This indicates our intention of giving gender a central place in labour history, which has not always been sensitive to it. Our original priority was to make visible the invisible, in particular women factory workers: in the first place by estimating their actual numbers – no easy matter either for Latin America (Mirta Zaida Lobato) or for Western Europe;15 and also by examining their image on film (Nicolas Hatzfeld). We have further included another invisible group, the very contemporary case of Bulgarian refugees of both sexes, who have been obliged to take manual work [in France] in order to survive their move into an exile marked by suffering, although such suffering is differently experienced by men and women (Albena Tcholakova). Our dossier further includes studies of the work process itself and representations of it, with some examples from pre-industrial periods: there are articles on women weavers in Champagne in the twelfth century (Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet) and on Turin in the early modern period (Béatrice Zucca Micheletto). Secondly, we have chosen to examine how historical discourse is modified by a gendered approach. Francois Jarrige examines the famous episode of machine-breaking which disrupted the process of industrialization from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, showing that women played a notable part in this episode, something which had not been sufficiently brought out by even the best British historians of the working class. Laure Machu considers the process of classifying trades, skills and occupations, through a study of the discourse of trade unionists, employers and government representatives in France, from the Popular Front to the Liberation. When embarking on such studies, the question of sources is a particularly difficult one: few sources survive to tell us about the decision-making processes underlying the definitions and classifications of skill, apart from those which simply reproduce, for example, a male discourse categorizing women machine-breakers and rioters as deviants, “impulsive, irrational, uncontrolled people, naturally inclined to violence” (François Jarrige). As evidence of the male gaze, the sources themselves display a wealth of prejudices and stereotypes. First-person oral testimony from workers of both sexes in Scottish paper-making in the early twentieth- century (collected by Ian MacDougall and presented here by Siân Reynolds) is therefore precious, even if it must be subjected to the same critical analysis as written sources.

7 Lastly, the approach through gender makes it possible to revisit the history of masculinities and to draw attention to the crisis in working-class virility. The history of

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masculinities – which are not necessarily always in crisis, in fact – allows us to reconsider practices either confined to a minority or disapproved of: such as machine- breaking and “ragging”or “hazing” (Xavier Vigna). The latter – the practice of subjecting new entrants to various forms of pain or humiliation – may sometimes take on a very explicitly sexual dimension, and has no doubt helped to reinforce the frequent representations of working-class masculinity as linked to virility.16 In the late 1970s, the entire factory world underwent a major transformation in this respect, as a number of processes both combined with and reinforced each other. The decline of the trade-union movement, in Europe at least, prompts us to explore the crisis of working- class virility of which it considered itself the standard-bearer. In the Italian example (Andrea Sangiovanni) men’s “natural” virtues – strength, courage, leadership, honour, aggression – were exalted, as if the only qualities which could resist and give meaning to existence were those that defined the working man as an alpha male.

New perspectives

8 Three contributions to this issue pose original questions about the relationship between work and the body. Despite the scarcity of sources relating to Ancient Greece, Violaine Sebillotte-Cuchet questions the connections between women wool-workers and sex-workers, slavery, and the exploitation of women’s bodies, in the Kerameika district of Athens in the fourth century BCE. The contributions by Fanny Gallot and Andrea Sangiovanni analyse ways in which the work they were doing constructed and modified representations of the bodies of male and female workers in the 1970s: in one case, through a study of the product – women’s lingerie (Gallot) – in the other, through the concern for appearances and consumerist practices (Sangiovanni).

9 It was also our intention that this issue would open up the dated limitations of a Franco-centric history, and we have therefore chosen articles forming concentric circles radiating outwards through Europe towards the rest of the world, edging towards a kind of global social history:17 firstly, because some developments challenge national specificities and invite re-evaluations; secondly, because major changes affecting labour history are today operating on an international scale. Similarly, the gendered history of migration and diasporas makes it possible to connect global history and world social history, ideally leading to a global labour history,18 which is still very much work-in-progress, with the appearance of some recent conspicuous manifestoes. 19 So the very contemporary comparison between France and Bulgaria describes the Bulgarian refugees in France who have been obliged to take manual jobs, but also considers migrants to Bulgaria. Among the latter are the young black men, for whom racial stereotypes represent both an advantage – in finding work in advertising – and a source of undervaluing oneself (Albena Tcholakova). Jamie Monson, in her analysis of the memoirs of retired workers from the Tanzania-Zambia railway completed in 1976, opens a window on to a global history in which Chinese experts offered African labourers a “fraternal” example of “work well-done” by Maoist standards, and thus took part in the construction of the “new man” during the building of East African socialism.

10 Exploring even further-flung territories geographically, several books included in the reviews section of this number of Clio [available only in the French edition] describe very young Chinese women being forced to migrate to find jobs, obliged to sleep in

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dormitories alongside the factory, and working long hours at starvation wages – so their situation can readily be compared with that of young female factory workers in late nineteenth-century Europe. Nevertheless, these girls were by the same token escaping the patriarchal domination typical of their native villages, and were able to develop the ability to act and adapt to different contexts. Nicolas Hatzfeld cites another case in the Far East, that of the Vietnamese woman director of the film Rêves d’ouvrières [Working Women’s Dreams]. Armed with a light movie camera, she proposed to interview a worker in a dormitory in Hanoi: the response was that she should put the camera down and come and sit beside the worker so that “she could talk to her like a sister” – indicating the new relations shaped by this situation, and the dimension of sisterhood which was stressed by the film director. Alongside the Bangladeshi case cited above, such examples make visible the way in which, in the early years of the millennium, a new factory context is appearing in Asia, one that is strongly characterized by the gendered organization of work.

11 The analysis of labour history in Latin America (in Mirta Zaida Lobato’s survey of current research) reveals – with a chronological time-lag in the industrialization process, linked to the lateness of internal colonization – a number of points in common with many European countries: the difficulty of estimating the number of women workers, spatial segregation and wage disparity between men and women, the mutually reinforcing of values of subordination and complementarity, the tensions between virtue and work. Another subject that emerges is the existence of strict moral codes which may be accepted or rejected: it would be worth re-examining one phenomenon that could be found not only in the French textile industry of the nineteenth century, marked by Catholicism, and in the secular municipal socialism of the 1930s, but also in the Peronist state in Argentina after the Second World War – the celebration of “Queens of Labour” – Reines du travail. We could also take another look at the slogan “equal pay for equal work”, which may have different meanings depending on who articulates the demand, men or women, and in what context. If one takes the standpoint of “intersectionality” as defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw,20 (although the term itself may be challenged, as it was recently by Danièle Kergoat)21, gendered labour history still has plenty of sites to open up, and older questions to revisit. This number of Clio aims to be part of that adventure.

12 Note: this issue also contains an article on the major American historian, Gerda Lerner (1920-2013). The next number will carry an article on our colleague Rita Thalman, who also died in 2013.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BERLANSTEIN, Lenard (ed.) 1993. Rethinking Labor History: essays on discourse and class analysis. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

BILGE, Sirma. 2009. Théorisations féministes de l’intersectionnalité. Diogène 1/225: 70-88.

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CHAKRABARTY, Dipesh. 1989. Rethinking Working-Class History. Bengal 1890 to 1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43/6: 1241-1299.

GLYMPH, Thavolia. 2008. Out of the House of Bondage: the transformation of the plantation household. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HOLT, C. Thomas. 2000. “The Essence of the Contract”: the articulation of race, gender, and political economy in British emancipation policy, 1838-1866. In Beyond Slavery: explorations of race, labor, and citizenship in post- emancipation societies, ed. Frederick COOPER, 33-60. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

JOSHI, Chitra. 2005. Lost Worlds: Indian labour and its forgotten histories. London: Anthem Press.

KERGOAT, Danièle. 2012. Se battre disent-elles.... Paris: La Dispute. Coll. « Le genre du monde ».

KESSLER-HARRIS, Alice. 1990. A Woman’s Wage: historical meanings and social consequences. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

LEE, Ching Kwan. 2007. The unmaking of the Chinese working class in the northeastern rustbelt. In Working in China: ethnographies of labor and workplace transformation, ed. Ching Kwan LEE, 15-37. London: Routledge.

MARUANI, Margaret, and Monique MERON. 2013. Un Siècle de travail des femmes 1901-2011. Paris: La Découverte.

PIGENET, Michel. 2002. À propos des représentations des rapports sociaux sexués : identité professionnelle et masculinité chez les dockers français (XIXe-XXe siècle). Le Mouvement social 198: 55-74.

POMERANZ, Kenneth. 2007. Social history and world history: from daily life to patterns of change. Journal of World History 18/1: 69-98.

PLANKEY-VIDELA, Nancy. 2012. We are in This Dance Together: gender, power and globalization at a Mexican garment firm. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

PRASHAD, Vijay. 2013. Bangladesh : le coût humain des prix bas. Courrier international 1175: 22.

SCULLY, Pamela, and Diana PATON (eds). 2005. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham: Duke University Press.

SEWELL, William H. 1980. Work and Revolution in France: the language of labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SHAH, Nayan. 1996. White Label et “péril jaune” : race, genre et travail à San Francisco, fin XIXe- début XXe siècle. Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 3: 95-115.

THOMPSON, Edward P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth. Penguin [1st edition 1963. London: Gollancz].

THIBAULT, Martin. 2013. Ouvriers malgré tout. Enquête sur les ateliers de maintenance des trains de la RATP. Paris: Raison d’agir.

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NOTES

1. Prashad 2013: 22. 2. Libération, 25 May 2013, p. 4. 3. “Tenir au travail”, special number of Travail, genre et sociétés, 29, 2013; “Usine, ouvriers, militants, intellectuels”, special number of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 196-197, 2013/1-2. 4. Berlanstein 1993; Sewell 1980; Kessler-Harris 1990. 5. Thompson 1968 [1963]: 13. [The French translation of this book has recently been re-issued by Points-Seuil, with a preface by François Jarrige, 2013]. 6. Chakrabarty 1989. 7. Holt 2000; Scully & Paton 2005; Glymph 2008. 8. Thibault 2013. 9. Joshi 2005. 10. Plankey-Videla 2012. 11. Lee 2007: 15-37. 12. Prashad 2013: 22. 13. The use of the term “race” has been the subject of an ongoing debate in the social sciences in France. See the journal Mots, 33, “Sans distinction de race”, 1992. 14. Shah 1996. 15. See the article on Current Research in this number of Clio. 16. Pigenet 2002. 17. Pomeranz 2007: 69-98. 18. NB : The English terms World or Global Labour History pose a problem in French, since travail denotes both “work” and “labour”. The French term more usually found is “histoire ouvrière”. 19. Cf. No 241 of Le Mouvement social: “Travail et mondialisations” edited by Marcel Van der Linden, December 2012, and the special number of Workers of the World, edited by Christian De Vito: “Global Labour History” 2013, on line at the following address (consulted 3 September 2013): http://workersoftheworldjournal.net/images/WW%203%20final.pdf 20. Crenshaw 1991-1992: 1242-1243: “I should say at the outset that intersectionality, is not being offered here as some new totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender considered here. Indeed, factors I only address only in part or not at all, such as class and sexuality, are often as critical in shaping the experiences of women of color. My focus on the interesections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed”; cf. Bilge 2009. 21. The French edition contains a review of Danièle Kergoat’s book Se battre disent-elles… Paris: La Dispute. 2012.

AUTHORS

XAVIER VIGNA Xavier Vigna teaches contemporary history at the University of Bourgogne (Centre Georges Chevrier) and is a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. His research on the 1968

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period and factory workers sets the French case in a West-European context. Publications include L’Insubordination ouvrière en France dans les années 1968 (2007) and Histoire des ouvriers en France au XXe siècle (2012). [email protected]

MICHELLE ZANCARINI-FOURNEL Michelle Zancarini-Fournel is emerita professor of contemporary history at the University of Lyon I, and a member of the Rhône-Alpes historical research laboratory. Recent publications include Luttes de femmes: un siècle d’affiches féministes [with Bibia Pavard) (2013); Les Lois Veil: contraception 1974, IVG 1975 [with B. Pavard and Florence Rochefort] (2012); Engagements, rebellions et genre dans les quartiers populaires en Europe (1968-2005) [co-ed. with Sophie Béroud et al.] (2011); La France du temps présent (1945-2005) [with Christian Delacroix] (2010); and Le Moment 1968: une histoire contestée (2008). [email protected]

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Gender and machine-breaking: violence and mechanization at the dawn of the industrial age (England and France 1750-1850) Le genre des bris de machines : violence et mécanisation à l’aube de l’ère industrielle (Angleterre-France, 1750-1850)

François Jarrige Translation : Siân Reynolds

1 In July 1837, a mill owner in Chalabre, a small industrial town in the Aude département in south-west France, announced his intention of installing a mule-jenny, in order to increase production. In this small cloth-manufacturing centre of 3,500 residents, where more than half the population was employed in the woollen mills, the news provoked consternation. The workers immediately gathered in front of the workshops, calling for “the departure of the workman installing the machine, and the destruction of the machine”. In the following days there were further assemblies, and the authorities feared that the unrest would spread to the surrounding villages. Although the forces of order were mobilized, the machine was finally smashed during a riot on 22 July. The authorities immediately issued a gendered interpretation of the conflict. According to the mayor, it was women who had urged the workmen to break “the mechanism”. The involvement of women also impressed the editor of the local newspaper, L’Aude, who reported that they “made themselves conspicuous by their fury and violence”, and “had shown themselves to be the most determined in this operation of senseless destruction”.1 When the conflict was over, one woman spinner was indeed sacked, because “she boasted of having been actively involved in breaking the machines”.2

2 This event provides evidence of women’s involvement in opposition to the machines which would deprive them of income in the early industrial age. As opposed to the usual image of machine-breaking as a predominantly male activity, there are many signs that women were present in force. Machine-breaking corresponds to a

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widespread and ambivalent practice, affecting many groups in the period from the late eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century.3 This form of industrial violence, a recurrent feature in England and France during the industrial revolution, has essentially been depicted as carried out by men, implying the predominance of a virile conception of social relations and labour conflicts.4 Women long remained invisible in accounts of popular protest, being seen as active principally in bread riots and confined to their roles as providers of nourishment for the family, with primarily domestic preoccupations.5 But far from being marginal or invisible, gender played a decisive role in these outbreaks of industrial violence: in fact it was a determining feature of social relations, and shaped representations of the conflict and the strategy of protest. In the 1970s, Michelle Perrot was the first historian to insist on women’s presence “in the movement against machines”. She saw them in a dual role: an “auxiliary” one as “housewives”, defending the family’s standard of living, but also as fully-engaged actors, rebelling against “the machine which was to destroy the domestic mode of production to which they were particularly attached.”6 The place of women in this type of incident is ambiguous, because the descriptions given by the authorities were themselves shaped by the prejudices and stereotyping characteristic of the male gaze. The image of the woman of the people as wild and violent, driving her husband to acts of disorder, is linked to the naturalization of woman as an instinctive being.

3 In this re-examination of the topic of machine-breaking in the trans-national area of France and England within which machines, people and experiments circulated, we shall question the role of gender identities in the construction of the industrialist consensus of the early nineteenth century. For women, industrialization was not a smooth process towards modernity. Contrary to a tenacious myth, which Michelle Perrot long ago demolished, the machines introduced in the nineteenth century were not always helpful to women: they did not automatically “open up to them a promised land of wage-labour and thus of equality and advancement”.7 Studying gender and machine-breaking means reflecting at several levels: it is necessary to look at the social effects of automation, but also at the various local interactions during the troubles. When they rioted, women workers were seeking to defend their jobs. They did not intervene solely as “home-makers”, preoccupied with the cost of living, but as full-time “workers”, who were just as threatened as the men with unemployment. To acquire legitimacy and volume for their protests, since their voices were excluded from the political arena, they had to enlist the support of other groups and take the men along with them.

The first mechanized machines: cotton-spinning in the late eighteenth century

4 The place of women in the early days of the industrial economy has been much discussed and is the subject of a copious literature.8 Their situations were both varied and changeable, depending on sector, region and period, consequently being so diverse as to warn us against any rapid generalizations. We also know that their relationship to machines was socially constructed, so that women were employed in the early days on looms, and later on sewing machines, on account of so-called feminine nature, the dexterity of women’s fingers, and their supposed affinity with “soft” materials.9 Overall, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mechanization tended to

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reinforce this division of labour and women’s subordination. Whereas complex machines requiring skill to operate them were usually assigned to men, those used for repetitive tasks under supervision were handled by female labour.

5 Machine-breaking first appeared in cotton manufacture, which was the earliest sector to be mechanized in the late eighteenth century. Cotton-spinning was a new activity in Europe, and it spread through the countryside, fitting into the rhythms of agricultural labour, outside the system of guilds and regulation. The vogue for indiennes (printed calicoes = cotton fabric in bright colours) was a stimulus for new forms of organizing production.10 Growth in demand prompted innovation.11 The traditional spinning wheel still in operation had changed little, and it took four spinners to provide enough work for a single weaver. British manufacturers of printed cotton sought to increase productivity at the point where mechanization would be easiest, in order to compete in American markets with textiles from India.

6 It was in this context that the famous early spinning machines appeared.12 In 1764, James Hargreaves perfected his spinning jenny, the first machine to work eight spools of thread at the same time, by turning a handle (fig. 1).13 The first jennies were intended for domestic or family production, and would not greatly interfere with the proto-industrial organization of spinning thread. Nevertheless on 14 June 1769, a number of workmen, anxious about competition and the lower price of products made in this fashion, broke up jennies in a riot which has remained famous in Lancashire. About fifty people armed with cudgels destroyed five machines at Turton, and one in Bolton, while another machine was destroyed at Bury in the days that followed.14 Several workmen were arrested, but they were not given heavy sentences.

Figure 1: Reconstruction of Hargreaves’s spinning jenny.

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7 Until about the 1780s, it was women who spun thread, either with spinning wheels or using primitive jennies.15 And the first machines were in fact specifically intended for female labour, since women were considered as more docile and less likely to protest.16 Later, when the increased number of bobbins required greater strength from the operative, men entered the cotton mills, using the more complex machines known as mule-jennies, while women continued to use the smaller jennies.17 Cotton-spinning gradually became men’s work, with spinners being considered skilled workers.18 In the space of a generation, the new cotton-spinners, coming from the ranks of men who had previously been artisans, had transferred into the cotton mills the norms of skilled labour: higher wages, greater autonomy, and being in control of a team (since a cotton- spinner on a machine would hire and pay his own assistants.) Far from leading to de- skilling and a loss of autonomy, the first generation of mechanized spinning machines rather favoured the emergence of a new male labour aristocracy. Writing in 1835 about the technical changes in spinning, Andrew Ure commented that “a man is no longer deemed to be deserving of contempt for exercising the functions of a spinner”.19 The rapid disappearance of resistance to the spread of mechanized spinning is explained in part by this process of re-skilling and masculinization which accompanied the new methods of manufacture.

8 In France, pressure for mechanization was less determined, and cotton manufacture long continued to be dominated by proto-industrial labour in the countryside.20 And at first the adoption of jennies which could be fitted into traditional work structures did not cause problems.21 But in 1788-1789, a combination of the widespread social crisis, the events in Paris during the outbreak of the Revolution, and increased imports of the new English processes changed the situation. In autumn 1788, the workforce employed at a manual spinning mill in the Falaise region (Calvados département, Normandy) blamed the machines for the crisis. On 11 November 1788, a crowd of women even announced its intention of burning a spinning machine which had recently been installed in Falaise. While the royal prosecutor tried to calm the protesting women, 2,000 male workers armed with sticks attacked the machine and set it alight. In early December, the women spinners of Argentan, a small textile centre some twenty kilometres to the south-east, “saw with distress the installation of machines for spinning cotton.”22

9 In the spring of 1789, as the crisis deepened, hostility to machines was once more expressed in the drawing up of the cahiers de doléances (grievance registers). During the rest of that year, agitation against machines in France was inseparable from the revolutionary context, the hopes it aroused, and the Great Fear in the summer.23 The question of the effect of machines on female labour was at the heart of the debate. One tract published in Caen denounced “the English spinning machines that people are trying to get established in France”, since they “have paralysed the worker’s arm and dealt a death-blow to the industry of the women spinners.”24 Over the summer, riots broke out in Rouen on 14 and 20 July, and again in August, before the city’s unrest was quelled. Violent protest vanished from Rouen thereafter, but broke out elsewhere, such as in Troyes, where the women spinners rioted in 1791 after manufacturers tried to install jennies there, forcing the authorities to move the machines out into the countryside. In Falaise on the other hand, protests by women continued for longer. In 1794, another riot greeted the arrival of a carding machine.25 In Germinal year XII (March 1804) a crowd made up of women and young people threatened to destroy a

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machine installed in the suburb of Guibray.26 By attacking the new procedures for spinning cotton, the spinners were also protesting against the cut in wages decided by the mill owners. To justify the measure, the employers had insisted that they needed to reduce their labour costs in order to remain competitive with the workshops already equipped with machines.27 In 1806, the authorities once more feared the outbreak of unrest: “the competition from the spinning machines has made the price of hand- spinning fall so low that a very competent spinner sitting at her wheel for 15 or 16 hours a day can hardly earn 5 francs,” the prefect reported.28

10 As in England, women workers deprived of their occupation gradually turned towards weaving, during the first half of the new century. Mills powered by hydraulic energy and equipped with mule-jennies had spelt the end of domestic spinning by women, but by the same token, they made it possible to increase demand for domestic weaving. This change can be seen from the statistics: whereas they were virtually excluded from weaving in the eighteenth century, women sometimes formed the majority of weavers by mid-nineteenth century.29

The world of craft: gender and mechanization in the nineteenth century

11 Long considered a specifically female activity, cotton-spinning was the focus for the most substantial mobilization by women. But their protests can also be found in other sectors in the early nineteenth century, as mechanization spread to many social spheres. Thought to be more docile, and often confined to unskilled work, women could be replaced by machines more easily than men. That is why, without ever being in the majority, their protests against machines were a recurrent phenomenon during the first half of the century. Such protests took many forms, of which violence was only the most obvious. Domestic outworkers for example often resisted the machines in silence, by intensifying their manual production, or by appealing to eminent local men. In Brittany in the 1830s, one mayor described how he had been addressed by women workers: I was out hunting, when I went past a farm, and was called in by some women spinners who were in a cowshed where the warmth enabled them to work in comfort. One of them said to me: “Is it true, monsieur le maire, that la Mère Canique [= la mécanique] who can spin 7 doités [local term for bobbins] at a time is coming here? We will not be challenged if we strangle her, will we? For she will be taking the bread from our mouths and that of our children.”30

12 By spinning flax, these women were providing a supplement to agricultural incomes. Their dispersal through the region and their lack of organization prevented them from making a public protest against the coming of spinning machines, but they were equally concerned about the consequences of their introduction.

13 The place and role of women in this dispute often depended on their position within the work process, and thus varied by trade. In the woollen industry, longer-established and better organized than cotton, but also more slowly changed by mechanization, machine breaking seems to have been predominantly a male phenomonon. The croppers (cloth dressers) for example, who prepared cloth, were well-paid men, proud of their skill and competence (fig. 2).31

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Figure 2: Croppers (cloth-dressers) in an all-male workshop.

14 In England as in France, they worked in teams in small, exclusively male workshops, where apprenticeship with all its rituals plus the physical strength required to do the work fashioned a virile worker’s identity. Protesting against the arrival of the new shearing frames in the first third of the nineteenth century, they were defending the masculine world in which they worked. And indeed, manufacturers of the new machines claimed that thanks to their new methods the proud croppers, reputed for their insubordination, could be replaced by “a couple of boys or women”.32 In woollen production, women were recruited into disputes at first as back-up troops, supporting male demands. This was the case in England in 1811-1812, during the famous Luddite riots in Yorkshire, where the croppers placed themselves under the mythical leadership of Ned Ludd, in order to destroy the new mechanical processes.33 The same was true in France under the Restoration, in the riots affecting cloth centres in the south, like Lodève and Bédarieux; at Salvage in the Tarn, a few years later, women workers incited the men to destroy the shearing machine, calling them “cowards and making a lot of noise.”34

15 Among craftsmen and the world of urban trades, the sexual division of labour was shaped by the legacy of the guilds and craft practices such as apprenticeship and compagnonnages. Craftsmen sometimes protested against machines, which were blamed for the feminization of the workforce: one example was that of the compositors in the printing trade in both England and France, who complained about the typesetting machines introduced from the 1840s on, in which they saw a strategy to weaken them by using women workers who were less well paid.35 In craft-dominated trades, women were often relegated to tasks like cutting or stitching, which were the easiest to mechanize. Machines which replaced women workers cutting shawls started to appear for instance towards the end of the 1830s, provoking riots among women workers in Paris and a riotous assembly in Lyon in 1831.36 In hat-making, mechanization arrrived on the initiative of the French Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, which launched a competition, won by an engineer from Boston in the United States.37 The machine in question (for cutting the fur from animal skins) was fairly simple: a

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frame made of wood or metal topped by a transmission shaft equipped with cutting blades. These helicoidal blades were moved by a wheel turning against a vertical fixed knife.38 Using this machine, a workman could accomplish the work previously done by three women. But its introduction led to a series of protests. In 1841, in Bordeaux, one factory owner tried to bring one into his workshop: the workers protested, the firm was boycotted, and anyone who went on working there was fined.39 In Paris, according to Barberet, some women workers even attacked the engineer who had naturalized the machine in France: Each one of these cutting machines replaced a dozen female fur-cutters who, being exasperated at finding themselves without work, assembled not only to destroy the machines but also to kill the engineer. For several weeks they followed him about, armed with their scissors, and he had to take every precaution necessary in such case not to be a victim of the progress which he had contributed so much to bring about.40

16 In March 1848, a petition by “two or three fur-cutters” in Paris once more denounced the “machines which have been adopted by the richest masters… which stay the arms of the women workers, aggravate their wretched condition, and take the bread from their mouths.”41

Figure 3: Fur-cutting machine.

17 Fur-cutting rapidly became separated from hat-making, and the women workers were the victims of the change.42

18 There were several riots by women in the Normandy textile industry in mid-nineteenth century, when machines were brought in to do tasks traditionally handled by women: one such was in Elbeuf, when a machine was introduced to speed up the sorting [triage] of raw wool, and in La Ferté-Macé (Orne) in 1853 when an automatic cotton spooling machine was installed. Both these tasks were considered specifically as women’s work. On Friday 22 May at about 8 p.m., a huge crowd of workers, men and women, gathered in front of the factory belonging to the mill owner Aroux in Elbeuf. To cries of “Down with the machines!” the crowd maintained protests for several days, bordering on

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insurrection, and only the arrival of troops and about a hundred arrests finally brought the disturbances to an end.43 Elbeuf was at the time one of the major centres in France for the production of woollen cloth. Thanks to the newly-popular craze for “novelties” (articles which changed yearly), local industry quickly expanded. The complex organization of production meant that several large factories coexisted alongside a varied number of handicraft workers. Proto-industrial structures were still in place, and only the operations of triage and preparation were concentrated in the town. Triage [= lit. sorting] consisted of checking wool for foreign bodies. It was work which required a good acquaintance with the raw material, and a set of technical accomplishments or qualities regarded as typically feminine: dexterity, concentration, attention to detail. In 1846, 59% of the adult women in Elbeuf were employed in textiles, mostly in the preparatory processes of winding, sorting or framing (bobineuses, trieuses, trameuses) or in cloth preparation, burling, lining and patching (épinceuses, doubleuses, rentrayeuses). Félix Aroux was an important millowner, whose factory employed 400 workers of both sexes, not counting temporary recruits. In the 1840s, Elbeuf was becoming a force in transnational trade networks. The raw wool was increasingly imported from Buenos Aires where it was cheaper, but it was also more difficult to work, because of the vegetable matter which was invariably tangled up in the fleeces. It was to resolve this problem that Aroux bought from England a a new machine to speed up the process. According to rumours in the workshops, it would replace the many ouvrières trieuses (women who picked matter out of the wool) and increase the poverty which was becoming evident with the deepening crisis in Normandy textile production. This event invites us to ask questions about a little- known group of women, but also to redefine the gendered identities of work. The transformation of working methods in mid-century did in fact lead to the rapid masculinization of the work of sorting. From the end of the Second Empire, in the 1860s, Alcan tells us, sorting was usually handled by men. He puts the exclusion of women down to their “natural weakness” making them ill suited to this type of work. Their strength is not sufficient to move the bales around… the fatigue caused by constant handling of fleeces all day long prevents them carrying out as much work in the same time as a man, That is doubtless why the first sorting process is almost everywhere reserved for men.44

19 In many sectors, women were the victims of mechanization which drove them out of the workshop, as the figure of the working woman was being marginalized and driven back into the home and domestic life.45 Even in the agricultural sector, where women’s labour was ubiquitous yet often invisible,46 women were sidelined by the appearance of threshing machines, which appeared early in the century in England and from the 1840s in France. There is no room here to discuss this complex question at length, but previously, at the height of the season when threshing had to be done, the whole family would normally be called upon, since there were many associated jobs to be done, adapted to every level of strength. But threshing machines, by providing fixed work stations, tended to impose a regular structure on the intensity of the labour needed, and thus to exclude women and older men. In his study of machine-breaking in English farming in the 1830s, the famous Captain Swing riots, Carl Griffin demonstrated how women’s presence was underestimated by observers and the authorities, to the point of becoming invisible, although they played an active part in the protests and wrote threatening letters.47

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Violence, collaboration and exchange: the gender of protest

20 The outbreak of machine-breaking thus touched some very different sectors and mobilized women in a number of ways at the start of the industrial age. The examples mentioned above do not by any means exhaust the question. When they rioted, working women were seeking to defend their jobs: they were not simply intervening as “carers and feeders of the family” but also as workers, threatened just as men were by the new procedures. But strikes by women are rare during this period, and above all were not recognized as legitimate by the elites and authorities who defined the norms of the public arena.48 To provide weight and legitimacy for their protest, women therefore had to obtain the support of other groups and persuade male workers to accompany them. That is why working women often appear at first as supporting forces during the troubles. During a riot, different roles fell to men and women. In Vienne (Isère, south-east France) women participated in the unrest, encouraged their husbands, and kept up their ardour by inciting them to violence: during records of interrogations when cases came to court, we can catch occasional glimpses of their role. Marie Berton, a worker aged 28, was accused of saying in public, “Ah, if all the women had been like me, there wouldn’t be any machines.”49

21 At times, a rhetorical strategy used by women whose voices were suppressed was to emphasize their role as wife and mother. Thus the women spinners in Châlons (Marne) in 1811 petitioned against the introduction of mule-jennies; they hated the “English machines” and claimed that among their own numbers, “there are some who can expect no help from their husbands […] who are away in the army.”50 While the men were away fighting English troops, the women were combatting machines they significantly described as “English”. A priori, machine breaking would seem to originate in a culture of violence and dominant masculinity in which women had little place And it is true that most of the violent incidents, in England as well as in France, seem to have been carried out by young men who had entered a craft with its traditional institutions, and whose identity had been shaped by their contact with hard physical work, where virility was exalted as a central aspect of craft culture.

22 Conflict and struggle were also the occasion for some “gender trouble”, that is for the challenging of the traditional frontier between the sexes. The atmosphere of carnival and disguise offered convenient ways to reduce the responsibility of the rioters. In England, witnesses mentioned examples of cross-dressing during the Luddite riots. The uprisings mimed the features of carnival: Luddites breaking machines sometimes disguised themselves as women. In February 1812, several workmen in Yorkshire, dressed as women, destroyed the shearing frames. In April, two weavers dressed as “wives of General Ludd”, led several hundred men to Stockport to smash the power looms.51 A drawing from the time shows “General Ludd” leading an attack dressed in woman’s clothing (fig. 4).52 As well as being a practical way of becoming unrecognizable and hiding whatever one was carrying, adopting a female identity also had a wider symbolic function. It freed men from full responsibility for their actions, by enabling them to blame the alleged “propensity to disorder” of women. This transvestism may also have its origins in the charivari, a form of protest and punishment enacted against individuals thought to have transgressed the norms of the community.53 It further

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refers to the desire for protection and reassurance on the part of a gendered work culture in crisis, as mechanization threatened working-class identity.

Figure 4: “The Leader of the Luddites” [Working-Class Movement Library]

23 By this instrumentalization of sexual identities, men could be relieved of responsibility and blame it on women’s natural “disorderliness”.54 In France, however, dressing in women’s clothes as a device seems to have been uncommon. In one example, during the revolt against fur-cutting machine in Paris in September 1831, the authorities noted that In the case of one woman, whose gestures were no less energetic than her speech, people thought that the dress, shawl and hat with which this person was attired were hiding a man, not a woman, so the order was given to arrest her. But the so- called woman took off her borrowed hat and shawl and disappeared into the crowd. 55

24 The authorities did not decide to arrest this individual until they finally realized that he was indeed a man.56

25 In 1853 in La Ferté-Macé, the introduction of a winding machine by the mill owner Frédéric Lainé provoked an assembly “composed for the most part of women […] in front of the manufacturer’s house.” The women threatened by competition from the machine assembled, crying ‘Down with the machine! Destroy it!”57 But in this case, it appears that “rival mill owners, who would be unable to compete with Lainé when he installed his machine [had incited] the women winders to riot and smash it.”58

26 The instrumentalization of this riot is as much evidence of the fierce competition between manufacturers, as of the inability of the authorities to envisage autonomous action by women.

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Impunity and repression: women’s violence before the courts

27 In France as in England, the rigour with which offenders were punished varied according to their sex. Even if the debate about the judicial treatment of violence by women is far from being closed, we know that during bread riots, women were often deemed “irresponsible” and punished less severely.59 The judicial authorities hesitated to define transgressive acts committed by women as crimes, preferring to treat them as misdemeanours, to be tried in a lower court. The representations which the authorities had of the nature and gravity of offences and the motives assigned to the acts of rioters modified the severity of sentences.

28 In England, only a few women were sentenced after the Luddite and Swing riots. Repression of machine breakers varied as norms fluctuated. In France too, women were only rarely sentenced for taking part in machine-breaking. In two cases of groups entirely composed of women, Montmartre in Paris in 1831 and La Ferté-Macé in 1853, they were sentenced respectively to one month, then 15 and eight days in prison. The nine women charged in Paris in 1831 had turned up on the doorstep of the manufacturer, and had been arrested by the officers of the law stationed there to protect the machines. Despite their “somewhat determined resistance”, they were imprisoned as ring-leaders. The writer of the account in the Gazette des tribunaux [Journal of law reports] our only source for the incident. was surprised by the rioters’ appearance: The account of the events contrasted strangely with the attitude of the defendants during the trial. Young and pretty for the most part, they kept their eyes modestly lowered and spoke only with hesitation, none of them presenting those marked male traits, hoarse voices, and overall gestures, voices, expressions and demeanour which had seemed to us to be the attributes of the female rioter. 60

29 Expecting to find himself faced with deviant women corresponding to the stereotype of the woman criminal, the reporter discovered young and timid women workers. In masculine discourse, the “female rioter” was par excellence a deviant figure: her body language had to symbolize gender confusion, her features and voice had to be subversive of female identity which, in the nineteenth century, was widely identified with that of the mother caring for her family. Insistence on the excesses of women rioters is frequent in accounts of popular assemblies In men’s view, rebel women were impulsive, irrational and unruly creatures, naturally inclined to violence.61

30 Incitement to violence was a frequent accusation levelled at women during these riots. In Nantes in 1830, the male “sand-fishers” destroyed a machine recently installed to dredge sand out of the Loire. One of the workers who stood trial stated that “the women who were standing on the river bank were shouting at us to hurry up and help the others who were already attacking the machine”.62 It was a frequent defence offered by men that women had driven them on. At Chalabre in 1837, women were supposed to have pushed men to break the spinning jennies and according to the mayor, “it was possible that nothing would have happened if a multitude of women, mostly married to the male spinners, had not come to sow disorder by exciting them and driving them to revolt.”63

31 The nine women cloth cutters in Montmartre were eventually sentenced to one month in prison, their offence being only that of “assembly”, while charges of rebellion and

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attacks on the forces of order were dropped. The relative leniency of the sentence is explained by the fact that the machine was not in the end broken, and no damage was done to private property. But in this type of affair, sentences were usually quite light. In Elbeuf, 23 women were among the 109 people arrested the day after the riot (21%).64 But there was only one woman among the 18 workers who stood trial at the assize court in May (under 2%).65 So the repression varied, and the circumstances seem to have dictated the severity of the punishment.

*

32 If gender is taken into account in relation to machine-breaking, it invites us to reconsider the role and weight of gender identity in modes of popular protest at the dawn of the industrial age. Gender crops up in many ways during these conflicts. Women figure either as victims of an industrial male order or as beneficiaries of an industrialization which was revolutionizing the work process. Their presence during riots against machines varies according to sector and period. Although most often auxiliaries, they were sometimes central figures in the riot. In spite of extremely fluctuating circumstances, and sources and accounts which tend to marginalize them and make them invisible, women did contrive to intervene as agents, fighting in everyday ways to defend their rights and their claims. Technological change was, from the very beginning of the industrial era, changing definitions of social and gendered roles, and as it developed further it shaped, reified and subverted gender relations in workshop and factory. Workers’ identities were constructed through a great number of interactions and mediations, especially via technology, which contributed to construct the field of what was possible in the way of working-class emancipation, as well as the forms of domination.

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THOMIS, Malcolm, and Jennifer GRIMMET. 1982. Women in Protest 1800-1850. London: Croom Helm.

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TIMMINS, Geoffrey. 1996. Technological Change. In The Lancashire Cotton Industry: a history since 1700, ed. Mary B. ROSE, 29-62. Preston: Lancashire County Books.

URE, Andrew. 1835. The Philosophy of Manufactures, an exposition of the scientific moral and commercial economy of the Factory System. London: Knight.

VERLEY, Patrick. 1997. L’Échelle du monde. Essai sur l’industrialisation de l’Occident. Paris: Gallimard.

VIAL, Jean. 1941. La Coutume chapelière. Histoire du mouvement ouvrier dans la chapellerie. Paris: Librairie Hatchuel.

WADSWORTH, Alfred Powell. 1965 [1st edn 1931]. The Lancashire wage-earners before the factory system. In The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780, ed. Alfred P. WADSWORTH and Julia DE LACY MANN, 311-408. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

NOTES

1. L’Aude, Journal des progrès, 1, 29 November 1837 2. Archives départementales (AD) Aude 5 M 26: report on the events in Chalabre of 20-22 July 1837. 3. Jarrige 2009. 4. In Eric Hobsbawm’s pioneering work on machine-breaking, including the 1952 article, the question of gender is not raised. 5. The literature in both France and Britain is enormous: see Cardi & Prouvost 2012. 6. Perrot 1978. 7. Perrot 1998 [first published 1983]: 177. 8. Schweitzer 2002; Tilly & Scott 1987. 9. Chabaud-Richter & Gardey 2002. 10. Chapman & Chassagne 1981: 215. 11. Verley 1997: 160-189; Griffiths, Hunt & O’Brien 1992: 881-906, and 1996. 12. Timmins 1996.

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13. The figure shows a reconstruction of the process perfected by Hargreaves, based on data from the 1770 patent. See Aspin & Chapman 1964. 14. Rose 1963-1964: 67. 15. Wadsworth 1965: 403-404. 16. Berg 1987; Honeyman 2000: 44. 17. Pinchbeck 1930: 148; Busfield 1988: 72. Often known simply as mules in England, the mule- jennies as they were known in France, combined the original jenny with the powered waterframe. 18. Boot 1995. 19. Ure 1835: 105. 20. The specificities of the French market made competition concentrate on the quality of the product rather than its price, Verley 1999: 176-177. 21. The earliest model of a jenny was smuggled into France by the English engineer John Holker in 1771; by 1786, there were 600, Ballot 1923: 40, 47-49; Reddy 1981: 51. 22. Archives nationales Paris (AN), H1 1420: list of alms distributed 14 December 1788. 23. Alline 1981; Horn 2006: 116-117. 24. Vœu des six sergenteries, faubourgs et banlieue de la ville de Caen pour la suppression des méchaniques de filature, Caen, 1789, quoted by Levasseur 1901: 769. 25. Désert 1965: 761-786. 26. AD Calvados, Z 1324, no 4229: report by the police commissioner, 3 Germinal Year XII. 27. AD Calvados, Z 1324, no 1324, no 4239: 5 Germinal Year XII. 28. AD Calvados, M 8619: “État des manufactures existant dans la ville de Falaise et son arrondissement” 1806. 29. Gullickson 1986: 110; Désert 1988. 30. Enquête sur les fils et tissus de lin et de chanvre, Paris, Imprimerie royale, 1838, 1 vol (XLVIII + 326 p.): 73. 31. Roland de la Platière, Encyclopédie méthodique. Manufactures, arts et métiers, Paris, Panckoucke 1784-1790. 32. Notice sur une nouvelle machine à tondre les draps appelée tondeuse ou Forces Hélicoïdes, Paris, Vve Courcier, n.d.; see Jarrige 2012. 33. Thompson 1968: 608 ff. 34. AN BB 18 1398: report by the general prosecutor, Toulouse, 15 October 1841. 35. Jarrige 2007. 36. Jarrige 2009; Rude 1969: 345. 37. Prize announcement in Bulletin de la société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale in 1829. 38. Julia de Fontenelle 1830: 77. 39. Vial 1941: 45. 40. Barbaret 1886: 51. 41. AN, F 12 4898: petition from the women cutters of rabbit fur to have the machines abolished, 13 March 1848. 42. Julia de Fontenelle 1830: 226 (fig. 3). In the 1860s, a woman operative could cut the fur from 200 skins in a week at most, whereas the machines were now able to cut 1200 skins a day. 43. AD Seine-Maritime 10 M 330: reports on the agitation against the “sorting machines”; L’Industriel Elbeuvien, 24, 28, 31 May 1846; Becchia 2000: 521; Largesse 1990. 44. Alcan 1866: 342. 45. Scott 1987. 46. Burnette 2004. 47. Griffin 2012. 48. Cohen 2010; Thomis & Grimmet 1982. 49. AD Isère, 4 U 97: law file: interrogation of the accused for the court of assize.

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50. AD Marne, 187 M 7: petition by the women workers of Châlons, 20 June 1811. 51. Binfield 2000. 52. http://www.wcml.org.uk. 53. Thompson 1972. 54. Davis 1975: 124 ff.; Farge 1991. 55. Gazette des tribunaux, 8 September 1831. 56. Steinberg 2001. 57. AN, BB 18 1526, file no 4019; report of 20 December 1853. 58. AN, BB 18, 1526, file no 4019: according to the prosecutor, 24 December 1853. 59. Bouton 1990; Dhaussy 2006. 60. Gazette des tribunaux, 12 October 1831. 61. Perrot 1979. 62. AD Loire-Atlantique, 7 U 99: interrogation of Alexis Boré, 18 October 1830. 63. AD Aude, 5 M 26: report by the mayor of Chalabre, 21 July 1837. 64. AM Elbeuf, J 1335: list of those arrested in 1846 after attack on the factory. 65. This was Anne Savignac, a wool sorter aged 25, who was one of the twelve people sentenced: in this case to three months in prison.

ABSTRACTS

Machine-breaking was a recurrent form of violence in England and France at the beginning of the industrial era. Historians have mainly depicted this kind of protest as a male practice, suggesting the dominance of a masculine conception of social relations and labor disputes. Yet, far from being marginal or invisible, women were well represented in these conflicts, not only as auxiliaries to men but also as participants, combatting the machines that affected their domestic production and their lifestyle. In considering the gender of machine-breaking, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, to study how machines reconstruct work in gendered terms, with significant differences across sectors and regions; secondly, it seeks to examine how gender identities shaped popular protests at the start of the industrial age.

Les bris de machines constituent un type de violence récurrent en Angleterre et en France au début de l’ère industrielle. Ce type de violence contestataire a été peint essentiellement sous les traits d’une pratique masculine, impliquant le triomphe d’une conception virile des rapports sociaux et des conflits du travail. Loin d’être marginales ou invisibles, les femmes sont pourtant bien présentes dans ces conflits, à la fois comme auxiliaires des hommes mais aussi comme actrices de plein droit insurgées contre les machines qui portent atteinte à la production domestique et à leur mode de vie. En examinant le genre des bris de machines, il s’agit à la fois de suivre comment les machines requalifient en termes sexués le travail, avec des différences importantes selon les secteurs et les régions, mais aussi comment interviennent les identités de genre dans le façonnement des protestations populaires au début de l’âge industriel.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: industrialisation, protestation populaire, mécanisation, genre, ouvriers Keywords: industrialization, popular protest, mechanization, gender, workers

AUTHORS

FRANÇOIS JARRIGE François Jarrige teaches contemporary history at the University of Bourgogne (Centre Georges Chevrier). His research is on the social history of technology and labour. Publications include Au temps des tueuses de bras: le bris de machines à l’aube de l’ère industrielle (2009). [email protected]

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Gender, collective bargaining agreements and skills in French industry in the first half of the twentieth century Genre, conventions collectives et qualifications dans l’industrie française du premier XXe siècle

Laure Machu Translation : Ethan Rundell

1 What did the pay scales that were developed in the first half of the twentieth century mean for French women factory workers? This question, which historians have begun to explore, constitutes the point of departure for the present article.1 Before answering it, it is worth recalling the historical background.

2 At the turn of the century, industrial wages still largely escaped negotiation between labor and employer unions. And although the pay hierarchies of the time were based on multiple criteria – age, sex, seniority – qualification or skill was not necessarily taken into account. In particular, women constituted a separate category in which wages sometimes depended entirely on age.2 As collective bargaining agreements expanded, especially in the interwar years, minimum pay scales based on the worker’s recognized skill gradually became widespread.3 When they were negotiated, pay scales represented a victory for wage-earners who hoped for recognition of their skills. Their development required a prolonged effort to inventory the existing trades and jobs that were to be classified. It also presupposed reaching agreement regarding the criteria according to which skill was to be defined. A polysemic term, “skill” could just as easily refer to a formal certificate as to the degree of complexity of the tasks to be carried out in the workplace. As a result, the measurement of skills as reflected in wages was subject to debates and conflicts regarding the value of a paper qualification or of the skills required in the performance of a job. However, judgments regarding the qualifications required for a given job could also vary depending on the sex of the person who held it.

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4 Recognition of skill was therefore the product of a series of social relations: on the one hand, relations between employer and trade union organizations and, on the other, relations between the sexes.

3 In order to examine the degree of skill respectively assigned men and women’s work by trade and employer unions, the present article compares the negotiations that took place in the garment [vêtement] and metalworking industries in France in first half of the twentieth century. The garment industry was a sector traditionally dominated by women, in which the small size of firms remained an obstacle to attempts to rationalize production. In metalworking, expansion of the number of female workers coincided with an extension of the scientific organization of labor [sometimes known as Taylorization]. As far as the sources permit, I will attempt to reconstruct the debates that accompanied the development of pay scales.5 In keeping with the chronology that guided the gradual codification of pay scales, I will begin by examining the earliest agreements reached during and after the First World War, before considering the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements under the Popular Front of 1936, and the development of the Parodi-Croizat decrees following the Liberation (late 1940s).

The First World War: women are included in classification for the first time

4 At the start of the twentieth century, collective bargaining agreements were still uncommon: in 1903, they only applied to around 5 per cent of the active population.6 They were the exclusive privilege of recognized skilled trades, and of very little benefit to women. Above all, collective negotiation developed in urban artisanal occupations employing an almost exclusively male workforce, such as the printing and building trades. It was almost completely absent from the world of the factory. Like the largely female labor force of textile and shoemaking factories, the personnel of metalworking factories rarely benefitted from collective bargaining agreements.7

5 During the First World War, the joint consultation system established by the French state to oversee labor relations allowed for an extension of collective bargaining, to the benefit of the female workforce. Collective bargaining took place in various sectors, including the clothing, and metalworking industries, but also in chemicals and shoe manufacture. It was in the first two sectors, however, that the negotiation dynamic was most robust. The strikes of winter 1916-1917, in which women workers played an active role, led the Minister of Armaments, Albert Thomas, to intervene in setting working conditions and regulating conflicts.8 The first result of placing the workforce of the war factories under state supervision was the 16 January 1917 decision fixing wages there.9 The Ministry of Armaments’ decisions revised the principles of labor classification, in line with the extension of the process of rationalization.

6 The first texts privileged a trade-based classification centered on the skilled worker [l’ouvrier professionnel]. They distinguished between two groups: skilled or partially- skilled workers and non- or semi-skilled workers. The latter had not undertaken an apprenticeship and were referred to as manœuvres spécialisés. Skilled workers were ranked according to their mastery of the trade; experienced workers were contrasted with novices, known in French as “petites mains”.10 The ministry decisions referred to “unskilled women” [femmes non-professionnelles] alongside other women working as

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“screw machine operators”, “polishers” and “varnishers”, all of whom were classified as skilled [professionnelles]. In the Paris region (but nowhere else), this promotion was consolidated by the definition of the female skilled worker as one “who has successfully undergone the same tests as those required of [male] skilled workers”.

7 The decisions rapidly gave another meaning to the category of manœuvre spécialisé. The March 1917 general mechanics pay scale specified that workers unqualified to do the relevant trade test, and those assigned to machines were to be classified in this category. Thus, the hand caster was classified as skilled, while the machine caster was assigned to the category of manœuvre spécialisé.11 The characteristics of the job thus determined the skill level to which it was assigned. For the male workforce, this understanding of skill entered by the back door: it is only to be found in pay scales. For the female workforce, by contrast, it was systematized, with the decisions of Fall 1917 giving a generic definition of the ouvrière spécialisée based on the type of work she was assigned. Thus, the 13 November 1917 decision specified that by “ouvrière spécialisée, we mean the woman worker who is suited to repetitive labor or to operating special machinery or equipment”.12

8 As one can see, progress in the area of classification was ambiguous. In Paris, the decisions represented an undeniable advantage, since they recognized and affirmed the skills acquired by women workers.13 As requested in the proposal submitted by the Union Corporative des Mécaniciens de la Seine [Seine Mechanics’ Corporative Union], women no longer fell under a single generic category.14 Henceforth, they were distributed among three skill levels. But the creation of the category of ouvrière spécialisée confirmed women’s assignment to the new machine-tending jobs that had resulted from the division and automation of labor. Employing women in these jobs allowed them to be classified as doing jobs which did not require much skill. Indeed, employers believed that women were “naturally” made for just such repetitive and monotonous work. The adroitness and dexterity needed to carry out their jobs were overlooked and not considered to qualify them as being “skilled”.15

9 In the area of remuneration, the 16 January 1917 decision set out the principle of equal pay and then immediately undermined it. For the same job, women were ultimately paid between 18 and 25 per cent less than men.16 Against trade unions which supported demands for pay equality – in the secret hope that this would lead to women’s exclusion from the workforce – employers claimed that this differential reflected the additional costs of employing women. In contrast to the British case, French women’s integration into the armament factories marked the end of thoughts of pay equality.17

10 Unlike in metalworking, the collective bargaining agreements reached in the garment industry in 1918-1919 (some of which were renewed until 1930) retained a trade-based definition of skill. The agreements inventoried several trades in which advancement reflected the acquisition of professional knowledge. At the summit of the hierarchy were the skilled trades of cutting and pressing. These were traditionally reserved for men who had undergone a long apprenticeship.18 The intermediary steps – the jobs of stitching and piecing, performed by female piecers and stitchers – were considered unskilled tasks.19 Before the war, this strict partition was vigorously defended by trade unions dominated by skilled male workers, for whom female labor was a threat to men’s skills and wages. Several strikes broke out demanding that women be prohibited from cutting and pressing.20

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11 Nevertheless, the agreements reached in the postwar years opened some skilled trades up to women. In Lyon, the agreement signed in 1919 abolished sexual segregation. While pre-war rates tended to exclude women from cutting and pressing,21 this agreement entitled them to equal pay with men.22 In Lille, the agreements of 1919 and 1923 mention several female presser posts,23 but the cutting trades remained exclusively male. Moreover, a division of labor continued to be observed within pressing, with male pressers given the task of working with so-called “noble” materials, such as woolen cloth, while female pressers only worked with twill or canvas.24

12 The comparison between Lille and Lyon shows the degree to which progress for women workers depended on the general evolution of trade union structures on one hand, and women’s advancement within trade unions on the other. In Lyon, agreements were negotiated by the Syndicat général du vêtement [Garment Industry Trades Union], an industry-wide union representing all categories of worker. As a union leader, Jeanne Chevenard signed all the texts negotiated in the interwar years.25 In Lille, the agreements were negotiated by the Intersyndicale de l’habillement [Clothing Trade Union Group], created in 1919. The new structure brought together the Chambre syndicale des coupeurs [Cutters’ Trade Union], the Syndicat des presseurs et des presseuses en confection [Trade Union of Garment Industry Pressers: both sexes] and the Syndicat des ouvrières en confection [Women’s Garment Industry Trade Union], each of which enjoyed complete autonomy.26 The survival of the separate trade unions thus favored the maintenance of sexual segregation in the union and at work. In fact, the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements was exclusively conducted by the [male] cutters and pressers. As a professional trade union, the Chambre syndicale des coupeurs aimed to protect its members’ skilled status via a Malthusian form of professional regulation. This depended on the defense of apprenticeship as the sole path for joining the trade, limiting the number of apprentices and excluding women from them.27

13 The First World War thus created the opportunity for women to be recognized as skilled workers. But little progress was in fact made. The strategies of worker and employer unions complemented one another. While the former defended male hegemony in the most highly skilled trades, the latter profited from women’s relegation to the new jobs created by the division of labor to deny them skilled status.

The Popular Front: improvement or regression?

14 In most sectors, collective bargaining began to fall off in the 1920s, with employers once again determining wages. The Popular Front thus represented a break with the immediate past. The strike wave, followed by the 24 June 1936 law on collective bargaining agreements, resulted in the signature of thousands of agreements. Inspired by thinking on labor relations reform with origins in the aftermath of the First World War, the new legislation profoundly reorganized the status of collective bargaining agreements. In particular, it required them to contain a scale setting out the hourly pay for each occupational category.28 The principle of classifying workers thus became widespread. While this represented an undeniable advance for the working class, the degree to which it benefitted women remains to be seen.

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Permanence of the sexual division of labor

15 The skill scales were determined in a gendered way: on the one hand, they excluded women from jobs defined as skilled; on the other, they tended to deny that skill was involved in those jobs women were allowed to perform. In keeping with the decisions of the First World War, the Parisian metalworking industry’s collective bargaining agreement assigned two meanings to the notion of skill. “Professional workers” [ouvriers professionnels] exercised trades in which apprenticeship “can lead to award of a CAP [certificat d’aptitude professionnel, or vocational training certificate]”. By contrast, specialized workers [ouvriers spécialisés, or OS] performed jobs that did not “require knowledge of a trade in which apprenticeship can lead to award of a CAP”.29 In one case, the classification was defined by the certificate. In the other, it was defined by the characteristics of the post. For the OS was not defined by the absence of an apprenticeship, but rather by his/her place in the division of labor, as indicated by the distinction between “OS machine posts” and “OS assembly and miscellaneous” posts – the former being more highly remunerated.

16 As no CAP existed for women in metalworking, the preference given to the CAP as a path for accessing the status of professional worker was to their disadvantage.30 Job- specific descriptions of skill further disadvantaged them. The worker’s relationship to the machine was the primary criterion chosen for distinguishing among jobs. Jobs that only required simple manual operations were exclusively held by women. Thus, in electrical construction, there were only “female wire spoolers by hand” and “female copper winders by hand”. Though held by both men and women, the job of “copper winder by machine” was classified “OS machine” when held by men, and “OS assembly and miscellaneous” when held by women.31 This inequality reflected a denial of the skill demanded by the specialized and repetitive jobs performed by women. Employers tended to regard the qualities required for this type of work as innate to the female sex; women thus had no claim to special remuneration.32 By virtue of this principle, which was applied in other sectors as well,33 work performed on “small motorized machines” was systematically classified OS assembly and miscellaneous. By contrast, work requiring physical strength – a masculine trait – was seen as justifying additional remuneration. “Heavy laborers”, an exclusively masculine category, were paid 20 per cent more than “ordinary operators”.

17 In contrast to metalworking, the Popular Front reforms confirmed women’s access to skilled trades in the garment industry – specifically, those of presser and cutter. But the feminization of skilled jobs did not necessarily constitute a resounding advance. While the texts recognized the progressive mechanization of cutting and pressing, this work continued to be marked by a sexual division of labor, with machine-tending posts reserved for women. In Paris, the men’s garment industry agreement included an exclusively female category – “female machine cutter” – which was paid less per hour than that of female hand cutter.34 In Lyon, the agreement only mentioned the post of “male presser”, with female presser jobs divided between the “small press” and the “large press” – the former being paid 10 per cent less than the latter.35

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Expansion and hierarchization of female tasks

18 As victims of a distribution of tasks that relegated them to the least skilled jobs, did women nevertheless profit from the Popular Front agreements in such a way as to improve their position within the division of labor? In a number of sectors, collective bargaining agreements in fact brought significant regression. The Parisian metalworking industry agreements unquestionably accentuated the sexual division of labor. Running counter to a trend of increasing recognition of women as skilled workers since the First World War, the Popular Front’s collective bargaining agreement reduced the spectrum of women’s skilled trades. The jobs of woman production grinder, metal turner and milling-machine operator (all of which were previously mentioned in employer surveys) no longer featured in the collective bargaining agreement of 1936.36 Other trades were downgraded. Women enamellers, who in 1930 were paid 20 per cent more than specialized workers, became “women enamel coaters”, a job classified as OS assembly and miscellaneous.37 As in Paris, the Saint-Etienne metallurgical agreement downgraded the jobs of most skilled female workers.38

19 But the deepening sexual division of labor manifested in these texts should not obscure the progress brought about by agreements in other sectors or regions. Many agreements allowed the spectrum of female tasks to be enlarged and hierarchized. By taking a task’s degree of difficulty into consideration, these texts allowed for greater nuance in the ranking of women’s work. The wartime pay scales and interwar statistics of the Lyon metals industry only take note of three groups: manœuvres and manœuvres spécialisées [unskilled women operatives]; 39 “women having some skills”; and “women with specialized skill”.40 The Popular Front agreement classified women into four groups, depending on the characteristics of their job. The first of these groups included unskilled laborers, storekeepers and those performing simple manual tasks.41 The second was that of the “machine-minders and hand assembly workers”. The third brought together women operating “small presses” and performing “light machine work”, a group to which women welders, staplers and paint-sprayers were annexed. The fourth group, finally, consisted of women who worked on “large presses and large machines”, performing “demanding work on high-risk machines”. A job’s difficulty and/or demanding nature was thus recognized and rewarded. These four groups were respectively paid 3.40, 3.75, 4.10 and 4.40 francs per hour,42 making for a 29 per cent pay disparity between the least skilled women workers and those who handled heavy machinery.

A wage policy favorable to women

20 Furthermore, a wage policy favorable to women partly compensated for the maintenance of the sexual division of labor. Under the impact of the Matignon Agreements’ readjustment of abnormally low wages, the Popular Front’s collective bargaining agreements introduced a reduction of pay differentials for equal work. The scale of the reduction nevertheless varied between sectors. In both Paris and Lyon, the metalworking industry’s agreements established a 20 per cent wage gap. For women workers in Lyon, the pay differential with their masculine counterparts was thus reduced by half. In the clothing industry, by contrast, the male-female wage differential was still 50 per cent. In this sector, the reduction of pay discrepancies was

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less systematic. For the trained personnel of the men’s garment industry, wage differentials remained almost unchanged between 1918 and 1936.43

21 An examination of the trades and wages allotted to the female workforce thus reveals that collective bargaining agreements were far from unanimously favorable to women. This disregard, as well as the variable effect of collective bargaining agreements on the situation of the female workforce, is explained by the fact that both employer and labor unions pursued strategies unfavorable to women.

Trade unions and women’s wages during the Popular Front

22 Although they took part in the strikes at the time of the Popular Front,44 women were marginalized in the negotiations because fewer of them were present as trade union representatives.45 While women’s participation in negotiations would not on its own have guaranteed that the resulting agreement would be to their advantage, there is no doubt that their absence left the way open to discriminatory discourses and practices. Neither at summit (confederal) level nor within individual trades unions was reducing gender inequalities a priority. Though this attitude may have been the result of indifference, or of a misunderstanding of the realities of sexual segregation, it more likely reflected the fact that, like the ideology of the “male breadwinner”,46 distrust of the female workforce lived on within the French labor movement. It should be recalled that, in 1933, the CGT demanded equal pay for men and women in order to put an end to “conflict between the sexes on the labor market” while at the same time asking for an increased family allowance in order to free mothers from the need to seek “extra income” – this latter on the grounds that one could not absolutely forbid women’s work.47 At the individual trade union level, sexual inequalities were part of a whole range of wage inequalities. Priority was given to reducing regional inequalities by reaching a national agreement, rather than to reducing inequality between the sexes.48

23 In most branches, the classification scales proposed by worker representatives at the local level seem indicative of a strategy that consisted of demanding better pay for women – perhaps in order to eliminate female competition – while at the same time preserving male prerogatives in access to skilled status.49 In the Parisian metalworking industry, where the trade union seems to have admitted the inevitability of women’s employment,50 the union proposals appeared advantageous from the point of view of the overall level of remuneration agreed. But the text put sexual segregation into practice, failing to address the grievances of the female workforce, which had been expressed in the formal demands of the female section of the metalworkers’ union, established in 1935. In the first place, the proposals did not mention the spectrum of female jobs specified by the Groupement des Industries Métallurgiques [GIM: Organization of Metallurgical Industries] wage inquiry, and by the formal demands drawn up by women workers. Next, the trade union project reduced female paint sprayers, fitters, measurers, winders and so on to the hourly rate of the “all-category female worker”, despite the fact that, in April 1936, they were paid more highly than female OS workers.51 The women workers called for these women to be paid 30 per cent more than the female ouvrières spécialisées.52

24 The inequalities left intact by the collective bargaining agreements do not seem to have provoked protest among women workers, either because it was considered that there had been an overall improvement or because their silence reflected their subordinate

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position within the labor movement. At the Liberation, by contrast, the greater number of women trade union officials allowed for some progress to be made.

The Parodi-Croizat decrees: equality won?

25 Following the Liberation, classification scales were included in ministerial decrees. In contrast to the collective bargaining agreements of the Popular Front, the Parodi- Croizat decrees consisted of a vast, state-directed effort to impose order on wages. The decrees were thus national in scale and were all issued in accordance with the same procedure: a “decree fixing wages” defined the general principles of remuneration and the generic categories of semi-skilled/unskilled and skilled worker; “classification decisions” then implemented the classification of jobs within the generic categories supplied by the decree. Although this period is thought of as one of “wage statism”,53 the decrees were elaborated in tripartite collaboration between trade unions, employer organizations and representatives of the state. The reorganization of wage scales took place in a context that was relatively favorable to women. In addition to obtaining the right to vote, their demands acquired greater visibility within the worker’s movement. 54

26 Though of crucial importance, the process by which these decrees were elaborated has received little attention.55 While the question of continuity with the hierarchies of the collective bargaining agreements of the Popular Front has been raised,56 the wages and skills attributed to the female workforce have not been examined. For women, the elaboration of the Parodi-Croizat decrees is a more significant moment than the negotiations of the Popular Front.

27 Initially, the decrees had difficulty establishing the principle of wage equality. The decree of 12 April 1945 regarding wages in the metal industry of the Paris region noted that, “given the same working conditions and productivity, remuneration must be calculated on the same bases for men and for women.” Yet, even as it proclaimed the principle of parity, the text reined in its scope. Indeed, it specified that “in no case shall the minimum rates of women’s wages be more than 10 per cent less than men’s rates.”57 The principle of a 10 per cent differential was debated in the Central Wage Commission. Workers’ representatives spoke in favor of wage equality and it was the employers who asked that discrimination be maintained. The arguments were rather classic, emphasizing the inferiority of the work performed by women and denying their skill.58 In the end, the Gaullist Minister of Labor, Alexandre Parodi, decided the debate in favor of the employers. In contrast to the Popular Front, the measure was sharply denounced in the columns of the CGT press. With the Parodi decrees, women activists protested, “a woman is legally paid less than a man solely because she is a woman.” Women’s committees sent several delegations to the Ministry of Labor to ask for the differential to be abolished.59 Speaking at a CGT conference, Marie Couette brought to the vote a resolution in favor of wage equality.60 Finally, on 10 July 1946, Ambroise Croizat, the new communist Minister of Labor, signed the decree doing away with the 10 per cent differential.

28 While the decrees accepted the principle of wage equality in cases of equal skills, the corresponding classification decisions offered the possibility of maintaining a gendered skill scale. The negotiation of classification decisions therefore played a major role in consolidating the principle of male-female equality. In the metal and clothing

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industries, they allowed women to maintain – and even on occasion improve – the positions they had acquired. In metalworking, the decree adopted the rules established by the Parisian metals industry agreement of 1936. The text thus retained a classification consisting of three categories: unskilled worker/laborer, partially skilled worker [ouvrier professionnel] and skilled journeyman, i.e. a worker having served an apprenticeship. In the last of these categories, the reference to the CAP was retained. This “formal” definition of the trade excluded women from access to the qualification. However, for certain jobs, the scale’s architecture forbade attributing rates of pay that were intermediary between those for the OS and professional categories. The decree thus allowed for a catch-all category of “assimilated to skilled workers” [assimilés professionnels] to accommodate jobs that, though not recognized as fully skilled worker posts, were nevertheless more highly remunerated in 1936 than the OS category.61 Around fifty posts were classified in the “assimilated to skilled workers” category. By taking the gains of 1936 into account, this “practical classification” was advantageous to women; it allowed women’s jobs regarded as skilled that had survived in the Parisian agreement to be preserved. The female “all-purpose spooler” and “polisher” and the “woman wire-welder” thus continued to be classified as skilled women workers. The maintenance of these jobs for women seems to have been partly due to the action of worker representatives within the classification commissions.62

29 While the metalworking industry privileged continuity with the Popular Front, the men’s garment industry [ready-made tailoring] broke decisively with the past. The classification decision no longer classified the workforce by acquired trade status, but rather in terms of posts held and tasks performed. Thus, the scale no longer mentions the term “cutter”, but rather jobs that involved cutting by hand, now classified in the first rank of the fourth category. These were listed as follows: “cloth quilting, canvas tailoring and all lining tracing; all lining cutting with handheld scissors or circular blade machine; unbinding interior cloth and cotton or similar lining with vertical blade machine”. The scale no longer made reference to trades, but rather hierarchized tasks by their degree of difficulty. These new criteria, the origin of which for the moment remains unknown, put an end to the privileges and hierarchies that had governed the trade’s customary organization – the superiority of cutters over pressers, for example, or the exclusion (still in effect at the time of the Popular Front) of women from certain trades. At the local level, male workers strongly opposed this aspect of the reorganization.63 Referring to the disputes to which the new classification of the men’s garment industry had given rise, the Féderation nationale des fabricants français de confection [National Federation of French Garment Manufacturers], which had representatives in the sub-committee responsible for classifications, denounced these attempts to conserve local advantages as severely undermining the impact of the wage reorganization.64

*

30 For the female workforce, the classification scales contained in the collective bargaining agreements and, later, the Parodi-Croizat decrees, represented a two-edged asset. While the scales developed by British employers in the interwar years continued to classify women workers into a common category in which age was the only variable, the extension of collective bargaining in France cast light on the variety of tasks performed by women in many different sectors and the skills these tasks required. The

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development of scales coincided with a policy of increased pay and allowed the differentials with men’s wages to be reduced. But the scales legitimated the sexual frontiers of the division of labor. Women metal workers were excluded from the most highly skilled posts and confined to the lower end of the skill hierarchy. While women workers in the clothing industry had access to skilled trades, it was never on an equal footing with men. The persistence of this segregation reflected a denial of the skill involved in the kinds of tasks demanded of women workers. More precisely, assigning the new posts that resulted from the division and mechanization of labor to women allowed them to be described as unskilled. In this respect, the attribution of skill to a job was inseparable from the sex of the person who occupied it.

31 Examining the course of negotiations over a middle term period reveals the complex interplay of the strategies adopted by the actors involved in defining skill. Trade unions and the state only belatedly became involved in promoting skilled status for women. The attitude of labor unions can partly be seen as a response to the strategy of employers, for whom the feminization of the workforce represented an opportunity to pay lower wages. But it was also the product of a certain indifference – even hostility – towards the female workforce that lasted until the Popular Front. In this context, significant progress was only achieved with the Liberation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEAU, Anne-Sophie. 2004. Un Siècle d’emplois précaires. Paris: Payot.

BLUM, Françoise. 1978. Féminisme et syndicalisme : les femmes dans la Fédération de l’habillement. MA thesis, Université de Paris I.

BURDY, Jean-Paul, Mathilde DUBESSET, and Michelle ZANCARINI-FOURNEL. 1997. Rôles, travaux et métiers de femmes dans une ville industrielle: Saint-Étienne, 1900-1950. Le Mouvement social 140: 27-53.

CASTETS, Jean. 2003. Genre et mixité des certifications professionnelles d’une guerre à l’autre. Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 18: 143-153.

DENIS-MORILLON, A. 1981. Les femmes et le syndicalisme dans la Fédération CGT de l’habillement. MA thesis, Université de Paris I.

DOWNS, Laura Lee. 1995. Manufacturing Inequality: gender division in the French and British metalworking industry: 1914-1939. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press.

FRADER, Laura. 1996. Femmes, genre et mouvement ouvrier en France aux XIXe et XXe siècles : perspectives et recherche. Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 3: 223-244.

FRADER, Laura. 2008. Breadwinners and Citizens: gender in the making of the French social model. Durham: Duke University Press.

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HARDEN-CHENUT, Helen. 1996. The gendering of skill as historical process: the case of French knitters in industrial Troyes (1880-1939). In Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonya O. Rose, 77-107. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

HARDEN-CHENUT, Helen Harden. 2005. The Fabric of Gender: working-class culture in Third Republic France. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

MACHU, Laure. 2011. Les conventions du Front populaire. Construction et pratiques du système français de relations professionnelles. Doctoral thesis. Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre.

MARGAIRAZ, Michel, and Danielle TARTAKOWSKY. 2006. L’Avenir nous appartient. Paris: Larousse.

OLMI, Janine. 2005. Les femmes dans la CGT 1945/1985. Stratégie confédérale et implication départementale. Doctoral thesis. Université de Nancy 2.

OMNÈS, Catherine. 1997. Ouvrières parisiennes : marchés du travail et trajectoires professionnelles au XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.

OMNÈS, Catherine. 2001. Qualifications et classifications professionnelles dans la métallurgie parisienne, 1914-1936. Revue du Nord 15: 307-322.

POGGIOLI, Morgan. 2012. À travail égal, salaire égal ? La CGT et les femmes au moment du Front populaire. Dijon: Presses universitaires de Dijon.

ROBERT, Jean-Louis. 1995. Les Ouvriers, la patrie et la révolution, Paris, 1914-1919. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, coll. « Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon », n°592.

RUDISCHHAUSER, Sabine. 2005. Tarifvertrag und bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit. Überlegungen zu einer vergleichenden Geschichte der Anfänge des Tarifrechts I, Deutschland und Frankreich 1890-1918/1919. http://www.forhistiur.de/zitat/0511rudischhauser.htm.

SAGLIO, Jean. 2007. Les arrêtés Parodi-Croizat sur les salaires : un moment de la construction de la place de l’État dans le système de relations professionnelles. Travail et Emploi 111: 53-73.

SELLIER, François. 1983. La Confrontation sociale en France, 1936-1981. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

SIROT, Stéphane. 1994. Les conditions de travail et les grèves des ouvriers à Paris de 1919 à 1935. Doctoral thesis. Université Paris 7.

VIET, Vincent. 2002. Le droit du travail s’en va-t-en guerre (1914-1918). Revue française des Affaires sociales 1: 155-167.

ZANCARINI-FOURNEL, Michelle. 1993. Collective agreements in France in the 1930s: products, territories, scales. The Saint-Étienne example. In Governance, Industry and Labour Markets in Britain and France: the modernizing state in the mid-twentieth century, ed. Noel Whiteside and Robert Salais, 178-192. London & New York: Routledge.

ZYLBERBERG-HOCQUART, Marie-Hélène. 1978. Féminisme et syndicalisme. Paris: Éditions Anthropos.

NOTES

1. Omnès 1997; Zancarini-Fournel 1993; Chenut 2010. 2. Beau 2004. 3. Machu 2011. 4. Chenut 1996.

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5. It is relatively rare to have access to the minutes of collective bargaining negotiations or projects that give one a precise idea of the actors’ motivations. Cf. Machu 2011. 6. Rudischhauser 2005. 7. For the years 1910-1912, 229 collective bargaining agreements were reached in construction, 15 in printing, 29 in the textile industry and 9 in clothing. 8. Robert 1995. 9. Viet 2002. 10. “Avis émis par le comité permanent de conciliation et d’arbitrage sur l’interprétation de la décision ministérielle du 16 janvier 1917 fixant la réglementation des salaires pour les fabrications de guerre, article 2”, ministère de l’Armement et des Fabrications de Guerre [“Opinion issued by the permanent committee for conciliation and arbitration concerning the interpretation of the 16 January 1917 ministerial decision fixing the regulation of salaries for war manufacturing, article 2”, Ministry of Armament and War Manufacturing]. Tarifs et réglementation des salaires applicables pour les fabrications de guerre de la région parisienne, Paris: Imprimerie nationale. 1917: 8-15. 11. “Décision du 2 mars 1917, tarifs des salaires de la métallurgie” [“Decision of 2 March 1917, Metallurgy Pay Rates”], ibidem: 24. 12. “Décision du 13 novembre 1917”, ministère de l’Armement [“Decision of 13 November 1917”, Ministry of Armament], Deuxième supplément au tarif des salaires applicables aux usines de guerre de la région parisienne, op. cit.: 10-16. 13. Omnès 2001. 14. Archives nationales (AN), 94 AP 138: letter from the Union corporative des mécaniciens de la Seine, 10 January 1917. 15. Downs 1995. 16. “Décision du 16 janvier 1917”, ministère de l’Armement et des Fabrications de Guerre [“Decision of 16 January 1917”, Ministry of Armament and War Manufacturing]. Tarifs et réglementation des salaires… op. cit.: 1-7. 17. Downs 1995: 110-113. 18. Cutting consisted of cutting fabric according to the pattern. Pressing consisted of ironing the article of clothing in order to give it a form once it had been tailored. 19. These two steps consisted of sewing and then assembling the pieces of fabric. 20. Office du travail [Labor office], Statistiques sur les grèves et le recours à la conciliation, 1906. 21. L’Ouvrier de l’habillement, 1906. 22. “Contrat de travail passé à la préfecture du Rhône le 5 juin 1919 entre le syndicat patronal des confectionneurs en gros et le syndicat de l’habillement du département du Rhône”, L’Ouvrier de l’habillement, August 1919. 23. Collective agreement (CA) of the Lille wholesale garment industry, L’Ouvrier de l’habillement, June 1919. 24. L’Ouvrier de l’habillement, 1923. 25. Archives départementales (AD) Rhône, 10 M 582: file of the Syndicat de l’habillement du département du Rhône. In 1920, the union declared 3,500 members, 2,500 of whom were women. 26. Un comité intersyndical à prendre en exemple: Lille. L’Ouvrier de l’habillement. 1923. 27. AD Nord, M 595 103: rapport au Préfet du Nord sur la grève des ouvriers de la confection, 25 December 1931. The cutters categorically refused to allow employers freely to recruit young people and women. 28. Machu 2011. 29. AN F 22 1633: CC des industries métallurgiques de la région parisienne, 12 June 1936, article 19. 30. Castets 2003.

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31. AN CAC 1986 0170, article 200: Sous-groupe A, construction machines et appareillage, définitions proposées. 32. Downs 1995: 222-223. 33. The same argument was used in the hosiery [i.e. knitted goods] industry of Troyes, where the jobs performed by women on small machines were systematically depreciated relative to the jobs performed by men on larger machines. Cf. Chenut 2005: 382-383. 34. AN F 22 1615: CC de la confection pour homme de la région parisienne, 18 July 1936. 35. AD Rhône, 5 UP 35: CC de la confection en gros de Lyon, 16 October 1936. 36. Omnès 1997: 140. 37. Groupement des Industries Métallurgiques (GIM), Enquête sur les taux horaires des salaires, January-February 1930. 38. Zancarini-Fournel 1993: 182. 39. AD Rhône, 10 M 586: recensement des salaires et des professions effectué par la préfecture du Rhône (1928); AN F 22 1633: CC des industries métallurgiques du Rhône, 25 July 1936. 40. AD Rhône, 10 M 586: Chambre syndicale des industries métallurgiques du Rhône, Statistique de payes, March 1935. 41. AN F 22 1633: CC des industries métallurgiques du Rhône, 25 June 1936. 42. AN F 22 1633: CC des industries métallurgiques du Rhône, 25 June 1936. 43. The differential oscillated between 35 and 40 per cent for cutters in Paris and remained at 50 per cent for the male and female pressers of Lille. 44. Blum 1978; Sirot 1994. 45. Zylberberg-Hocquart 1978; Frader 1996; Denis-Morillon 1981; Poggioli 2012. 46. Frader 2008. 47. CGT. Congrès confédéral de Paris. Paris: Éditions de la confédération générale du travail. 1933: 307 ff. 48. Margairaz & Tartakowsky 2006. 49. Chenut 2010. See also the example of the Troyes textile industry. The author indicates that the trade union’s leadership negotiated an agreement that protected the jobs reserved for men. Saint-Etienne activists were for their part driven by a “misogynistic Malthusianism” that defended the “natural need for distinct work spaces for men and women”. Cf. Burdy, Dubesset & Zancarini-Fournel 1997. 50. Frader 2008: 212. 51. Projet de contrat collectif ouvrier. L’Humanité. 5 June 1936. 52. Le Métallo. June 1935. 53. Sellier 1983: 187. 54. Olmi 2005. 55. This lacuna is in part due to the fact that the Labor Ministry’s archives are closed for this period. The collections have not been available for consultation since 2003. 56. Saglio 2007. 57. “Arrêté du 31 mai 1945 relatif aux salaires dans les industries des métaux”, Direction du Travail, Salaires et classifications professionnelles, fascicule: industries du vêtement. Paris: Imprimerie des journaux officiels. 1946: 9-18. 58. AN CAC 1976 0122, article 292: procès-verbal de la séance de la commission nationale des salaires du 10 mars 1945. 59. Marie Couette. À travail égal, salaire égal. La Vie ouvrière. 19 October 1945. 60. Olmi 2005. 61. Saglio 2007. 62. AN CAC 1896 0170, article 209: constructions électriques, compte rendu de la réunion du 15 juin 1945. 63. L’Habillement, August and September 1946.

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64. De la reclassification des travaux. Bulletin de l’industrie du vêtement masculine. 15 January 1946.

ABSTRACTS

The development of collective bargaining during the first half of the twentieth century led to the generalization of wage grids based on the qualification of work. This represented an equivocal gain for women. The elaboration of grids revealed the diversity and the value of jobs occupied by women. They coincided with an economic policy focused on raising low wages, which led to a reduced wage differential with men. But classification grids also institutionalized job segregation by gender. Close examination of the negotiations reveals the complex strategies developed by actors involved in the definition and the evaluation of skill. The state and the unions provided tardy support to the recognition of women’s skills.

L’extension de la négociation collective pendant la première moitié du XXe siècle accompagne la généralisation des grilles de salaires suivant la qualification du travail. Ces dernières représentent un acquis ambigu pour les ouvrières. L’élaboration des grilles rend visible la variété et la qualification des tâches exécutées par les femmes. Elle coïncide avec une politique de revalorisation salariale qui permet de réduire l’écart avec les salaires masculins. Mais elle entérine également les frontières sexuelles de la division du travail. L’examen des négociations entreprises laisse voir le jeu complexe des stratégies déployées par les acteurs impliqués dans la définition et l’évaluation de la qualification. L’État et les syndicats ouvriers ne s’engagent que tardivement dans la promotion de la qualification féminine.

INDEX

Mots-clés: conventions collectives, classifications, qualifications, salaires, Front populaire Keywords: collective agreements, classification grids, skills, wages, Popular Front

AUTHORS

LAURE MACHU Laure Machu is an agrégée with a doctorate in history, and associate member of the Institut des dynamiques historiques de l’économie (IDHE). Her doctoral dissertation on collective bargaining during the Popular Front (November 2010), was supervised by Catherine Omnès, University of Nanterre-Paris-Ouest. [email protected]

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The revenge of the bra. Seamstresses’ bodies in the lingerie industry (1968-2012) La revanche du soutien-gorge. Le corps des ouvrières de la lingerie (1968-2012)

Fanny Gallot Translation : Regan Kramer

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Translator’s note: the French term for “bra” is soutien-gorge, literally “bosom support”.

1 Over the course of the twentieth century, undergarments underwent something of a revolution, as they “are now flaunted, or can be divined at any rate, not for what they are, but for what they have to say about the political dimension of modern society”.1 Indeed, from the Belle Époque onwards, as bodies were gradually revealed,2 feminists demanded an end to the corset or “at least its adaptation to the female body”,3 while hygienists condemned the malformations it caused.4 Little by little, women replaced it with the bra [or brassiere, as it was originally known], recommended as early as 1908 by the couturier Paul Poiret, who, “in the name of freedom”, designed clothes with a new silhouette inspired by the fashions of the “Merveilleuses” from France’s Directoire period [the 1790s] – when dresses were cinched just below the bosom.5 The adoption of the bra became more widespread between the two World Wars, and even though it compressed more than it supported, it was heralded as liberating.6 After World War II, women went back to “their old habits of compression”7 until 1968, when American feminists lashed out against the image of Miss America: their actions led to the term “bra-burners” being used to designate feminists.8 As in the case of the so-called “first- wave” feminists, the body itself was implicated in this act: the idea was to liberate it from the yoke of the bra, deemed to be too oppressive. As an intimate item, the bra constitutes a center of tension between the political and the private, between

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domination and liberation, and between women as passive objects and active subjects. Having been a symbol of the oppression of women’s bodies for American feminists in 1968, what did bras mean in the following years to the women workers who made them in France?

2 The bodies of female seamstresses and other garment workers in the lingerie industry from 1968 to 2012 constitute a heuristic object of observation allowing for several inter-connected levels of analysis that intertwine the timeframe of the factory with the seamstresses’ own private timeframes. As both producers and potential consumers, these women stood at the intersection of two movements: on the one hand, their bodies-at-work deconstructed the product’s intimate nature; on the other, they were confronted on a daily basis with the images conveyed by the company they worked for, and which they ended up assimilating. Their bodies were implicated in a historically particular way,9 because the bras were both items that the women mass-produced and items that they wore. The idea is not, therefore, to produce historical knowledge about their bodies but from them, by carefully “bringing to light what transpired through them”.10

3 Most of the seamstresses at Chantelle and Lejaby spent their entire career at one company. When the factories closed in the 1990s and 2000s, the women protested by drawing attention to what they had produced there. Their bodies, which had been shaped by decades of work, became visible on this occasion. It is this construction, specific to the lingerie industry, that I intend to examine, basing this study on various sources, including Chantelle’s in-house magazines from the years 1984 to 1994, and oral sources.11 I also had access to the private archives of one woman, who was a union organizer for the CGT at Lejaby, as well as to a great number of photos, which I examined alongside images from two films, Rue des filles de Chantelle, (“Chantelle Girls’ Street”) made by Véronique Ménard and Danièle Lefebvre during the seamstresses’ protests in 1993 and 1994, and Tous ensemble (“All Together”), a 1998 made-for-TV drama by Bertrand Arthuys about seamstresses’ protests in a lingerie factory called Epernelle. After examining how women’s bodies were used in Chantelle’s communication campaigns, I will consider the way the women garment workers internalized those norms, in order to understand how the item they produced contributed to the display of the seamstresses’ very bodies when the factories were shut down.

4 This article will concentrate on women garment-workers at the Chantelle factory in Saint Herblain, whom I will compare with women at two Lejaby factories (Rilleux-la- Pape and Bourg-en-Bresse),12 in other words these were seamstresses producing fine lingerie that they could not afford to buy without the employee discounts offered by their firms. Chantelle is a mid-range to high-end lingerie company. Its roots go back to the nineteenth century, when François-Auguste Gamichon started producing elastic fabric and founded a company re-named Gamichon-Kretz when his nephew, Maurice Kretz, joined him. Inserting elastic into corsets contributed to Kretz’s growth in the early twentieth century, but it was a new girdle called Chantelle, launched in 1949, that brought fame to the company, and eventually became the firm’s new name, in 1976.13 Kretz enterprises moved to an industrial park in Saint Herblain in 1967. While some of the women worked at the cutting tables, the majority of the workforce was made up of skilled industrial seamstresses. The high point was reached in the mid-1970s, when the

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factory employed nearly 500 people (male and female). It then declined gradually until 1994, when the company decided to close the plant.

5 In 1930, Gabrielle Viannay founded the “Le Gaby” brand for bras she was making in Bellegarde-sur-Valserine. The business continued to grow after the founder’s death, in 1954. It was bought out by the Bugnon brothers, who opened other plants, including the one in Bourg-en-Bresse. The brand name was changed to Lejaby, and the company, called Rasurel (later Euralis), was bought out.

The bodies of women garment-workers: valued by the company

6 After 1968, in the context of an economic crisis, production-organization methods in French factories underwent profound transformations,14 accompanied by the birth of a “neo-paternalism” founded on “new managerial techniques for motivating staff”. These included, in particular, a new culture within firms that aimed “to urge employees to identify with the company they work for, and to motivate them while avoiding excessive pay rises”.15

7 For working men and women, this identification with the company could be based on what they produced – pride in “a well-crafted product”16 – which different companies sought to reinforce in different ways, depending on the type of item produced. Among the tools used by Chantelle to forge a shared culture throughout the workforce, the company’s in-house magazine played a key role. It offers historians an observation post for understanding both the implications and the themes of communication the company used. Although in-house newsletters and magazines date as far back as the late nineteenth century, their numbers grew rapidly in the second half of the twentieth, especially post-1968. In-house newsletters fulfilled three main roles: informing, training and “reinforcing a sense of belonging or of identification.”17 Information Chantelle first appeared in 1984. The idea was that it would enhance employees’ “sense of belonging”, essentially by featuring the latest trends in lingerie, promoting, for instance, “beguiling bandeau bras that flaunt the beauty of your shoulders,” a “strapless” model in order to satisfy customers looking for a bra that would be “invisible, with a smooth natural line, while providing some support”.18 In the early 1980s, shortly after feminists had called on women to “burn [their] bras”,19 lingerie firms needed to promote the image of women’s “natural” shape. So Chantelle reinvented itself as the “liberating lingerie” that offered women a sense of “consummate and unabashed femininity,” lingerie for women who were now active and independent, but still sexy.20 Although Chantelle’s in-house magazine was provided free of charge, not all of the women workers read it regularly.21 They were, however, all aware of the brand’s advertising campaigns,22 if only through the advertising posters, which were highly visible on the shop floor. Being confronted on a daily basis with images that featured a certain type of female body, the women workers were led to reconsider their own bodies. Even though this high-end lingerie was intended for well- to-do women, the advertising campaigns focused on busy working women with whom the women on the shop floor could identify, all the more so in that they were asked to test the products.

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8 Because the fact was that although they did not fall into the company’s target market, women at Chantelle still lent their bodies to the cause, taking on the role of virtual consumers, and indeed, actual users of the products: There was someone who, when we brought out a new bra, would, well, grab one or the other of us, to give the bra a try-out, to see what flaws it might have, if it stayed in place well, or this or that… So there were these try-out sessions, they would take a few girls, and so, I would get picked to try out a bra or panties or a teddy or whatever. And it was a good deal, because they would ask you test-wear it, which meant that they gave it to you. They would give it to you, and afterwards they asked you to bring it back to see how it held up to getting washed a few times. Like, did it tear, did it lose its shape, and all that. But after that, it was yours. Knowing that Chantelle was, well still is, a very expensive brand. So, uh, when you don’t have to pay for your underwear, it’s great, really really great; that was about the only good part.23

9 Asking women on the shop floor to try the items out seems to have been common practice in the lingerie sector, because Lejaby used to do it too.24 These comments – made in 2010 by Florence Benoit, a grass-roots CFDT union member, more than 15 years after the factory was closed – show that the women knew that they didn’t match the brand’s actual target market. While it is important to take the source into account, the idea that the free items and reductions granted to employees were seen in a very positive light has been corroborated by others, like Patricia Denis, a CFDT representative at Chantelle, who talks about the sales organized by the works council, They were actually items that couldn’t be sold, so they would sell them to us for less. So back then, anything that was on sale we could buy for incredible bargain prices […] So you had the right to a certain number of sale items a year, as well as a certain number of new items. So for example, we got 50% off if we ordered from the catalogue. So we’d buy things for our whole family, our sisters, mothers… We got some great deals.25

10 So the reductions granted by the firm allowed not only the seamstresses themselves, but also women in their families, to become consumers of their products. This was yet another way in which to instill company spirit and identification. You could say, after a fashion, that the seamstresses acted as spokeswomen for their companies to their families. Whether it was product-testing or price reductions for employees, these practices provided certain advantages to these blue-collar women, who couldn’t have afforded to buy fancy lingerie at market rates.26 The women saw these advantages as a form of workers’ rights. So this type of recognition for garment workers involved their bodies – or those of the women close to them at home – and could be explained by the fact that they were crossing class barriers by wearing lingerie that didn’t belong to women factory workers’ normal consumer habits.27 Finally, starting in the 1980s, the seamstresses’ gendered bodies began to constitute one of the vectors for getting the women to identify with Chantelle. Whether they were drawn in by the company’s advertising campaigns or solicited as potential consumers, these blue-collar women were transgressing class rules by wearing the brand’s undergarments. But the seamstresses’ gendered bodies did not only constitute real or imagined products of company culture and policies: they were also modified by them.

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“They were real lookers”:28 assimilated standards?

11 In addition to Chantelle’s discourse and practices, other historical processes implicated the bodies of the women working at the Saint Herblain factory between 1968 and 1994, allowing us to delve more deeply into how those bodies were fabricated. Annie Guyomarc’h, CGT union representative at the Saint Herblain Chantelle factory, points out that the industrial sector where women work affects their habits as consumers: “girls” who work in the garment industry pay a lot of attention to their appearance, “whereas in other federations, it doesn’t matter nearly as much.” She adds that, for her, “your appearance, your hairstyle and how you dress matter.”29 The connection between industrial sector and the appearance of both the women and the men who work there has been established by Mathilde Dubesset and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. They showed that “daily exposure” to ribbons and notions founded the reputation of the workers in that sector, who were said to be particularly careful about their appearance.30 So it is possible to suppose that, faced on a daily basis with the items they produce, destined for the fashion market, women garment workers are in permanent contact with certain gender norms, and that this affects the way in which they themselves dress. This aspect is reinforced in the case of lingerie because of the female nudity that is integral to the product’s advertising. So the seamstresses at Chantelle and Lejaby were exposed on a daily basis to fashion models’ bodies, which conform to exacerbated versions of these norms. In addition, wearing a bra is an inherently gendered practice, in that bras are in contact with the skin of a highly intimate and sexualized part of the body: they touch and shape women’s busts. So bras mold a part of the body that is the target of particular expectations. Women’s breasts are supposed to distinguish their figures from men’s chests; the bra, by molding women’s breasts, plays an active part in creating this distinction. The bra enters into the game of seduction, all the more so if it is made visible. Therefore, in addition to shaping the bust and offering a certain comfort, the bra has to look pretty and be graced with other typically feminine attributes: delicacy, lightness, purity, softness, etc. The bra can thus become symbolic of femininity and of the bust’s erotic power. In that sense, it is fetishized: acting as a metonym – since the bra incarnates the breasts it supports – the item of dress is invested with the erotic value of the body part, but also with a certain gendered role, since it can be personified and thus become a subject in itself through emotional transference. That is why working in the high-end lingerie sector puts the women in the factory face to face with discursive and practical signals having implications for their own bodies.

12 Indeed, the product’s specificity may explain why several women at Chantelle resorted to plastic surgery, something that they talked about openly, even though the practice was only first becoming common in the late twentieth century.31 Véronique Ménard, one of the directors of the documentary Rue des filles de Chantelle, which was shot in 1994 during the protests against the Saint Herblain factory being closed, describes her surprise, which was undiminished in 2010: I’ve never seen so many… talking with them, I’ve never seen so many girls who had had makeovers, like getting a nose job, or their breasts or ears re-done…32

13 These comments show that their breasts weren’t the only parts of their bodies on which the women had plastic surgery performed: although their faces were not directly concerned with lingerie, they also had them transformed (operated on), indicating a

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certain familiarity with the idea at the factory. Nevertheless, Véronique Ménard remembers that most of the operations concerned the women’s busts: […] covered by your health insurance… They were too busty, you see… Well, it was usually either too busty or not busty enough… You could say it was a work-related issue, because when you’re sitting at the sewing machine, when you bump into… It’s true, a big bust can get in your way… So that was one reason for... recalibrating…33

14 The comments show that operations on the bust could be justified by factory work. It is likely that the first women to resort to surgery did it for practical reasons rather than esthetic ones, and were therefore covered by their health insurance. Yet that explanation doesn’t work for breast enlargement or cosmetic surgery to the face. While Annie Guyomarc’h confirms that “the girls would get their breasts done. […] Quite a few of them did that,”34 she adds that, “some of them would get a tummy tuck too”.35 Still, not all women in the lingerie sector went in for plastic surgery. Women at the Lejaby factory in Yssingeaux didn’t,36 or rather, if they did have operations, they didn’t discuss them openly the way the women at the Chantelle factory in Saint Herblain did. So other factors besides the industrial sector need to be taken into account to explain these differences. We could start by suggesting urban life as a factor: Saint Herblain is a suburb of the city of Nantes, while Yssingeaux is located in a much more rural environment. This disparity between the two locales is consistent with the women’s social background and therefore with their culture and their relationship with consumerism.

15 What is undeniable is that between 1968 and 1994, the fact that they worked in the lingerie industry factored into the striking changes in the way the Chantelle factory workers’ envisaged their bodies. While the firm’s production and communication strategy contributed to shaping the women’s bodies, their actual bodies-at-work, particularly their “nimble fingers”,37 tended to challenge the bra’s intimate nature.

The product’s intimacy challenged: bodies that count38

16 Most of the women who took part in the struggle to keep their factories open (Chantelle in 1993 and 1994 and Lejaby in 2010) were hired somewhere around 1968.39 So they had had long careers at the factory, which affected their relationship with lingerie, reducing the intimate – or sexual – nature of the product of their work. In other words, a process of de-fetishization of bras took place from 1968 until the factories closed. The incarnation of femininity that the bra represented in broader society, particularly in terms of the heterosexual male gaze,40 tended to have less impact in their approach to the product, which was explained by their role in its production, their class role: so the women’s bodies-at-work led them to see bras and panties as mass-produced items like any other. Because high-end lingerie has to incarnate ideal feminine qualities, it uses specific fabrics, like lace, and rounded shapes: two constraints that require great manual dexterity from the seamstresses. Although they are elements of sexual fetishism for the women who buy them, each of the bra’s features becomes a skill qualification for the women who make them.

17 In the garment industry, seamstresses are in direct contact with the fabric they work on, with their sewing machines as the only go-between. With a low level of mechanization, sewing bras requires tremendous craftsmanship, particularly in high- end lingerie (Chantelle and Lejaby). Extra pride is specific to this type of production;

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the seamstresses point out, for example, that certain jobs, like cup assembly, are particularly tricky. The idea is to attach the cups to the center stay and join everything together while making sure both cups are at exactly the same height, the symmetry is perfect, and the center stay remains smooth, with all these intricate adjustments depending essentially on the seamstress’s knack.41 A woman from Lejaby emphasizes the fact that making bras is “meticulous” and that “every millimeter counts” – especially since making them involves “lots of different steps”.42 So the sexual division of labor led seamstresses to have a special relationship with the product of their labor, because the sector required significant skills and therefore input from the seamstresses, input that mechanization hadn’t replaced. Until the early 2000s, the situation in high-end lingerie was comparable to the one that has been described in the late nineteenth-century luxury woolen-fabric industry in the city of Elbeuf: mechanization had not replaced craftsmanship. The pride generated by this preserved know-how reinforced the seamstresses’ attachment to the product, to the company and to their work.43 Eventually, the product’s intimate nature pales in comparison with the craftsmanship required to make it: the seamstresses’ bodies-at-work, in this case their hands, de-fetishize the product. That is why the women had no qualms about flourishing the bras atypically during their protest actions: during demonstrations, bras were sometimes strung on lines between banners,44 and or the women wore the lingerie over their clothes.45 They even produced a giant bra-and-panty set, 46 reconnecting with the carnival-like atmosphere of the charivari that accompanied nineteenth-century women’s strikes.47 Nevertheless, the product’s intimate nature persisted, due to the single-sex situation on the shop floor. When the women were hired (circa 1968), their supposedly innate feminine skills were used to justify that situation: male elements were totally excluded.

18 So the seamstresses’ bodies-at-work, their positions in the sexual division of labor, created an incomplete defetishization, because a gender criterion subsisted in the hiring practices. In fact, while textile workers’ pride is tied to the quality of the fabric and the craftsmanship of “those who design it and make it,”48 high-end lingerie seamstresses’ pride is all the greater in that they make an intimate, feminine item: an undergarment that is invisible, that hugs the body and – except in the sphere of intimacy – is untouchable for everyone else. Gilles Laurent, director of the Chantelle factories in Lorient and Epernay in 2011, remembers his early days: The first time, I still remember, the first time I was walking through the factory with a package of bras in my hand, or on my shoulder… or wherever. The point is, it was an odd thing for a man, a young man, back in ’80.49

19 He adds that when he tells people he works in the lingerie industry: You can definitely dine out on it. You always get a laugh when you say what your job is: “Do you get to watch the fitting sessions?” Actually, no, I never saw a single fitting session. Not even as director of the factory, in fact especially as director, I never saw a single one.50

20 These comments show that because of the sexual division of labor at the factory, supervisors – here the male executives – were excluded from certain activities on account of the type of product being made: its intimate nature and exclusively feminine clientele created a specific relationship between the workforce – particularly the seamstresses, who were manual workers – and the items they produced. Despite their subordinate position in the company, as women they had a certain exclusivity in their relationship to the product. Therefore, although it was de-fetishized in terms of class,

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lingerie was still a fetish in terms of gender. Nevertheless, the gender norms associated with what lingerie conveys were eventually upended by class relations when the seamstresses began protesting against factory closures.

21 In July 1996, for instance, Lejaby seamstresses decided to organize a fashion show “unveiling the latest [and last] models from the collection”.51 in front of the town hall in Bourg-en-Bresse. They repeated the parades in Bellegarde-sur-Valserine and Beynost (Ain) and Firminy (Loire), where some women employees and their daughters demonstrated in underwear or bathing suits: “the kind of demonstration we’d like to see more often,” as one (male) journalist put it. The idea even appears in Bertrand Arthuys’ TV movie Tous ensemble, which ends with seamstresses from Epernelle parading.52 Marie-Christine Rochon explains the idea in these terms: “We wanted to attract people’s attention to the quality of French-made garments.”53 Lejaby had just been bought out by Warnaco, so the seamstresses wanted to make “Made in France’ quality – as opposed to foreign production – visible. It was an interesting form of protest because it took the idea of a fashion show and enrolled it in a confrontational perspective. In the film, the seamstresses’ bodies are important. They agreed to expose their own intimacy by modeling undergarments – thereby turning them into symbols of protest – and at the same time, they distanced themselves from the gender taboo that says that undergarments should remain invisible. Here, the women’s agency was exerted both in the act of appropriation and in the subversion of gender roles: on the one hand, as women, they were following the injunction to wear undergarments by appropriating the habits of the lingerie industry (i.e. fashion shows), while on the other, they deconstructed the norms by modeling, even though they were factory workers, not fashion models; something which would, in Judith Butler’s terms, constitute a performance.54 So they introduced into a public space bodies that were usually unseen: bodies that work, bodies of women who can’t afford the time or the money for beauty treatments55 or fitness. The implication of these “working-class” bodies also contributed to the very deep subversion of class roles: the seamstresses took over production and promoted the products without the bosses, but they also introduced new forms of class struggle, light years away from classic agonistic ones. In this way, they deconstructed class roles on two levels: class in itself (en-soi), which would have them take orders from above; and class for itself (pour-soi), because they were inventing an innovative and unprecedented form of class-struggle protest, diametrically opposed to the belligerent image that the words class struggle usually convey. At that point, the collective agency they exerted – and which could be seen in the way they linked their own bodies to the product – was based on the categories of both class and gender, which modified each other: the women workers were operating within gender norms obliging them to wear certain undergarments, which reconfigured their class role; in return, this modified the gender norm, which associated fashion shows with modeling. In addition, by re-appropriating the product, they created a break with the way it was usually used. It took on a whole new meaning, becoming visible when it was supposed to stay outside of the public sphere. While it was still a fetish, in that it gave the women’s demonstration unique meaning (“the kind we’d like to see more often”), it was no longer a reiteration of the inaccessible norm conveyed by fashion models’ perfect bodies. Finally, more than just a de-fetishization, the seamstresses’ bodies brought new content to the bra as object, and by extension, to the body it personified. This resignification of the product can be integrated into a more global resignification of the company’s discourse about quality, a discourse that

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was turned against management, and furthermore accompanied by the seamstresses choosing to distance themselves from overseas production.

The end of French bodies at work?

22 The lingerie seamstresses’ bodies were therefore implicated in a range of different ways between 1968 and 2012. Seen through the prism of the bra, the product of these women’s work, a vision of history that starts with the body lets us understand the effects produced by the metamorphoses of paternalism when faced with the re- composition of global production leading to the closure of French factories. The women brought their product out of the sphere of intimacy. By wearing lingerie over their clothes, they shattered a certain image that the companies wanted to give of their products. The women flaunted a product that is normally dissimulated, exposing and attributing value to its production – and therefore to their own labor – whereas the bosses wanted to render the women invisible by closing the factories. In September 2010, Lejaby seamstresses occupied the company’s headquarters in Rillieux-la-Pape to protest against 197 planned layoffs. The women explained to the media that their connection to the product was “visceral.” When I questioned them about the fact that the media photographed and filmed them with their products quite a bit, the women themselves referred to their “attachment”,56 like Lise Jalabert, a CGT member at Rillieux-la-Pape: Lise: […] Somebody said to me one day, ‘‘You have to admit you’re lucky to work in undergarments. At least you get to see the finished product, you get to hold a good- looking item.” And back then I answered, ‘‘Yeah, I suppose, but… it’s no big deal!’’ I really didn’t see it as lucky… But it’s true that, when you’ve been there a long time, and you’ve seen how the company has evolved, the products have evolved, and you go into a lingerie shop, you just can’t help checking if they have any Lejaby, and which Lejaby. And when you walk by a store with Lejaby in the window, you think: ‘‘That’s our work in that window’.” Knowing that only 30% of Lejaby is made in France… We do have an attachment”…57

23 Lise Jalabert’s comments reveal that the attachment grew gradually, and that the generation of seamstresses who didn’t care all that much about the product of their work in the late 1960s cared a lot more by the time the factories started to close. At the same time, a limit is indicated here, because the seamstress specifies that “only 30% of Lejaby is made in France.” Which is why, when they boast about the high-end aspect of their production, they are hightlighting their own craftsmanship, their French bodies- at-work, producing the quality for which the brand is known. Taking the same approach as the one described by Monique Jeudy-Ballini in reference to workers (both male and female) in a luxury leather-goods company, the protesting seamstresses’ discourse comes down on the side of “good”, of quality production, while management’s is located, not so much here on the side of “fast”, but of “less expensive” production.58 In this instance, they are defending French industry, as opposed to “overseas”, “foreign” or “Asian” production.59 By placing themselves within the French tradition of luxury,60 which was so important in knitted goods in the first half of the twentieth century61, the “quality” they mention refers to French seamstresses’ craftsmanship. The same reasoning can be seen in the Lejaby Yssingeaux seamstresses’ protest when, in January 2012, they produced a tricolor bra in the colors of the French flag, inspired by the context of the French presidential election campaign.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARD, Christine. 2010. Ce que soulève la jupe. Identités, transgressions, résistances. Paris: Autrement.

BEAUD, Stéphane, and Michel PIALOUX. 2012. Retour sur la condition ouvrière. Enquête aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux-Montbéliard. Paris: La Découverte.

BERTHERAT, Marie, and Martin DE HALLEUX, 1996, 100 ans de lingerie. Paris: Atlas.

BUTLER, Judith. 2009. Ces corps qui comptent : de la matérialité et des limites discursives du sexe. Paris: éditions Amsterdam [translation by Charlotte Nordmann of Bodies that Matter: on the discursive limits of “sex”. 1993. New York: Routledge].

BUTLER, Judith. 2005. Trouble dans le genre. Pour un féminisme de la subversion. Paris: La Découverte. [translation by Cynthia Kraus of Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. 1990. New York: Routledge]

CHENUT, Helen H. 2010. Les Ouvrières de la République : les bonnetières de Troyes sous la Troisième République. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.

CHESSEL, Marie-Emmanuelle. 2012. Histoire de la consommation. Paris: La Découverte.

DAUMAS, Jean-Claude. 1993. Des politiques paternalistes dans la draperie elbeuvienne à la fin du XIXe siècle. In Logiques d’entreprises et politiques sociales des XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Sylvie SCHWEITZER, 63-78. Lyon: Centre de coopération interuniversitaire franco-québécoise.

DAUMAS, Jean-Claude. 2010, Les métamorphoses du paternalisme. In Dictionnaire historique des patrons français, 880-884. Paris: Flammarion.

DUBESSET, Mathilde, and Michelle ZANCARINI-FOURNEL. 1993. Parcours de femmes : réalités et représentations. Saint-Étienne, 1880-1950. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon.

DUCLERT, Vincent. 1999. Comptes rendus de « Marie BERTHERAT, Martin DE HALLEUX (avec Véronique GIRARD), 100 ans de lingerie, Paris, Atlas, 1996; Farid CHENOUNE, Les Dessous de la féminité. Un siècle de lingerie, Paris, Assouline, 1998; Gilles NÉRET, 1000 Dessous. Histoire de la lingerie, Paris-Cologne, Taschen, 1998; Marie SIMON, Les Dessous, Paris, Éditions du Chêne, 1998 ». Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 10, “Clio a lu”: 256-267.

FRÉMONTIER, Jacques. 1980. La Vie en bleu : voyage en culture ouvrière. Paris: Fayard.

GRANGER, Christophe (ed.). 2012. Histoire par corps. Chair, posture, charisme. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’université de Provence.

HANISCH, Carol, 2007, The 1968 Miss America Protest: the origins of the Bra-Burner Moniker. In The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Rachel BLAU DUPLESSIS and Ann BARR SNITOW, 197-207. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

HATZFELD, Nicolas. 2002. Les Gens d’usine : 50 ans d’histoire à Peugeot-Sochaux. Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier / Éditions Ouvrières.

JEUDY-BALLINI, Monique. 2002. ‘Et il paraît qu’ils ne sont pas tous sourds ?’. Le travail comme exploit et résistance au quotidien. Terrain 39 : 17-32.

KLEJMAN, Laurence, and Florence ROCHEFORT. 1989. L’Égalité en marche : le féminisme sous la Troisième République. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques/Des Femmes.

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LAFAYE, Françoise. 2005. Professionnels du textile : se construire une conscience fière. Ethnologie française 104(4): 703-713.

MALAVAL, Catherine. 2001. La Presse d’entreprise française au XXe siècle : histoire d’un pouvoir. Paris: Belin.

MARSEILLE, Jacques. 2000. France terre de luxe. Paris: Éditions de la Martinière. Coll. « Photo Découverte ».

NÉRET, Gilles. 2003. 1000 dessous. Histoire de la lingerie. Paris: Maxi-livres.

ORY, Pascal. 2006. L’épreuve des corps. In Histoire du corps, vol. 3: Les mutations du regard. Le XXe siècle, Alain CORBIN, Jean-Jacques COURTINE and Georges VIGARELLO, 129-161. Paris: Seuil.

PERROT, Michelle. 1974. Les Ouvriers en grève, France 1871-1890. Paris-La Haye: Mouton.

SOHN, Anne-Marie. 2006. Le corps sexué. Histoire du corps, vol. 3: Les mutations du regard. Le XXe siècle, Alain CORBIN, Jean-Jacques COURTINE and Georges VIGARELLO, 93-127. Paris: Seuil.

VERRET, Michel. 1996. La Culture ouvrière. Paris: L’Harmattan.

NOTES

1. Duclert 1999. 2. Sohn 2006: 94. 3. Klejman & Rochefort 1989: 318. 4. Bard 2010: 19. 5. Bertherat & de Halleux 1996: 22. 6. Ibid.: 36. 7. Ibid.: 56. 8. Hanisch 2007. 9. Granger 2012: 7. 10. Ibid.: 10. 11. I met with five seamstresses and one manager from Chantelle, as well as one of the directors of the film Rue des filles de Chantelle, and two seamstresses from Lejaby (Rillieux-la-Pape and Bourg-en-Bresse). 12. In 1995, after the death of Maurice Bugnon, the problems started for the women, who began protest actions against the merger of the two companies as early as 1996. Finally, in 2003, the group announced 225 layoffs plus the closing of the sewing shops in Rillieux-la-Pape (Rhône), Firminy (Loire), Beynost (Ain) and Vienne (Isère). Then in 2010, more downsizing led to the closing of three out of the four plants. Eighty-eight jobs were eliminated in Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain), 46 in Bellegarde (Ain) and 63 in Le Teil (Ardèche), despite the takeover of the company’s headquarters in Rillieux-la-Pape, in September 2010. The last working plant, in Yssingeaux, closed in January 2012. 13. Bertherat & de Halleux 1996: 73. 14. Hatzfeld 2002; Beaud & Pialoux 2012. 15. Daumas 2010: 885. 16. Frémontier 1980: 81; Verret 1996: 33. 17. Malaval 2001: 11. 18. Informations Chantelle, 3, March 1984. 19. Les dessous de Chantelle, 4, January 1997. 20. Duclert 1999.

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21. Informations Chantelle, 61, June 1995; only 100 employees (male and female) took part in this survey, and “in the factories, Épernay and Peronne came way out in front, with by far the most answers.” 22. Images from the film Rue des filles de Chantelle, as well as photos of the protesting Lejaby workers, both show that the slogans and visuals from the brands’ ad campaigns were often parodied during the protests, leading us to believe that they were known to the women who worked there. 23. Interview with F.B., conducted on 7 January, 2010, in her home. 24. Interview with L.J., conducted on 5 November 2010, in Rillieux-la-Pape. 25. Interview with P.D., conducted on 6 January 2010, in a café. 26. Interview with A.G., conducted on 17 February 2010, at the Centre d’Histoire du Travail (“Work History Center”, CHT) in Nantes. The Lejaby women who took over the company’s headquarters in Rillieux-la-Pape in September 2010, talk about this shift in Les pieds sur terre, Lejaby 1, broadcast on France Culture radio on 8 October 2010, “tendu comme un string “ (“As Taut as a Thong”). 27. Chessel 2012. 28. Interview with V.M., conducted on 9 January 2010 in her home. 29. Interview with A.G., conducted on 17 February 2010, at the CHT. 30. Dubesset & Zancarini-Fournel 1993: 137. 31. Ory 2006: 138. 32. Interview with V.M., conducted on 9 January 2010 in her home. 33. Idem. 34. Interview with A.G., conducted on 17 February 2010, at the CHT. 35. Idem. 36. Interview with B., H., S. and R., conducted in the Lejaby factory in Yssingeaux on 14 February 2012. 37. « Nos doigts de fée, il faut qu’on les mette en valeur » (“We have to draw attention to our nimble fingers”) a Lejaby worker declares in January 2012, AFP, « Arnaud Montebourg se drape du ‘‘soutien-gorge tricolore’’ (“Arnaud Montebourg dons a ‘tricolor bra’ with the Lejaby protesters”) 20 January 2012. 38. Butler 2009. 39. Chantelle’s records show that the workers’ seniority rose over the years, and the Lejaby women point out that: “we all watched each other grow up, get married and have kids. Some of us are grandmas now,” Les pieds sur terre, Lejaby 1, broadcast on France Culture radio on 8 October 2010, « tendu comme un string » (“Taut as a thong”). 40. Neret 2003: 7. 41. Interview with B., H., S. and R., conducted in the Lejaby factory in Yssingeaux on 14 February 2012. 42. Interview with L.J. and M.-C. R., CGT members, conducted on 5 November 2010, at the Lejaby factory in Bourg-en-Bresse. 43. Daumas 1993: 221. 44. Interview with A.G. conducted on 17 February 2010, at the CHT; photograph of Chantelle workers demonstrating, 1994, CHT. 45. Photograph of Lejaby workers demonstrating, 2010, source: www.voixdelain.fr. 46. Photograph of Lejaby workers demonstrating, 2010, source: www.libelyon.fr. 47. Perrot 1974: 318-330. 48. Lafaye 2005: 703‑713. 49. Interview with G.L., conducted on 15 September 2011, in Lorient. 50. Idem. 51. Lise Jalabert’s private archives, press clipping [s.n.], 14 juillet 1996.

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52. INA Archives, Tous ensemble, by Bertrand Arthuys, was screened on France 2 on 18 November 1998. 53. Lise Jalabert’s private archives, press clipping [s.n.], 14 July, 1996. 54. Butler 2005: 261. 55. It should be pointed out that these were Lejaby women and not women from Chantelle, whose use of plastic surgery has been described. Despite the fact that the Chantelle women’s concern for their appearance, and the efforts they employed therein, were far greater – or perhaps precisely because of those factors – they never considered taking on the role of models. 56. Interview with Lise Jalabert and Marie-Christine Rochon, CGT members at Lejaby, conducted on 5 November 2010, at the Lejaby factory in Bourg-en-Bresse 57. Idem. 58. Jeudy-Ballini 2002. 59. Interview with L.J. and M.-C. R. conducted on 5 November 2010, at the Lejaby factory in Bourg-en-Bresse. 60. Marseille 2000: 7. 61. Chenut 2010: 333.

ABSTRACTS

The body of female lingerie workers in France between 1968 and 2012 offers a heuristic vantage point to address several levels of analysis and temporalities. As producers as well as potential consumers, these women workers are at the heart of a double movement: on the one hand, their bodies at work deconstruct the intimate nature of the bra; on the other hand, they are exposed on a daily level to the brand image, which they eventually incorporate. Indeed, the internal press as well as business strategies vaunt the bodies of female workers and often use them in the conception of products, as well as using their feedback as potential consumers. The intimate nature of the object produced may explain the attention female workers pay to their bodies, some even turn to plastic surgery. Nevertheless, in the protests against industrial plant closures, women workers sought to reduce fetishism surrounding bras through actions that involved rending visible the products of their work.

De 1968 à 2012, le corps des ouvrières de la lingerie en France constitue un lieu d’observation heuristique en articulant plusieurs niveaux d’analyse et de temporalités. Comme productrices et comme consommatrices potentielles, les ouvrières se situent au croisement d’un double mouvement : d’un côté leurs corps à l’ouvrage déconstruisent la nature intime du produit et, de l’autre, elles se trouvent quotidiennement confrontées aux images véhiculées par la marque qu’elles finissent par incorporer. En effet, le corps des ouvrières est valorisé par l’entreprise à travers sa presse interne, ou par sa politique qui les met souvent à contribution dans la conception des produits ou dans leur appréciation comme consommatrices. Le caractère intime du produit fabriqué peut permettre d’expliquer l’attention que les ouvrières portent à leur propre corps, certaines ayant parfois recours à la chirurgie esthétique. Dans la mobilisation contre les fermetures d’usines, elles se livrent à une défétichisation du soutien-gorge, en rendant visible publiquement le produit de leur travail.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: ouvrières, corps, produit, lingerie, agency Keywords: female workers, body, product, lingerie, agency

AUTHORS

FANNY GALLOT Fanny Gallot has a doctorate in contemporary history from the University of Lyon 2-Lumière. Her thesis on working women in France from 1968 to the present was awarded the Gis Genre (CNRS) prize in 2013. A member of LHDEST-IDHE, she is researching gender at work, militancy, feminisms and agency, currently in a Franco-Argentinian context. [email protected]

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Filmed images of women factory workers: work, gender and dignity, variations on a classic trilogy (1962-2011) Figures filmiques d’ouvrières : travail, genre et dignité, variations sur une trilogie classique (1962-2011)

Nicolas Hatzfeld Translation : Melissa Wittmeier

1 While it has often been admitted that over the past few decades industrial workers in general have become almost invisible in French society, to a degree well beyond the decrease in their real numbers,1 what is to be said about women factory workers? Must we paraphrase about them the slogan used by the MLF2 at the Arc de Triomphe on 26 August 1970, to describe the wife of the Unknown Soldier (that they are “even more unknown”)? To have a clearer idea about this, and to contribute to an outline of their role in recent social history, an examination of the representations that have been put forward of them can bring to light a field of reference within which the images of women factory workers are endlessly being reconfigured. If it is prepared to go beyond evoking their merely illustrative function, an analysis of these portraits will allow us to question the relationship between the actual situations of women workers and their representation on film. The similarities that one may find between these two domains, and more importantly the differences, can reveal the image that society itself forms of women workers.

2 Among these representations, cinema offers material of singularly expressive force, all the more significant since it is able to mobilize resources that are generally considerable and varied. Every film consists of an overall process of constructing images: moving from the initial conception, the negotiations needed for starting production, and the mobilization of various skills, expertise, and approaches, to the different phases of filming, distribution and reception3. Certain film historians have

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shown the fruitfulness of an analysis based on this sequence4. The study presented here, however, will restrict itself essentially to the surface of the finished films, and will only make occasional comments on their creation and trajectory. The objective is rather to explore, from amongst those productions destined for public distribution, a primary corpus of films linked by the fact that they offer us representations of women workers, which further research may later correct and diversify.

3 Our corpus immediately proves to be particularly composite, notably mixing documentaries and fiction films. Distinguishing between these two genres, although it remains pertinent, tends to accentuate differences that on closer examination show themselves to be more nuanced. Undoubtedly, the fact that documentaries are rooted in real situations reinforces their status as sources for social history. Nonetheless, the choices made by many directors of documentaries in the course of production amount to a process of selection, covering such things as preliminary negotiations, recourse either to actors or to the people directly concerned, the authenticity of the sets or their reconstruction, direct recording as opposed to the acting of the scenes filmed, the nature of the sound track, the voices heard, what is said, etc. The combination of these cinematic choices reduces the classic divide between documentaries and fictions, and can suggest rather that it is worth concentrating on what they have in common, which is the approach adopted here. A different typology, based on the ultimate destination of films, would also offer fertile paths for interpretation. The distribution of films to cinemas, the size of their audience, the scope for re- diffusion through television channels, film clubs or militant networks or, as may also be the case, the near-total absence of any projection at all, are significant aspects that are very rarely addressed, any more than the gap between the directors’ intentions and the effective careers of films. Including both documentaries and fiction films in the analysis helps in turn to identify the way in which certain themes can circulate across film genres and echo one another, according to other factors such as period, country, branch of activity, etc. It encourages us to underscore the two major relationships at the intersection of which the condition of female factory workers is located: their relationship to work, and gender relations5. These two primary domains, on which the films considered here concentrate in different ways, raise questions about the types of women workers represented, their activities and their struggles, as well as the configuration of their identities.

Films made by women, in France and elsewhere

4 In order to consider these different horizons and nonetheless keep a degree of focus in the selection, this survey is based primarily on the impressive pioneering work that has been undertaken over the past 35 years by the organizers of the Women’s International Film Festival in Créteil, a valuable source of openness, inquiry and sensibility6. It is these features, rather than any selective bias, which should be borne in mind in any overall interpretation. The core of our corpus is therefore drawn from films selected from the start by this team. Other titles resulted from group research7, the work of Michel Cadé,8 the holdings of the Génériques9 association and finally, from the author’s personal searches. The constituted corpus therefore consists very largely of films directed by women directors about women workers. This criterion puts the accent on the emerging phenomenon of films made by women. Future research may discover

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earlier examples, but film-making by women on this subject appeared during the 1960s, if still to a marginal degree, and became more frequent after 1968, even though some professions in the film industry had long been open to women. But the survey is not confined to women directors, and certain films directed by men, such as Norma Rae, Coup pour coup or, more recently, Rêves d’usine have been integrated into the group. Although few in number, their inclusion in the sample invites investigation as to the potential gender specificity of these films, in the form of possible avenues for exploration, pending a more systematic comparison. On the other hand, films showing the wives and companions of male workers were not selected, even when they were directed by a woman, as in the important documentary Harlan County USA, directed by Barbara Kopple (1976). Another choice was to venture beyond the boundaries of France, in order to outline comparisons with other countries of Europe, America or Asia, even if, here too, we are far from targeting a systematic group.

5 Over the course of the five decades considered, the status of this kind of film has evolved. The two earliest films identified, during the 1960s, were supported by institutions, the administration of the state cinema in Czechoslovakia during the period of liberalization, and the Italian communist party. In the years after 1968, a group of films appeared that to some extent steered clear of the established film industry, or opposed it. Their women directors often appropriated new technology, first the 16 mm camera with synchronized sound, then video cameras – economical techniques that required only minimal teams. Facilitating the proximity between film makers and the people being filmed, these techniques corresponded to the critical, protest-based or militant approaches of some of these moviemakers. Nonetheless, Hollywood did not disdain this current, since it gave Academy Awards to Barbara Kopple’s documentary Harlan County USA in 1976, and then, in 1979, to the feature film Norma Rae. The 1980s saw a long period of silence on the subject in France while, elsewhere in the world, works appeared that prolonged and diversified questions inherited from the protest movement. The first decade of the new millennium saw a revival of French productions, notably documentaries, while the heritage coming from elsewhere grew richer. Diversification in the means of diffusion has favored this renewed attention to the subject.

6 What emerges from the corpus as a whole is the blossoming of films on this subject, from the 1960-1970s on, in both Western and Eastern Europe as well as in North America. Such films share certain developments with French cinema, at least until the decade after 2000, when the obsessive anxiety over factory closures becomes a distinguishing feature of films made in Western Europe. Other films coming from actively industrializing countries in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam) offer a distinct contrast during this last decade.

Works and days

7 A few films trace the initiatives of women who, alone or as a group, are shown conquering their place in traditionally masculine occupations: a female dry-waller of Finnish origin in Canada (Laila 1982), a feminist group creating a frame-house company in California (Raising the Roof, 2005), a woman truck driver in Kerala (Manjuben, Truck Driver, 2002) or a female agricultural worker trimming Bordeaux vines (Femmes précaires, 2005). But in a general way, the branches of activity depicted offer

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similarities. The images of car factories generally show the relatively commonplace presence of female workers in mixed workshops where they clearly remain minorities, working on the assembly line or “feeding the robots” (Sochaux : cadences en chaîne, 2010). The same minority presence is found at Michelin (Paroles de Bibs, 2001), inside a printing house (Elefantenhaut, 2009) and at the Legre-Mante chemical factory in Marseille, where, in truly antiquated workshops, the workers are manufacturing tartaric acid. Such chemical risks reflect a health hazard referred to in another film, In future costruzione (2011), in regard to the many workers who died from inhaling asbestos in a timeworn cement factory

8 Most of the films, however, show female workers performing activities in which they are usually in the majority, sometimes almost the only visible paid labor. This appears in the cabling or lining workshops at car factories (Humain, trop humain, 1974). It is also the case at the Samsonite factory (Liquidation totale, 2009) and above all, in the three classic sectors of industry employing female workers. The first sector groups together precision assembly of household electrical appliances, watch making and electronics (Essere donne, 1965; Lip, 1973; Grandin 2010; Calor, une usine en perspective, 2005; Mon travail c’est capital, 2000; Sauf la lutte, 2002). The textile industry is another sector widely represented, whether fabric production or the garment industry, on all continents and in all periods. The activities vary from the hand weaving of artisanal tapestries (Daughter of the Sun, 2000), to Filipina seamstresses, “able to work under pressure,” according to one job advertisement (Ouvrières du monde, 1998), or to sewing workers in Brittany, whom a manager taunts to the point of breakdown, while on camera (Maryflo, 1997). Finally, the food industry shows here, unvarnished, the harshest of faces: fruit and vegetable preserving (Sassedkata, 1990), and especially the slaughter and cutting up of poultry in Russia (With Love, Lilly, 2003) and fish-gutting in France (En avoir (ou pas), 1995; Les filles de la sardine, 2000). Young women workers in Tangier are in no doubt about which is best, as between the relatively fortunate textile group and those shelling shrimp (Sur la planche, 2011), the worst off.

9 Between these activities, working conditions differ, but the films tend to underscore their harshness. Animal canning factories are characterized by the coldness of the workshops and by the stabbing contact with chopped flesh, the odor of which seems to stick to the skin (Sur la planche, 2011). Noisy conditions are more prevalent (Grandin 2010; Elefantenhaut, 2009; We Are Not Defeated, 2006), and are particularly trying in weaving workshops. Unable to make herself heard, a woman worker has to write on a cardboard box to call her neighbors to join in solidarity (Norma Rae, 1979). Amongst the common characteristics of these factories, one finds the low wages paid, on all continents and in all periods: in Austria in 1918 (Marianne. Ein Recht für Alle, 1984), in the United States in the 1930s (Union Maids), in post-Soviet Russia, in industrialized Korea (We Are Not Defeated), in England before the Equal Pay Act of 1970 (Made in Dagenham, 2010), in Portugal in 1974 (Nous, ouvrières de la Sogantal, 2010) and in current day Southeast Asia (Rêves d’ouvrières, 2006; Ouvrières du monde, 2000). France is no exception, even if the garment workers regret that their Filipina counterparts work for “a bowl of rice” and the latter, when they see on a video screen the houses, furniture and cars belonging to the former, conclude soberly: “There’s a big difference”. This low level of remuneration is usually based on the absence of recognized skills: At Siemens, according to the terms of the contract, there are 2000 of us who ought to be promoted to category 3. But until now, only 150 have been moved up. This is truly shameful. (Essere donne, 1965).

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10 Women are typically shown doing repetitive and limited tasks performed at a fast pace. When the organization of a garment factory (in Coup pour coup, 1972), or an Italian pasta manufacturer is still rudimentary, the browbeating of workers by the “forewoman”, who “screams at us all the time”, is enough to ruin one’s life. The canning factory in Tangier employs the same kind of overseeing forty years later, with a forewoman going down the lines, behind the backs of her shellers. The piece-work system (performance- related pay) is another mechanism for forcing the pace, as one French woman worker at Levi’s indicates: The rate of work isn’t imposed by management, everyone works according to her needs. Me, I work according to my capacities, relative to my budget and my health. Because the required rate can give you all sorts of occupational illnesses, and also repetitive gestures, you have to see what that can do to your shoulders. There are people who have had shoulder operations because of that. All that for what? For higher performance, to try to have a decent wage.

11 Technology changes the kinds of constraints applied. An electronics assembly factory will be organized by mechanized belts, with women seated at an assembly line that moves past them at an automated pace. While the voice off of Essere donne (1965) refers to visual fatigue and nervous tension, one witness account mentions 18 welds a minute and fear of the time keeper. In the Calor gas factory in the early 2000s, the image soberly shows women who are similarly hunched over assembly operations which they appear to be doing calmly. Until a group of former workers, now retired, stops by and starts up a conversation. The evocation of the work rate of former times and of today is made in similar terms, and there is similar talk of pains in the joints. But when Taquin, a former worker, asks: “And if you want to stop the line, which button do you press?” – “There isn’t one”. The height of sophistication comes, however, from Indonesia where, in a sewing factory working for Levi’s, computerized production tracking allows the forewoman to follow the bathroom breaks of each worker on a screen, and to “identify bad workers, excuse me, bad work”, in the words of the guide showing around western visitors, who immediately corrects her slip of the tongue.

12 The visual record of the severity of the work is matched by what the women have to say. Numerous films allow women workers to express themselves about the wear and tear they suffer. Some mention nervous strain, as in Fanny Gallot’s analysis of a scene from Coup pour coup, developed with the participation of the workers themselves10. In the case of Grandin, other women workers say something very similar: I remember one very, very hard day. There had been several cases of nervous exhaustion on the assembly line, so that the line was stopped for a whole day. And that was because all of a sudden we were required to produce much more than usual in exactly the same working conditions. As soon as we walk in, we are asked for a lot, a maximum, at night when we go home we’re completely wiped out. That explains the nervous attacks. We can’t take any more. It’s nervous exhaustion, it comes from the noise, and the tension with the next part coming along before we’ve finished the one in our hands.

13 An Italian woman worker echoed these words: After 8 hours, you go home broken. You can’t feel your bones any more, and people don’t realize that you die twenty years younger than you should.

14 As if this fatigue was a matter of course, a Latvian short film focusses, dumbfounded, on one women worker who has for twenty years, been breaking 20,000 eggs every day by hand without displeasure, separating the whites from the yolks (Egg Lady, 2010). While her performance is exceptional, she is nonetheless not alone in seeming to find a sort of

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calm in the workshop (Shurale, 1991). Certain films, sometimes made during disputes, mention or underline the attachment not only to having a job, but also to the work, to the activity exercised and to the social life surrounding it. The woman trade unionist in the French Levi’s factory admits, in an aside, just before she has to make the assembly of female workers accept with pride their defeat in a dispute (Ouvrières du monde, 2000): Now, I’m going to say goodbye to my machine. If we look around ourselves, it’s going to be empty. To go where? Yeah, we were alright here, in spite of everything, we were alright. I’ll miss my factory. It isn’t mine, but still, I’ll miss it.

Struggles and their polysemy

15 The appeal of films about female workers comes not merely from the fact that these women work their fingers to the bone, but also that they rebel. Nearly half of the films evoke struggles, which are the central subjects of several productions, some of them historical, based on valuable legacies from the past, and combining archive images with interviews of former activists. The harshness of working conditions, the struggles undertaken from 1945 onward, and the construction of a female union movement are driving themes of the South Korean film, We Are Not Defeated: what it amply demonstrates, with abundant use of archival images and testimony, is a logic of continuity between past and present. Other films translate one generation’s rediscovery of struggles led by those who came before, such as the Americans of the 1970s rediscovering the testimony and traces of the action of three pioneers of women’s unionism in Chicago in the 1930s (Union Maids, 1976). Similarly, in 2009, a young French woman of Portuguese origin uses old film footage from the spring of 1974 (Nous, ouvrières de la Sogantal, 2010) in order to explore the circumstances of a prolonged occupation of a textile factory in the suburbs of Lisbon, and to question its women organizers. In a remarkable scene from the earlier period, a circle of very young recalcitrant female workers are listening to a man in suit and tie, hardly any older than themselves, who is none other than the Minister of Labor during the Carnation Revolution, and has come to give them a lecture: Workers cannot make demands as you have done here. They can expose their problems… A union or a worker cannot demand this or that. — Can’t he? — No he can’t. He can present his problems, ask that they be resolved… but not in the form of a demand as was done here. The possibility of finding solutions depends on the way that problems are presented.

16 Most of the depictions of labor disputes are, however, filmed in the present. Some conflicts have to do with wages, work conditions or the despotism of management, although few are actually triggered by these motives: ones that are include Tout va bien (2010); Made in Dagenham (2010); Maryflo (2010); Une part du ciel (2001); On n’est pas des steaks hachés (2002). Filmed struggles are often composed like sagas, rich in twists and turns. The triggering of a strike, altercations, factory occupations, the various initiatives that follow, are presented in more explicit scenarios in most of the fiction films than they are in documentaries. But the latter sometimes present an astonishing rawness. The boss in Maryflo (1997), who insults the strikers after having harassed them at their machines, displays such virulence that the viewer believes for quite some time that it is all a joke, an illusion reinforced by the propensity of this man to appeal to the camera to witness his outbursts. His (female) boss is no less colorful, a woman who, once the manufacturing has been relocated elsewhere, declares: “With factories you get

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problems, but without factories, it’s boring.” From one continent to the next, images of strikers, demonstrators, stand-offs and confrontations with the police present a revitalized and feminized image of the class struggle. In the 1970s, this image, even when it related to defending jobs (Lip; Grandin), was still characterized by a degree of self-confidence, as in the films on the famous case of the Lip watch factory, where the loss of employment formed to some extent a backdrop for dealing with other questions.

Between protest and alternative

17 Over the course of time, the corpus of the films concerned has tended to separate into two types, geographically distinct one from the other. In Asia, and perhaps on other continents, the theme of protest is continued in films which consider jobs, working conditions and wages. One documentary with an intriguing title, Lesbian Factory, follows a group of Filipinas under a temporary contract in Taiwanese companies, fighting for their back pay. In Western Europe on the other hand, the loss of jobs and the closing down of factories have taken on critical importance, in the form of a threat, as a present reality, or as the echo of a past trauma. French examples of this phenomenon are the cases of Epeda and Moulinex, Levi’s and Starissima, Samsonite and Legre- Mante, often connected to relocation abroad. Representations of these cases in film differ primarily by the circumstances of the factory’s fortunes. Managerial strategies are shown as varying, sometimes marked by lengthy preparation of workers’ mindsets, other times imposing abrupt shutdowns. According to circumstance, their tactics may take the form of interventions in the media, bland interviews, or impromptu face-to- face meetings with strikers. The dynamics of worker mobilization and the modalities of action are presented in even greater detail, and in some cases constitute the sole object of the film: assemblies and debates, more demonstrations, disruptive appearances in public spaces, debates, etc. The differences also have to do with the cinematographic choices of the directors. Some of the films perpetuate an alternation of sequences shot live and off stage interviews, in keeping with the type of documentary that took hold in the 1960s and 1970s. Others prefer to capture, in the course of the action, informal exchanges between women workers, which begin imperceptibly and little by little to reshape opinions: assemblies then formalize them in speeches and collective decisions. Finally, some films tend to situate themselves in a time after the struggle. This is the case of a reflective Belgian film, in which factories are no more than architectural ruins (Devenir, 2011). In Italy in 2011, a young woman worker, threatened by the closing of her factory, realizes that her familiar surroundings contain the remains of another, much larger factory, now in the final stages of destruction, for the greater profit of speculative tourist building (In future costruzione).

18 Several films offer a concrete alternative: the cooperative. The idea had already formed the basis in 1936 of a tragi-comedy, Le crime de Monsieur Lange, in which Jean Renoir treated somewhat light-heartedly a short-lived initiative by a group of seamstresses. The films on the Lip watch factory in the 1970s, paradoxically, barely mention the cooperative formula which has nonetheless been attached to this name. But the principle of cooperative manufacturing, sales and payment is found in the case of Sogantal. In the 1970s again, cooperation features in the filmed story of an all-women outfit, a group of women carpenters, fed up with craft and trade union discrimination, who created their own company in 1978 (Raising the Roof). Later, the same idea is at the center of an Italian fiction film tracing the industrial, managerial, and emotional

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fluctuations of a female collective forming a textile cooperative in Milan in the 1980s (Gentili signore). Two other films, one fiction and one documentary, consider the process by which the personnel of a company in liquidation opts to regroup as a cooperative (L’Amour sur un fil; Entre nos mains). The subtlety of the latter film comes from the close attention paid by the director to the various processes by which the women workers reinvent the project in the first decade of 2000. Once more, the initiative was sabotaged by the managerial collusion between banks, commercial rivals, and customers in the chain of distribution, according to a class mentality made explicit in the words of the boss of Maryflo, who decided to close her factory: “They [the workers] want it all. Let them figure it out. That way, they can be dignified all the way to the dole office.”

Gender at work and work of gender

19 As expected, some films depic discord between men and women in the factory, including conflict between male and female workers. Some women refuse the work medal that their bosses want to pin on them (Revers), others sing to their thunderstruck [male] boss, “And now, big cheapskate, big jackass, stick your dough up your ass, up to the last penny” (Nous, ouvrières de la Sogantal). On the whole, it is the movies from the 1970s that expose with most clarity the gender contradictions, often associated with professional, hierarchical, or class conflicts. Nonetheless, an Austrian film made in 1984 underlines the internal conflict within the workforce. On returning from the 1914-1918 war, the men, struggling to find work, wanted to expel from the workshops the women who had implanted themselves there (Marianne. Ein Recht für Alle). The heroine, who is a worker’s wife as well as union representative, finds herself caught in the dilemma. In a more targeted way, several films present a more or less pronounced masculine ascendency within the trade unions and during labor disputes (Rêves d’usine; 300 jours de colère). Others show how the disputes offer an occasion to challenge gender relations. It’s not a new phenomenon. Already, as can be seen in the archive-based scenario about militant American working women in the 1930s (Union Maids, 1976), the fight against the sexist prejudices of male workers and union representatives toward the women who had fought alongside them was part of the very construction of unionism. Over the course of the 1970s, we see this conflict appearing closer up, with more or less virulence depending on the situation and according to the film.

20 Challenges to union leaders are found in some films (Coup pour coup, 1972). The documentary Quand les femmes ont pris la colère (1977) traces the action, in the Loire- Atlantique département in western France, of wives on behalf of their worker husbands, the repression they encounter, and the mobilization that follows. One of the militant women later looked back on it to conclude: I discovered that we also have little conflicts with the men, workers, unionists, even political militants. They have trouble recognizing the strength that women can bring to certain fights. Women are prepared to push open doors when the men themselves are afraid of being cornered. They [the men] need, as the saying goes, a bit of education.

21 On this point, the feminist gaze offers particular acuity, for example, the films Carole Roussopoulos made about the Lip case. Monique Piton’s monologue is, in this respect, a text worthy of an anthology (Lip V. Monique et Christine, 1976):

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I’m going to tell you a little about what goes on at Lip. But I’m going to replace the word “men” by the word “white”, and the word “women” by the word “Arabs”. So each time I say Arabs, I mean women.

22 In this picaresque film, the images of work and those of the ongoing struggle are interspersed with numerous forms of male domination, from deciding who gets to speak to the composition of a delegation to the police station. The difficulty of inserting gender conflicts and the issue of rape into assembly debates, or the discreet evocation of conjugal violence is a new element in the years around 1968 (Lip V. Monique et Christine; Quand les femmes ont pris la colère, 1976). Finally, women workers develop certain modes of action, most notably songs and theater11, which are more frequently found in factories with a female workforce (Nous les ouvrières de la Sogantal, 2010; Entre nos mains, 2010). A former Portuguese woman factory worker commented on how valuable these could be: You know, they’re inspired rimes… These rimes were made up by everyone. I can’t say exactly, but there were a lot of us and each one had her word to say. Suffering feeds our poetic vein - that must be it. There is a lot of feeling behind it.

23 A number of films look at the gender relations in which women workers are entangled outside of work, as described by Cecilia Mangani in 1965 (Essere donne): the double shift annihilates the emancipation brought about by factory life relative to the patriarchal attitudes and exhausting housework experienced at home. Later films show challenges to this inequality of gender relations within the couple, which may emerge during labor disputes. In many cases, women will make their decisions about initiatives discussed at the factory “individually”, that is, by a discussion within the family (Entre nos mains). Nonetheless, the families evolve in various ways (Quand les femmes ont pris la colère). Some are strengthened: It brought me closer to my wife; it’s wonderful what she did. (…) I was expecting more the reaction of a little, normal woman, the little wife of a working man, who stays at home and says, “I’m sick of this, I’ve had enough of eating potatoes, you gotta go back to work”.

24 Norma Rae offers, on the contrary, the archetype of growing tension between the heroine and her husband, while she gets along better and better with her union representative (although this is depicted as a purely professional relationship). In a parallel scenario, a kindly foreman might replace the generous trade unionist, as opposed to a brutal husband (Sassedkata, 1990). Others depict the obstacles placed by the husband in the way of his wife’s militancy, or a separation: “After what happened at Tréfimétaux, it doesn’t work for us any more. My husband didn’t earn enough money, so he left and was transferred.” The wife follows him, but they are unable to avoid a break-up: “Now, I’m fine, I have a job, I do what I can with my kids, I feel good, I have my quiet little job, my kids with me”. Beyond these crises or break-ups, several films also consider private life by following the habitual loneliness of women workers, whether as employees of Moulinex or in a Russian slaughterhouse, a Bordeaux vineyard, a Latvian pastry shop or an Austrian printing house (Mon travail c’est capital, 2000; Femmes précaires, 2005; Egg Lady, 2000; Elefantenhaut, 2009). Sometimes the working-class heroine brings up her children alone (Laisse un peu d’amour, 1997), sometimes she has to care for her aging mother or elderly father. The difficulty in finding a compatible partner may never be evoked or, on the contrary, sometimes provides the basic framework for a determined quest, which may be treated in jocular mode (With love, Lilly, 2003). Finally, one way of life presented, the hostels for young

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women workers, may look like a hangover from former days (Un sac de puces, 1962). But the phenomenon is commonplace in the new industries of Vietnam or Taiwan. The (female) director of the Taiwanese film, Lesbian factory (2010), in the course of one labor dispute, discovered the propensity of young immigrant women crammed into Spartan dormitories to find comfort in a homosexuality that might fade away when the end of their contract disperses the personnel.

Head low, head high

25 Protesting against the tear-jerking program made by a television channel about workers at Samsonite, the director of Liquidation totale (2009) explains that she has by contrast set out to underline their combativeness, their resistance, their courage. More than the subject matter of the film, which is soberly treated, it is the argument which recalls the heroic vein of the films produced in the 1970s, and is found again in more recent productions by both male and female directors (300 jours de colère, 2002; Garder la tête haute, 2006). Without always explicitly taking this approach, most film makers agree in accentuating the dignity of the women workers represented, and try to express sympathy without condescension, which they achieve by different concrete choices12. In recent decades, one frequent approach has been to film from the standpoint of accompanying the workers, rather than by acting as their spokesperson. Thus, when the Vietnamese woman director of the film Rêves d’ouvrières (2006), armed with a light camera, asks a woman worker in a dormitory in Hanoi about the conditions, the latter tells her to leave the camera aside and to come sit next to her so that she can “talk to her like a sister”. In complying, the director agrees to adopt a relationship of proximity and equality.

26 Age is a significant indicator of the difficulty of being a woman factory worker. Most of the younger women featured are seeking at all costs to avoid the factory and the life of an assembly line worker, and might take any risk to achieve this (Sur la planche, 2011; La vie rêvée des anges, 1998). In En avoir (ou pas), the heroine lashes out at her male partner, a building laborer, paradoxically refusing to go on seeing him: “Anyway, you’re not made for me. Too broke, just a laborer. You’re shabby. That’s what I’d say.” To escape her destiny, she has left a fish cannery in Boulogne-sur-Mer, the smell of which she long believes stays on her hands, and has traveled across France. Escape like this is in some cases dealt with from the angle of a passion for some leisure activity, in which all hopes are invested (cf. Secret Society, 2001, where the passion in question is for Sumo wrestling). Acceptance of one’s occupation does not come without effort, as this exchange between the film director and the worker (both women) demonstrates (Calor, une usine en perspective: Rovetta, le dragon et la pieuvre, 2005): I asked you what trade you operated at Calor, and you corrected me, saying, “Ah, you mean my job”. You mean there’s a difference? – To have a trade means you’ve learned a skill. Me, all I’ve ever done is repetitive work. That’s not a trade. – You mentioned your daughter. When she had to give her parents’ occupation, and she asked you, what did you say? – I called myself a factory worker in front of the other pupils’ parents. I didn’t much like saying that. I oughtn’t to have minded though. I don’t have to be ashamed about being a factory worker. It’s honorable, I’m not doing anything dishonorable. When little girls say my mommy is a school teacher, a secretary… It’s stupid, but… Still, I’m not ashamed to be doing it. It’s honest, it’s satisfying, I get my pay. But sometimes the look of other people. Depending on who

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you’re with: oh right, you work in a factory. My husband tells me that I shouldn’t be like that. But I am, I feel it.

27 This same worker tells the film-maker how, in her childhood, she was very proud of her mother’s occupation, a really skilled one in this case, of dressmaker. As if in echo, a Flemish woman at Levi’s tells how she put on her best clothes for her first day at the factory (Ouvrières du monde, 2000). Should we see these examples as spelling the end of the dignity of the industrial worker, something that remained strong until the beginning of de-industrialization and the crumbling of the labor movement? Another testimony, from a communist activist in 1976, reminds us not to view that past as too rose-tinted (Quand les femmes ont pris la colère, 1976): What I’m fighting for is to be happy. To be a woman who’s comfortable in her own skin. Not boastful about herself, but… The thing I would like the most, would be to have a job I liked. Not to be ashamed to say, “I’m a warehouse packer.” Anyone who could bring us that, something like that, it would be a political change. And I think that afterwards, relations between men and women would be transformed. It will never be perfect, we chase after perfection, without ever reaching it, but…

28 In this definition, where once more we find combined private and public, work and what is outside work, the quest for dignity is located in a different time-frame – here, the future – whereas the present is simply a synonym for dissatisfaction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1936: Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, Jean Renoir, France (♂). 1962: Un sac de puces, Vera Chytilová, Czechoslovakia. 1965: Essere donne, Cecilia Mangini, Italy. 1973: Lip 1. Monique (Lip), Carole Roussopolos, France. 1972: Coup pour coup, Marin Karmitz, France (♂). Tout va bien, Jean-Luc Godard, France (♂). 1974: Humain trop humain, Louis Malle, France (♂). 1975: Grandin, Nat Lilenstein, France. 1976: Quand les femmes ont pris la colère, Soisig Chappedelaine and René Vauthier, France; Lip V. Monique et Christine, Carole Roussopolos, France; Union Maids, Julia Reichert, James Klein, Miles Mogulescu, USA. 1979: Norma Rae, Martin Ritt, USA (♂). 1982: Laila, Diane Beaudry, Canada. 1984: Marianne. Ein Recht für Alle, Käthe Kratz, Austria. 1987: Naplo Szerelmeimnek, Marta Meszaros, Hungary. 1988: Komplizinnen, Margit Czenki, West Germany. 1989: Gentili signore, Adriana Monti, Italy. 1990: Sassedkata (La voisine), Adela Peeva, Bulgaria. 1991: Shurale, Renita et Hannes Lintorp, USSR/Estonia. 1992: Revers, Daisy Lamothe, France. 1995: En avoir (ou pas), Laetitia Masson, France. 1997: Laisse un peu d’amour, Zaïda Ghorab-Volta, France; Rue des filles de Chantelle, Danielle Lefebvre and Dominique Ménard, France; Maryflo (série Stripease), Olivier Lamour, France (♂). 1998: La vie rêvée des anges, Erick Zonca, France (♂). 2000: Mon travail, c’est capital, Marie-Pierre Bretas, Raphaël Girardot and Laurent Salters, France; Les filles de la sardine, Marie Hélia, France. Daughter of the Sun, Maryam Shahriar, Iran; Egg Lady, Una Celma, Latvia; Ouvrières du monde, Marie-France Collard, Belgium. L’amour sur un fil, Michaela Watteaux, France. 2001: Paroles de Bibs, Jocelyne Lemaire-Darnaud, France; Une part du ciel, Bénédicte Liénard, Belgium ; Secret Society, Imogen Kimmel, Germany ; Rêves d’usine, Luc Decaster, France (♂). 2002: On n’est pas des steacks hachés, Anne Galland, Alina Arouali, France ; Sauf la lutte, Catherine Tréfousse, France; Manjuben, Truck Driver, Sherna Dastur, India; Ouvrier, c’est pas la classe, Patrick Jan, France (♂). 300 jours de colère, Marcel Trillat, France (♂). 2003: With Love, Lilly,

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Larisa Sadilova, Russia. 2005: Calor, une usine en perspective: Rovetta, le dragon et la pieuvre, Martine Arnaud-Goddet, France ; Raising the Roof, Veronica Selver and Françoise Flamant, USA; Femmes précaires, Marcel Trillat, France (♂). 2006: Rêves d’ouvrières, Tran Phuong Thao, Vietnam; We Are Not Defeated, Lee Hye-Ran, South Korea. 2009: Liquidation totale, Hélène Desplanques, France; Elefantenhaut, Ulrike Putzer, Severin Fiala, Austria. 2010: Made in Dagenham, Nigel Cole, UK (♂). Sochaux, cadences en chaîne, Laurence Jourdan, France; Entre nos mains, Mariana Otero, France; Lesbian Factory, Susan Chen, Taiwan; Nous, ouvrières de la Sogantal, Nadejda Tilhou, Portugal. 2011: Disparaissez, les ouvriers, Christine Thépenier and Jean-François Priester, France; Devenir, Loredana Bianconi, Belgium; In futura costruzione, Giulia Casagrande, Italy; Sur la planche, Leïla Kilani, Morocco/ Germany/France. Garder la tête haute, Martine Gonthié, France.

Bibliography

BEAUD, Stéphane, and Michel PIALOUX. 1999. Retour sur la condition ouvrière. Enquête aux usines de Peugeot-Sochaux. Paris: Fayard.

CADÉ, Michel. 2004. L’Écran bleu. La Représentation des ouvriers dans le cinéma français. Perpignan: Presses universitaires de Perpignan.

GALLOT, Fanny. 2009. La “crise de nerfs”, de la souffrance à la résistance ? Clio, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 29: 153-164.

GALLOT, Fanny. 2012. Les ouvrières, des années 68 au très contemporain: pratiques et représentations. Doctoral thesis, Université Lumière Lyon 2.

LINDEPERG, Sylvie. 2007. Nuit et brouillard. Un Film dans l’histoire. Paris: Odile Jacob.

ROT, Gwenaëlle, and Laure de VERDALLE (eds). 2013. Le Cinéma. Travail et organisation. Paris: La Dispute.

ROT, Gwenaëlle and Alain MICHEL. 2006. Le travail au cinéma. Un réapprentissage de la réalité sociale. Esprit 326: 78-99.

VIGNA, Xavier. 2012. Histoire des ouvriers en France au XXe siècle. Paris: Perrin.

NOTES

1. Beaud & Pialoux 1999; Vigna 2012. 2. The MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes) is the equivalent of the Women’s Liberation Movement. 3. Rot & de Verdalle (eds) 2013. 4. Lindeperg 2007. 5. Gallot 2012. 6. The Women’s International Film Festival of Créteil has taken place every spring since 1979 at the Maison des Arts in Créteil. Unique in the world, it introduces and supports films by women directors from all countries. It aims to promote the female gaze on societies and to emphasize their different cultures. For the past several years, this Festival has developed a center for resources, the IRIS, which classifies and digitizes the archives from the annual events. This center offers over 6,000 films and numerous documents on the history of cinema and women for study year round. A thematic catalogue is available for consultation. 7. Groupe Nigwal. Hatzfeld, Rot & Michel 2006. 8. Cadé 2004.

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9. Thanks here to Tangui Perron. 10. Gallot 2009. 11. The importance of songs in workers’ strikes was underscored in Gallot 2012. 12. Their preoccupation in many cases is similar to that of Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron. Le Savant et le Populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature. Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil. 1989.

ABSTRACTS

The article studies representations of female workers in movies, directed for the most part by women, over the past fifty years. The diversity of these films reflects evolutions in cinematic production and differences between countries and areas of the world. Most of these films show the peculiar painfulness of the work carried out by female workers in certain industrial sectors. Some of them concentrate on the struggles against the difficulties and constraints of work, and, in Western Europe, depict struggles relating to plant closures. These movies depict gender inequalities or contradictions both at work or in other facets of life; these are portrayed at times as being at the heart of the struggles. Lastly, the dignity of female workers is a concern present in most of these movies.

L’article étudie les représentations des ouvrières dans des films réalisés au cours des cinquante dernières années, dont la plupart sont l’œuvre de réalisatrices. La diversité de cet ensemble traduit les évolutions du monde du cinéma et les variations de point de vue entre régions du monde. Cependant ces films montrent, souvent, la pénibilité singulière des travaux attribués aux ouvrières, dans certaines branches industrielles. Une partie d’entre eux se concentrent sur les luttes menées contre la dureté et les contraintes du travail, et, en Europe de l’Ouest, contre les fermetures d’entreprises. Les inégalités ou contradictions de genre sont abordées aussi bien au travail que dans les autres aspects de la vie de ces femmes, parfois dans le cœur même des luttes. Enfin, la dignité des ouvrières est une préoccupation présente dans la majeure partie des films.

INDEX

Mots-clés: ouvrières, films, travail, représentations, luttes Keywords: female workers, movies, work, representations, struggles

AUTHORS

NICOLAS HATZFELD Nicolas Hatzfeld is professor of contemporary history at the University of Evry. His research is on twentieth-century labour history, factory life, industrial health and representations of work on film. Publications include Les Gens d’usine: cinquante ans d’histoire à Peugeot-Sochaux (2002); Observer le travail (2008, co-author) and La Santé au travail: entre savoirs et pouvoirs XIXe-XXe siècle

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(2009). [email protected]

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Italian working men’s masculinities in the latter half of the twentieth century

Masculinités ouvrières dans l’Italie du second XXe siècle

Andrea Sangiovanni Translation : Heloise Finch-Boyer

EDITOR'S NOTE

Article originally in Italian, translated from the French version by Heloise FINCH-BOYER

1 In Acciaio [Steel], a 2010 novel that takes place in the steelworks of Piombino, Silvia Avallone writes: No one from outside can understand what it means to transform tonnes and tonnes of raw material. The hardest material that exists. And [the author adds] they could no more imagine the unbelievable quantity of sexy calendars and posters of naked women pinned up everywhere.1

2 The novelist repeatedly suggests the existence of a direct link between the way industrial workers experience being men, based on physical energy and aggressive behaviour, and their labour in the steelworks itself, in direct contact with heat, exhaustion and the constant emotional tension caused by danger: You felt your blood flow at a crazy rhythm, when you were in there […] you regressed to a bestial state […] You had a constant desire to fuck someone. The reaction of the human body to the titanic body of industry.2

3 Although her novel is set at the beginning of the new millennium, it portrays an image of workers whose key features seem to reproduce a traditional image: the steelworks are described as a completely masculine world, where the “natural” characteristics of man – strength, courage, leadership, honour, aggression – are praised to excess. Furthermore, these characteristics seem to be reduced to a basic level that denies them

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any of the political aspects that once characterized the image of the worker in socialist and communist culture. Thus, in Acciaio there is no trace either of “class consciousness” or of any “work ethic”, not even the attention to a job well done. It is as if – given the progressive marginalization of manual work within production, as well as at a social and individual level, and the disappearance of the proud subjective identification of workers with their own trades – the only characteristics which could resist and give meaning to existence were those that defined the worker as male. In a way, this novel can therefore be considered as an end-point in representations of working-class masculinity which now seems, at the beginning of the twenty-first century when it is in profound crisis, to be above all a means of seeking reassurance.3

4 This article examines the development of representations of the worker as a man in Italy in the late twentieth century. Such representations result from the interplay between both the idea of the worker, and the idea of the man, two indeterminate representations which influence and – at least in part – shape each other. As a socialist and communist-inflected investigation into the working-class condition in the 1950s observed, it was not generally thought that there was “on one hand the man, and on the other the worker. The latter is a man because he is a worker. That is where his humanity is located. His being-a-man.”4

Work and masculinity

5 This layering of representations derives from the common perception that manual work is a foundational element of masculine identity. The importance of this perception has influenced lexical constructions, because “men usually make the verb ‘to be’ the indication of belonging to a trade” whereas “women use the verb ‘to do’, followed by a distanced enumeration of numerous activities.”5 The link between work and identity is, however, relational: work forms a masculine identity which in turn influences the world of work. This holds true not only in the example of mining – where rigid gender barriers have prevented inter-communication between the occupational sphere and the family sphere6 – but also in the textile industry where, despite an overwhelmingly female workforce, the division of labour and industrial relations have been marked by a clear gender hierarchy.

6 This article examines the case of metalworkers in engineering industries, in particular that of Fiat, where female presence had always been fairly low. In the 1970s, a special edition of the monthly company magazine Illustrato Fiat about women working in the company gave voice to women’s growing demand for access to industrial work. The magazine sought to depict “modern” female workers who, it said, were no longer content to be housewives but wanted an occupation that would be really considered a proper job. Of course, said the magazine, their number was limited, but that was because engineering “demands […] a particular type of preparation that women, partly because of their education, very seldom succeed in obtaining.”7 The situation was hardly any different in office work, even if the number of female employees was higher there in percentage terms than that of female workers in the factories. Once more, the division of labour was strongly influenced by gender difference.

7 All in all, despite the relatively high number of women in employment in the 1970s,8 work was still considered to be a masculine prerogative and its iconography was anchored to images of machismo. To be sure, this image was no longer rigidly linked to

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the stereotype of male worker typical of the 1950s:9 “sober, virile and strong, robust and reassuring, threatening if in a group, depicted as clean-shaven and radiant, if possible in shirt-sleeves and canvas or cord trousers”.10 Nonetheless, as late as 1972, an Ennio Calabria poster continued to reflect this traditional visual language by drawing a working man in overalls, arms folded, looking larger and even more imposing because of the extreme worm’s-eye angle, gazing into the distance at an undefined future of social rebirth.11

The workplace as masculine community

8 Workplaces also appear to be represented as masculine communities. In 1955, a year after being laid off, a worker wrote to his workmates “I loved the factory”, this “ community of hard-working men, united by effort and the desire for a fairer future […] I still feel like one of your brothers.”12 Another describes how the factory consisted of “comrades, friends, it was the atmosphere, how we used to discuss things, how we talked, the solidarity there”. It was a place where experience was inherited through the male line, because there the worker found “the smell that my father brought back from work when he came home, when I was a kid”.13 Aside from these statements where memory of the factory seems to have been influenced by nostalgia, we might think of two standard images used to evoke the factory: on one hand, the prison and the barracks, both exclusively masculine locations of harsh working conditions. And on the other, the “community”, a place made up of networks woven from masculine solidarity which often took on a political colour,14 but which was also defined by eating together and a shared passion for sport.15 This polarization continued even in the most intensely politicized moments of factory life, for example during the period of strikes between 1968 and 1973.

9 Andrea Papaleo’s statement, as a Fiat worker and member of Lotta Continua,16 is therefore illustrative: I thought that the factory was the centre of everything […] even if the work wasn’t easy […] Even if it seemed that the discussions you had outside were more profound, in the factory things were truer. Perhaps you talked more about women and football than about politics, but no-one was faking, no-one was playing a part.17

10 Moreover, even the strategies used by women workers to make the factory less sanitized and impersonal, such as putting a bunch of flowers next to their machine, can be read as a kind of opposition to the masculine connotations of the workplace. Male workers emphasized this opposition by their own personalizing of their work space: in a scene from the 1971 Elio Petri film La classe operaia va in paradiso [The Working Class Goes to Heaven] one workstation is decorated by a poster depicting a nude woman. This practice was still occurring at the end of the 1970s, when the activists of the Turin Womens’ Inter-professional Union demonstrated and made “punitive”-type raids, pulling down and binning posters and porn magazines stuck on office walls.18

The factory, after school and the barracks

11 Despite their variety, company models of representing the factory also suggest the idea of a masculine community. Thus Fiat promoted an image of its own world based on a hierarchical conception of existence, viewed for the most part through the prism of masculinity. The Fiat apprenticeship college (Scuola Allievi Fiat) is particularly

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interesting for this reason; it is depicted in all the films that describe company welfare programmes, and one 1962 film is entirely based on the college.19 The reference models, including their visual language, are the barracks or the high school, with pupils in uniform marching in formation, and performing the same movements. These are representations depicting a masculine model which probably had a normative value for the company to the extent, as Simonetta Piccone Stella notes, that it was commonly thought in the 1950s and 1960s that “youth was simply an apprenticeship for adult life.”20

12 Moreover, the same references appear in a photographic series from the early 1970s, which shows other Fiat company welfare programmes, such as the “apprentice houses” (case per lavoratori apprendisti).21 Again, these images show an exclusively male community. Once more, the spatial organisation, the furniture and the sanitized atmosphere evoke either a high school or a barracks. It is as if the interior and the exterior of the factory worked together to define a unique model both of a man and of an orderly, disciplined worker, with few and simple entertainments like playing cards or, at best, reading a magazine. Some of these photographs, however, show working men cooking: these are images which definitely depict a world without women, yet which push the viewer to ask to what extent the social transformations emerging from the economic boom transformed traditional models of virility. For male workers, this change overlapped with the transformation of manufacturing and the factory environment in addition to the transformations wrought by the revival of trade unionism.22

Changes in working-class masculinity

13 During the “economic miracle”, the most attentive observers of Italian reality – from literature to cinema, from newspaper investigations to the social sciences – began once more to enquire into the factory world, by picking up faint signals of the transformation of working-class masculinity. Giuseppe Fina’s Pelle viva [Scorched Skin, 1962] relates in a late neo-realist mode the difficult life of a worker obliged to commute between his home and his workplace. The director’s main intention is to criticise his harsh working conditions, but he also shows the subtle changes of the family as an institution, because the main character marries – in a civil ceremony – a young woman immigrant from the Mezzogiorno who already has a child.

A weakened workforce?

14 In other cases, however, changes to basic elements of the traditional model of workers’ masculinity were more obvious. One such was representation of the body, which has always been central to the written and visual construction of the image of the manual worker. The male worker has long been represented by an image of his own body: the iconography of the nineteenth century often showed him stripped to the waist, in order to highlight his muscle structure, contrasting with the flabby and unfit bodies of the “bosses”. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, there were frequent representations of the worker as “a demiurge”, a “gigantic figure without whom humanity would stop”,23 such as the muscular workers wielding heavy iron hammers depicted on the membership cards of the communist party in 1952 and 1961.24

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15 In 1962, however, Paolo Volponi questioned this representation of the worker’s body in Memoriale [Memorial], one of the most important “industrial” novels of Italian literature. The story centres on the main character’s body: Albino Saluggia is suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, but he is hired at the factory because of his status as ex- prisoner of war. The novel relates both a psychological and physical pathology, and follows the slow and inexorable decline of Saluggia’s health. Alongside the central plot however, Volponi follows the way the increasingly mechanized factory transforms the bodies of the workers. Thus, Saluggia notes in relation to his work colleagues that each one had a tensed muscle, pursed lips, half-closed eyes or furrowed eyebrows. In other words, they all had but one thought beating away in their heads, bouncing off all the walls of the factory, and beating on. The factory gave no respite to these thoughts […] it was not enough to lift their eyes from the work and look around; there was nothing that was not part of the factory. The work itself did not help; it did not require the guidance of thought […] It was only after work that we finally seemed to see men in the factory.25

16 True, the theme of factory rhythms that annihilated both body and thought was not particularly new, but the attention that the question aroused in public opinion was new. At the end of that decade, Giorgio Bocca devoted a number of his columns in Il Giorno to this subject and coined the expression the neurotic factory”26 a place where “machines get younger and workers age before their time”27 and where “men and machines live together with difficulty”, a state of affairs which produces a maladjustment to the working environment and its dangers […] then devastating epileptic seizures, individual and group explosions which bring in their wake new repressions and frustrations and their consequences, industrial accidents, absences, spontaneous strikes, sabotage and, sometimes, madness.28

17 The neurotic factory, Bocca stated, influences life even when workers adapt “their lives to continual exhaustion, giving up any tiring leisure activities, sleeping more, reading less”29 and, one could add, making love less often. This grievance, which became a topos of working protest in the following years,30 destabilized one of the foundations of working-class masculine identity.

18 The previously mentioned film The Working Class Goes to Heaven demonstrates, however, that the deconstruction of this aspect of masculine identity did not develop in a linear way. Lulù Massa, the film’s main character, appears as the prototype of “the good worker”, embedded in consumer society and the productive system. His only concern is to get maximum benefit from his own work and because of this the management asks him both to define the time needed for making parts and to train new employees. In one scene, Lulù explains to two young men who have just arrived how to work one of the machines; and when they ask him how he manages to keep up with the rhythm of work he replies: I’ve got this technique to help me concentrate. I get an idea in my head: I think of an arse, the arse of that girl over there. In here, there’s nothing else to do; what else can you do?

19 In the following scene, the camera frames Lulù in front of his machine while he works at a rapid rate and obsessively repeats “One part, one arse. One part, one arse…” The camera then follows the two young men who start to smash the machines in an act of rebellion, before returning to Lulù who, completely unaware, continues to produce the parts without ceasing his mantra. Beyond the symbolic force of the scene, the portrait of Lulù is the most interesting. His repeated and obsessive macho utterance is nothing

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more than a form of nervous tension, belied by other scenes that cast doubt on his real sexual performance. Yet the factory has damaged Lulù’s whole body: “I am thirty one years old,” he says. “I’ve been in the factory since the age of fifteen. I have been poisoned by paint twice and I have an ulcer. I’m broken inside”. It is perhaps no accident that Lulù’s rebellion is finally precipitated by his losing a finger, another violation of his body.

20 All the same, despite increasing awareness of how factory rhythms negatively impact on sexuality, one can detect a kind of reaction in defence of working-class virility, weakened and compromised as it had been. For example Il padrone e l’operario [The boss and the worker] a minor film by Steno [Stefano Vanzina], plays on the opposition between the virile worker and the unmanly boss. One could also cite the case of workers in the 1968-1969 period, who sometimes described their complex relationship with [left-wing] students in ways that were also underpinned by sexual factors. The ageing worker who, for years, had felt himself to be an inferior being [a leading campaigner of that time related] suddenly found himself face to face with a teenage girl who was interested in him and told him he was the centre of everything.31

21 This is echoed in a report by Gad Lerner, a far-left activist at the time: It was lovely to watch the parade in front of the Milanese Lotta Continua premises on Saturday afternoons when the teenage girls […] from Berchet High School encountered Militich de Pirelli and the other workers who touched them up and they let themselves be touched, they played about with that.32

22 Another activist from Lotta Continua, Vicky Franzinetti, remembered that young women sometimes got engaged to workers of their own age: “they would go to the cinema with them, share their interests and copy their way of dressing”. She added, “We needed to be forgiven for being daughters of the bourgeoisie. People told some of the women (and some women said it too) that you had to go out with the workers”.33

23 This demonstrates once more that the changing models of masculinity were not linear, even in the social milieus that might have been most likely to accept such change. The publication of a Gasparazzo comic strip featuring Lotta Continua, for example, created a lot of bad feeling. Drawn by Roberto Zamarin, the character Gasparazzo was depicted as an immigrant worker from the south who, as Goffredi Fofi has noted, “looks at the world of the factory, and industrial society, with the astonishment and the artlessness of a child but also with the consciousness of age-old exploitation.”34 In the Lotta Continua drawings, Zamarin shows him fondling the bottom of a girl who is distributing the Lotta Continua magazine in front of the Fiat factory gates. Furious, she brings up the issue in a committee meeting which agrees, “no fondling the Lotta Continua girls’ bottoms will be allowed”. Gasparazzo is persuaded, stops touching up the Lotta Continua girls, but moves on to fondling the bottoms of girls in Potere operaio instead (another far-left group).35 The comic strip highlighted, in an ironic and farcical way, the “woman question” which would later fuel strong disagreements among far-left groups, and yet which was already beginning to foster the appearance of a new masculinity. The persistence of old-fashioned gestures of virility of a “slap and tickle” kind focussed discussions on a new model of gender relations based on “friendship and complicity”. As Vicky Franzinetti, one of the people who protested against the comic strip remembered: “among older generations, segregation was the rule, men and women lived separately and did politics separately. But we thought we should be comrades and companions.”36

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Education of the workers and transformations of daily life

24 To understand fully the significance of the change this episode marks, it must be contextualized within broader transformations of youth culture, because the arrival of a new wave of young workers in the 1960s also influenced the world of the factory. Whilst young people were still seen as adults being trained, they began to see themselves as peer-groups based on “a network of horizontal links inside the vertical institutional structures which had, until then, been internalized”.37 Young people saw each other as peers because of the way they dressed, the music they listened to, what they read; in short through the informal culture conveyed by the media, rather than through the formal culture of educational institutions or traditional behavioural norms. As the daily press noticed in 1969, the workers who stopped to talk with the students at the [factory] gates, are mostly young southerners. They don’t seem in any hurry to go back home. […] After eight hours of working on a factory line, it’s a relief to listen to other young people and talk with them.38

25 This transformation modified gendered interactions, albeit slowly, and made it possible for women to have an active role.39 It also changed men’s relationship to their work, which affected another element of masculine identity: if the older workers were sorry to see a “work ethic” disappearing, the new generations of workers sometimes even refused the sense of belonging to the masculine community of the factory. In the words of Giampiero Carpo, a worker who had nonetheless gone through the Fiat apprenticeship scheme: For me, as for a whole lot of young workers, it was one of a range of options; if things didn’t go well in there, we could go elsewhere and we were no longer willing to accept injustice beyond a certain limit just in order to keep our job.40

26 In short, patterns of working-class identity were slowly changing; from now on, this identity would include what was happening outside the factory, both in public and in private life, contributing to what Luisa Passerini and Marcella Filippa have described as a “multiple identity”41 where diverse affinities did not conflict with each other, but were layered and mutually enriching.

27 Growth in consumer consumption and transformation in living styles added to this. The development of the market, and especially of leisure consumerism was no longer reachable only through male mediation but was directly aimed at female consumers, “destabilizing the women-men-market triangle” and dealing “a serious blow to virile masculinity”.42 This is shown, for example, in the pathetic attempt by Giulio, a Milanese worker of advancing years, who goes to long sessions in a male beauty salon in an attempt to win back his young wife Vicenzina, who has fallen in love with someone else – Mario Monicelli’s warm and ironic portrayal of a working class couple in his 1974 film Romanzo popolare [Come Home and Meet My Wife]. The director reveals the fracture in the classic model of working-class masculinity and, at the same time, shows a new model of masculinity – brought to the fore by 1960s magazine advertisements – whereby men use cosmetic products without losing their virility. Thus, the film depicts a multiple masculine identity and yet has little or nothing to do with traditional masculine models.

28 Another film from the same period, Delitto d’amore [Somewhere Beyond Love] (Luigi Comencini, 1974) takes a young woman worker as its narrative focus, and effectively its

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main character. Again, in this example, the man is represented as having an increasingly fragile identity and appears to try to bolster his lost virility by salvaging out-dated models. Nullo, a Milanese worker who sees himself as an anarchist, meets and falls in love with Carmela, a southern worker at the factory. Their relationship is made more difficult by their social and geographical backgrounds: Carmela’s desire for independence becomes a battleground, as her brothers try to stop her, sometimes forcefully, from meeting up with Nullo. When the young woman dies, poisoned by toxic products from the factory, Nullo (who by this time has married her) seems to adopt the cultural models of his in-laws and takes blood revenge for his dead wife by shooting the factory owner. The reception of this film was very hostile, with sharp criticism of the way the worker’s private life overtakes his social commitments. From today’s perspective, this could be seen as a forerunner of a broader decline in collective action, that would become more obvious in the following years.

29 At the beginning of the 1970s then, an increasing number of signals heralded the profound transformation of the working-class, even if they stayed hidden behind perceptions of the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969.43 Comparing two covers of the Catholic weekly Famiglia cristiana helps to elucidate these representations of masculinity. In 1969, the cover dedicated to the First of May portrays a close-up of a man wearing blue overalls and a yellow safety helmet. On the cover of the first issue of 1971 the weekly newspaper portrays a woman working on a welding machine (under a headline announcing “Women and heavy engineering”).44 Another sign was the creation in 1975-1976 of the women’s coordinating group within the metal federation FLM (Federazione Lavoratori Metalmeccanici) arising from the development of feminism in an almost exclusively male-dominated trade union movement which had previously given little serious thought to the female question beyond a declaration of principles, at least until 1974.45 In both cases, however, the new role of women was held back by the slow- changing traditional representations of factory work as a masculine arena. Thus, the female images which illustrated the cover and the article in Famiglia Cristiana appeared alongside the statement that heavy engineering “demands special physical and psychological qualities, talents and aptitudes which are, without doubt, confined to men”.46 As for the women delegates from the presses section at Fiat, before interviewing the female workers, they had to “ask for the agreement of the [male] operators and then the male delegates of the Fiom-CGIL” who issued “imperious injunctions: What do you want to talk about? We’re very serious here, here there are some things that are better left unsaid”.47

Renegotiating domestic labour

30 Despite the reinforcement of traditional representations of masculine identity at the beginning of the decade, profound but subtle shifts also began to occur. This is evident in the brief messages that Vittorio and Nives Sparati, a working couple on the three- shift system, send to each other [in Alberto Papuzzi’s 2007 novel Quando Torni: Una vita operaia, set in the 1970s]. They write these messages to organize household and family activities, as they find it difficult ever to see each other. These messages illustrate the couple’s innermost transformations, sometimes becoming a kind of private diary.48 In the Sparati household, the daily management of the house is equally divided. Vittorio cooks, does the shopping and the cleaning; and in 1978, he even discovers the pleasure of looking after himself and his own body, as if he was in tune with the broader retreat

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into the private sphere which would characterise the “reflux”, the changing social tide. 49 Despite this continual redefinition of his own identity, however, Vittorio’s traditional masculinity sometimes emerges, for example during a discussion on the division of household roles, which results in the couple’s temporary separation.50 As Sandro Bellassai has remarked, the “renegotiation of domestic labour” which gained a foothold in the 1970s was often a pragmatic necessity which did not necessarily imply that men had signed up to the new behavioural models proposed by the women’s movement.51 In 1979, Carla Ravaioli was perhaps a little too optimistic when she wrote that “feminism’s challenge to hegemonic masculine roles has unquestionably modified the behaviour of a significant number of men”.52 The tensions characterizing the relationship between male workers and women inside the Lotta Continua movement are symbolic in this respect: during the 1976 Rimini congress, a working man maintained that “only the [male] worker, as a worker, can express what the proletariat expresses. The woman, as a woman, does not always express what the proletariat expresses.”53

Transformations of work and the redefinition of masculinity

31 In reality, it was not only the working-class model of masculinity that underwent a profound change at the end of the 1970s, but also the entire world of the factory, in a series of processes that mixed and fed into each other. The relation to work changed and these changes were profoundly linked to the generational tensions that characterized the 1977 events. Furthermore, this change underpinned a number of contemporary analyses that attempted to explain “this strange movement of strange students.”54 During those years, the concept of “the refusal of work” was increasingly evoked: theorists of workerism [operaismo] saw as one of the decisive factors of the 1970s the transformation of the “mass worker”, typical of 1968-1969, into the "social worker" in the “social factory”.55 But literature would also do this: take the words of Boccalone, the main character of a 1979 novel: “my desiring machine is not synchronised with the work machine”.56

32 In between times, moreover, the working environment changed, as much in the small and medium-sized companies that were to typify the emerging “third Italy”57 as in heavy industry. At Fiat there was a transition from “permanent conflict” to “a productive truce” which changed the behaviour of the working community. Collective action tended to die down in favour of a private sphere and while “not so long ago [a worker said] we all shouted together, nowadays we all mutter in little groups, as if we were in the market square”.58 One journalist remarked that an absolute refusal of “industrial values: productivity, work, the factory” appeared to spread, without anyone realising that these industrial values were also precisely the “values” of trade union culture. Similarly, relationships with the traditional collective forms of struggle were changing as well: new models marked by subjectivity and creativity began to replace them. The demo, the picket line, the meeting, are interesting like happenings, [wrote the same journalist] as an occasion for boys and girls to meet, to go out with each other, to make love, and that also happens at the factory during a strike.59

33 These new kinds of behaviour clashed with the widespread culture at Fiat amongst the older workers and the “foremen”, who were intermediary subjects between the large

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mass of the workers and the management. “Should people be able to make love in the factory?” asked a letter sent in January 1977 to the company newspaper Il giornale dei capi [The foremen’s newspaper]. “For me, the right to make love in the factory seems inconceivable,” wrote the correspondent. He added that this kind of behaviour signalled a general deterioration of the entire country, which had started with lack of interest in work. “I respected work my entire life, and I continue to do so, and I’ve seen that all the problems of the country began when such respect was considered idiocy”.60

34 Moreover, towards the end of the 1970s, the youngest generations started refusing not only work but the overall working environment, including the most common model of masculinity: Look at me, look at me properly [said Giò, aged 20, in July 1979]. I’m wearing disco shoes, an extremist’s shirt, a homosexual’s earring and I’ve got long hair like a singer: nothing that makes me look like a factory worker! Because if anyone comes in here, into the workshop, I want them to understand immediately that I’m not like the others. […] Outside I can walk around without my earring, dressed normally, but here I have to signal my difference.61

35 Giò’s search for difference also shows that the process that began in the previous decade had come to fruition, namely a construction of multiple, sometimes contradictory, masculinities that nonetheless never relinquished virility. It could happen therefore that men active in the trade union looked after children, or might even bring them along to factory council meetings.62

36 Once more, however, the evolution of working-class masculinity, notwithstanding its specific features, reflected a broader social transformation. In summer 1978, Il Corriere della Sera published a letter on its first page in which “a fifty-year-old professional”, unable to choose between his wife and his mistress, stated that he wanted to take his own life because of love. This was one of the first signs of this “triumph of private life”, to which the concept “reflux” or ebbing tide was applied. This was a social attitude which Il Corriere della Sera (the most widely read newspaper in the Italian press at the time) was not only happy to write about, but which it had almost encouraged. In fact, a journalist’s recent reconstruction of this affair states that the letter was probably a piece of writing created by the newspaper’s editors, based on a marketing survey that made predictions about the future direction of public opinion, “[a shift from] political participation to nascent individualism, from a desire for order to a revival in religiosity.”63

37 This resonates with some research that Fiat commissioned from the Demoskopea institute in 1979, whose aim was to study the “change factors” in complex societies, in other words the “vectors through which it can be hypothesized that changes will occur in our society”.64 Amongst the transformations that Demoskopea predicted were both the “refusal of work” and a modification of the traditional values attributed to the “working class”. Significantly Demoskopea noted in relationship to the family that it “no longer constitutes an end in itself, either for the woman or the man”, and “marriage is no longer seen as the sign of entry to the adult world”. This transformation in the institution of the family arose out of general anti- authoritarianism, which made traditional hierarchical organization more difficult, and which, in a more general way, brought about a radical fault line in the social conditioning intended to encourage acceptance of the authority of the state, and of institutions where paternal authority constituted the symbolic reference point and the most efficient instrument of pre-disposition.65

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38 Transformations of the family and the role of woman as agent, noted Demoskopea, seemed not to affect the figure of the male, because “men do not change at the same rate as women”. In reality, however, beyond the apparent equality of gender relations, a real upheaval of traditional identities was taking place, which for men would result in “growing insecurity and an enormous identity crisis.”66

39 It was at exactly the same time that magazines started giving an important place to light-touch articles describing “the male crisis”,67 a subject which was also developed effectively by Marco Ferreri in his 1978 film Ciao maschio [Bye Bye Monkey].68 But the most interesting film from the point of view of working-class communities was pure comedy entertainment La patata bollente [Hot Potato], filmed by Steno [Stefano Vanzina] in 1979. With an ambiguous title alluding to erotic comedy, this film dramatizes the political and personal crises of a worker (played by Renato Pozzetto) who is an uncompromising communist, union rep and one-time boxer with superhuman strength. His character, nicknamed Gandhi, is the quintessential virile worker. However, his encounter with Massimo Ranieri, a homosexual whom Gandhi saves from a fascist lynching, and who is then put up by Gandhi in his house, makes him question himself and his own convictions. On a symbolic level, therefore, masculine “deviance” causes cracks in the exaggerated virility of the main character, but at the same time this virility is not rejected, and ends up redrawing the representation of working masculinity in a new way.69

40 The film therefore describes (sometimes in a vulgar register) the profound transformation in a working-class world that is increasingly difficult to represent as a monolithic bloc. Perhaps, as a communist Fiat delegate affirmed, “we are beginning to understand that this working class has changed, and that there are no longer simply generational differences, but also differences in income and culture”.70 The same year, the Italian communist party had carried out an impressive mass study on industry, which drew an unexpected portrait of the working-class world.71 This was confirmed a few years later by a new piece of research which described a “multi-dimensional worker” in the sense that alongside the working man, other faces and other interests began, in turn, to assert themselves: that of the income gatherer, the saver, the consumer, the producer, the skilled professional, the (conscious) holder of resources of power and influence, and so on.72

41 And yet, once more, traditional images and representations were extremely slow to change. It is no accident that gendered and generational dimensions marked two of the most significant fractures of this period, as a long headline in Corriere della Sera effectively demonstrated.73 “The young woman enters the factory and is put to work in the foundry. If she complains, they tell her: you wanted sex equality, didn’t you?”

42 All the tensions and fractures which had weakened the labour and union movements – from terrorism to the transformation of the forms of production, from the ossification of internal forms of representation to the arrival of new generations of workers – led to a double defeat at the beginning of the 1980s: the famous “March of the Forty Thousand” in 1980, [when a strike at Fiat was broken by other workers] and the 1985 referendum [which saw the rejection of inflation-proofed sliding pay scales in industry].74

43 Defined at the end of the 1980s as “the class that no longer exists”75 the workers had already demonstrated at the beginning of that decade that they had “changed skin” to

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use an expression of the newspapers at that time.76 It is significant that the L’Espresso edition of 26 October 1980 (in which the union defeat at Fiat was announced) contained two opposing representations of working masculinities. On one hand, there was a photograph of an older man in blue overalls, who appeared to be clutching a red flag with an expression of disappointment and bitterness, the very symbol of defeat, reflected in the headline Woe to the defeated! [Vae victis]. On the other hand, a photograph illustrating an article on part-time work showed a half-length portrait of a man looking serene, half-smiling, wearing both overalls and casual clothes at the same time, and holding a bunch of flowers. This symbolic juxtaposition, while probably involuntary, signalled the irresolvable crisis in working-class masculinity linked to the end of Fordism and of the centrality of work as a value of identity. It is no surprise, therefore, that the main character of the above-mentioned fictionalized biography Quando Torni decides to stop being a worker in the 1980s. This decision has consequences, because Vittorio Sparati leaves the factory to start his own business and “was conscious of appearing substantially different from the man he had always been. Of appearing to himself like this.”77

44 This type of existential transformation is recorded in two 1994 films, Paolo Virzi’s La Bella vita and Padre e figlio [Father and Son] by Pasquale Pozzessere, in which representations of the factory world return to the cinema after a long absence and offer a vision of a radically changed manufacturing sector: through a decrease of the active workforce employed in industry (declining from 37.6% in 1980 to 32.5% in 1995) and the reconfiguration of values and imagery linked to work, accompanying the attempt to introduce a “culture of flexible working”.78 In both films, the growing marginalization of a particular industrial world causes an identity crisis in the leading characters, not only the identity shaped by their work, but, more broadly, affecting their masculinity. In La Bella vita, the worker played Claudio Bigagli loses his job, throwing his relationship with his wife, a supermarket cashier, into disarray. She then falls in love with a local television presenter. The two models of masculinity are obviously juxtaposed, as if they belonged to two separate eras, and two types of work: the first linked to the material world – specifically the steel produced at Piombino – and the second linked to an almost complete dematerialization.79

45 If therefore, new virile identities were being redefined during the 1990s, by the requirements of marketing and advertising, rather than by belonging within social categories, the model of working-class virility seemed to be constantly on the wane. Peter Cattaneo’s 1997 film The Full Monty is exemplary in this sense. In this English film – which was very successful in Italy as well – a group of unemployed workers decide to become strip-tease performers to make ends meet. By reawakening their relationships with their own bodies, they reconstruct a masculine identity that had been shaken by their loss of work. This new corporeality is precisely the central axis for the different macho image constructed by consumer markets.80

46 In this sense, the workers described by Silvia Avallone’s novel Acciaio, quoted above, seem to be particularly representative. The novel is continuously shot through with a rigid, separation of social roles, according to gender. The young “seventh generation” workers no longer seem to have any commitment at all to their work: in the steelworks, writes Avallone, “they have fun riding the diggers as if they were bulls, listening to music at full volume, with an amphetamine pill under their tongues”81 but their lives

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play out far from the factory, pursuing models of virility linked to the possession of what money can buy.

47 Far from the traditionary set of images of the factory, the fictional workers described by Silvia Avallone, like the real workers described by Alessandro Portelli from his research in the Terni steelworks, refer to a different set of images, one linked to youth and the embodiment of various models of masculinity. Thus, Portelli describes on the same page “Daniele Tacconelli, a 28 year old worker who has a piercing, likes hip-hop, goes to Valencia with his friends to see the motorcycle grand prix, hangs out in the Terni movida bars and talks about his love life with his factory friends” and Tacconelli “the worker who does overtime because he has to go to a trendy shop and buy trousers by Gucci, Prada or some other cool brand, own a fancy watch, and manage the monthly payments on his car, because that way, when he goes to a disco on Saturdays, everyone says to him ‘Wow, what a great car you’ve got’.”82 For these workers, therefore, there is a particularly close relationship between masculine identity and social identity, for the most part constructed around public spectacle. Thus, just as industrial production seems to become more and more marginalized – more so in collective representations than in the real world of manufacturing in fact – so the social figure of the worker also seems to have a declining place in the collective imagination, usually limited to moments of crisis in employment, where the worker is most often represented as a defeated man. In this context, the factory worker is no longer a model of masculinity, linked as he is to a specific professional role or to an object. Moreover, the very transformation of factory work contributes to diminish his attractive force, because his specific relationship with materiality and with creation have disappeared, aspects which, a few decades ago, exalted the physical attributes (strength), or the psychological ones (determination or willpower) of being-a-man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AVALLONE, Silvia. 2010. Acciaio. Milan: Rizzoli.

BAGNASCO, Arnaldo. 1977. Tre Italie. Bologna: Il Mulino.

BALLONE, Adriano. 1987. Il militante comunista torinese (1945-1955). Fabbrica, società, politica: una prima ricognizione. In I Muscoli della storia. Militanti e organizzazioni operaie a Torino 1945-1955, ed. Aldo Agosti, 88-213. Milan: Franco Angeli.

BELLASSAI, Sandro. 2011. L’Invenzione della virilità. Politica e immaginario maschile nell’Italia contemporanea. Rome: Carocci.

BERTUCELLI, Lorenzo. 1997. Nazione operaia. Cultura del lavoro e vita di fabbrica a Milano e Brescia, 1945-1963. Rome: Ediesse.

BERTUCELLI, Lorenzo. 2004. Piazze e palazzi. Il sindacato tra fabbrica e istituzioni. La CGIL (1969-1985). Milan: Unicopli.

BIANCIARDI, Luciano. 1998 [1st edn 1962]. La Vita agra. Milan: Bompiani.

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BONI, Federico. 2004. Men’s help. Sociologia dei periodici maschili. Rome: Meltemi.

CAZZULLO, Aldo. 1998. I Ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione. 1968-1978: storia di Lotta continua. Milan: Mondadori.

CERESETO, Giovanna, Anna, FRISONE, and Laura VARLESE. 2009. Non è un gioco da ragazze. Femminismo e sindacato : i coordinamenti donne FLM. Rome: Ediesse.

CONTINI, Gianfranco. 1999 [1997]. Rappresentazioni. Minatori e cavatori toscani si raccontano. In Tra Fabbrica e società. Mondi operai nell’Italia del Novecento, in Annali della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, ed. Stefano MUSSO a. XXXIII, 275-312. Turin: Feltrinelli.

FOFI, Goffredo. 1972. Un personaggio e un metodo. Ombre rosse 3-4: 127-129.

GARIGALI, Guiseppina. 1995. Memorie operaie. Vita, politica e lavoro a Milano 1940-1960. Milan: Franco Angeli.

GIACHETTI, Diego. 2002. Anni Sessanta comincia la danza. Giovani, capelloni, studenti ed estremisti negli anni della contestazione. Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini.

GIORDA, Nicoletta (ed.). 2007. Fare la differenza. L’esperienza dell’Intercategoriale donne di Torino. 1975-1986. Turin: Edizioni Angolo Manzoni.

Images from the Fiat Archives, 1940-1980. 1990. Milan: Fabbri editori.

LERNER, Gad. 1988. Operai. Viaggio all’interno della Fiat. La vita, le case, le fabbriche di una classe che non c’è più. Milan: Feltrinelli.

LERNER, Gad, Luigi, MANCONI, and Marino SINIBALDI. 1978. Uno Strano movimento di strani studenti. Composizione, politica e cultura dei non garantiti. Milan: Feltrinelli.

LOY, Gianni. 1999. Lavoro, professioni, rappresentanze: l’interpretazione delle ambivalenze. In L’Italia dopo la grande trasformazione. Trent’anni di analisi Censis 1966-1996, ed. Carlo Felice CASULA, 87-105. Rome: Carocci.

MORANDO, Paolo. 2009. Dancing Days, 1978-1979. I Due anni che hanno cambiato l’Italia. Rome-Bari: Laterza.

NEGRI, Antonio. 1979. Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale. Intervista sull’operaismo. Milan: Multhipla.

NOVELLI, Edoardo. 2000. C’era una volta il Pci. Autobiografia di un partito attraverso le immagini della sua propaganda. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

ONOFRI, Fabrizio. 1955. La Condizione operaia in Italia. Rome: Edizioni di cultura sociale.

OTTIERO, Ottieri. 1959. Donnarumma all’assalto. Milan: Bompiani.

PACI, Massimo. 1973. Mercato del lavoro e classi sociali in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino.

PALANDRI, Enrico. 1988 [1st edn 1979]. Boccalone. Storia vera piena di bugie. Milan: L’erba voglio.

PAPUZZI, Alberto. 2007. Quando torni. Una vita operaia. Rome: Donzelli.

PASSERINI, Luisa, and Marcella FILIPPA. 1997. Memorie di Mirafiori. In Mirafiori, ed. Carlo OLMO, 327-358. Turin: Umberto Allemandi & Co.

PENNACCHI, Antonio. 1994. Mammut. Rome: Donzelli.

PESCAROLO, Alessandra. 1996. Il lavoro e le risorse delle donne in età contemporanea. In Il Lavoro delle donne, ed. Angela GROPPI, 299-345. Rome-Bari: Laterza.

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PICCONE STELLA, Simonetta. 1993. La Prima generazione. Ragazze e ragazzi nel miracolo economico italiano. Milan: Franco Angeli.

POLO, Gabriele. 1989. I Tamburi di Mirafiori. Testimonianze operaie attorno all’autunno caldo alla Fiat. Turin: Cric.

PORTELLI, Alessandro. 2008. Acciai speciali. Terni, la ThyssenKrupp, la globalizzazione. Rome: Donzelli.

RAVAIOLI, Carla. 1979. Le donne. In Dal ‘68 ad oggi. Come siamo e come eravamo, ed. Antonio GAMBINO, 317-358. Rome: Laterza.

REVELLI, Marco. 1989. Lavorare in Fiat. Da Valletta ad Agnelli a Romiti. Operai Sindacati Robot. Milan: Garzanti.

SANGIOVANNI, Andrea. 2006. Tute blu. La parabola operaia nell’Italia repubblicana. Rome: Donzelli.

URBANI, Giuliano, and Maria WEBER. 1984. Cosa pensano gli operai. Lavoro, economia e politica negli orientamenti degli operai agli inizi degli anni ottanta. Milan: Franco Angeli.

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ZAMARIN, Roberto. 1972. Gasparazzo. Rome: Samonà and Savelli.

NOTES

1. Avallone 2010: 86. 2. Ibid.: 23. 3. Bellassai 2011: 17. 4. Onofri 1955: 29-30. My emphasis. 5. Pescarolo 1996: 322. 6. Contini 1999 [1997]: 280-281. 7. Illustratofiat 1975. 8. Paci 1973. 9. This image, principally derived from communist culture, also influenced the collective imagination, such as the film by Eduardo De Filippo Napoletani a Milano [Neapolitans in Milan] (1953) or the first industrial novels of the 1960s (Ottiero 1959: 139; Bianciardi 1998 [1962]: 53). 10. Ballone 1987: 163. 11. The image is available at the following website: http://manifestipolitici.sebina.it/sebina/ repository/opac/link/ams_cal/ams_cal_059.jpg 12. Mario Colombo in Garigali 1995: 107. My emphasis. 13. Garigali 1995: 41. 14. Bertuccelli 1997: 22. 15. Passerini & Filippa 1997: 337; Portelli 2008: 90-93. 16. Extreme left-wing Italian political organization 17. Polo 1989: 213. My emphasis. 18. Giorda 2007: 216-217. 19. See the company films Opere Sociali Fiat (1957), Accanto al lavoro Fiat (Claudio Solaro, 1962), Oltre il lavoro (Adriano Di Majo, 1973), a trilogy about the Fiat social programmes and La Scuola Allievi Fiat “Giovanni Agnelli” (Stefano Canzio, 1962). Opere sociali is archived at l’Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat; the other films can be watched online at www.cinemaimpresa.tv 20. Piccone Stella 1993: 28. 21. Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat, busta OS337, series “Case per lavoratori apprendisti” (1971), partially reproduced in Images from the Fiat Archives, 1940-1980. Milan: Fabbri editori. 1990: 86.

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22. Sangiovanni 2006. 23. Bertuccelli 1997: 219. 24. Novelli 2000: 69 and 163. 25. Volponi 1991 [1962]: 112. My emphasis. 26. He devoted seven columns, published in February and March 1968 to the subject of “the social cost of labour”. The phrase appears in Il Giorno, 29th February 1968. 27. Il Giorno, 25 February 1968. 28. Il Giorno, 29 February 1968. 29. Il Giorno, 5 March 1968. 30. One photograph shows a placard held up during a trade union demonstration in Turin, representing two hearts superposed on to each other with the heading “We can only do this if we work less”. Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat, b. 6/20, 1971. 31. Polo 1989: 152. 32. Cazzullo 1998: 83. My emphasis. 33. Cazzullo 1998: 254. 34. Fofi also notes that “Gasparazzo is not a typical case but an average: he represents, is intended to represent, working class humour in its current form, in its shared maturity and force.” Fofi 1972: 128. 35. Zamarin 1972: 90-91. Potere Operaio is another Italian extreme left political group and newspaper. 36. Cazzullo 1998: 254. 37. Piccone Stella 1993: 53. 38. Mario Monicelli, L’Espresso, 9 November 1969. 39. Giachetti 2002. 40. Polo 1989: 114-115. 41. Passerini & Filippa 1997. 42. Bellassai 2011: 106. 43. Sangiovanni 2006. 44. Famiglia Cristiana, 27 April 1969, 3 January 1971. 45. Cereseto, Frisone & Varlese 2009. 46. Famiglia Cristiana, 3 January 1971. 47. Statement by Tina Fronte in Giorda 2007: 134. 48. Papuzzi 2007. 49. Ibid.: 54. On the term “reflux” see also Morando 2009. 50. Ibid.: 58-60. 51. Bellassai 2011: 129. The practice of this “practical egalitarianism” in the management of domestic affairs does not prevent adherence to a traditional family model with the man at work and his wife in the house. Thus Vittorio Sparati is convinced that if Nives “didn’t go to work, ah, well, everything would be really different. I say it all the time, if I earned 800 smackers a month all our problems would magically disappear”. Papuzzi 2007: 59. 52. Ravaioli 1979: 355. 53. Cazzullo 1998: 270. 54. Lerner, Manconi & Sinibaldi 1978. 55. Negri 1979. 56. Palandri 1988 [1979]: 43. 57. Bagnasco 1977. 58. Revelli 1989: 69-70. 59. Giustolisi, L’Espresso, 22 July 1979. 60. Unsigned letter, Il giornale dei capi, January1977. 61. Interview in Revelli 1989: 81.

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62. L’altra metà del cielo. Giornale delle donne in Fiat / F.L.M., no 1, September 1980. 63. Morando 2009: 35-36. 64. Demoskopea, IV rapporto: Il cambiamento della società italiana – tipologia della popolazione italiana from December 1979, p. 1, Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat, Segreteria dr. Luigi Ferro, busta n. 56, “Demoskopea anni 1978-1979-1980”. 65. Demoskopea: 5-6. 66. Demoskopea: 8-9. 67. Riotta, L’Espresso, 19 February 1978: 7. 68. Reviewed by Moravia under the headline De profundis, maschio, in L’Espresso, 12 March 1978. 69. On the ambiguous relationship between homosexuality and the male factory environment see Pennacchi 1994: 66-67. 70. D’Agostini, Rinascita, 15 June 1979. 71. A. Accornero, A. Baldissera, S. Scamuzzi, “Ricerca di massa sulla condizione operaia alla Fiat: i primi risultati”, Bollettino Cespe, 2 February 1980; G. Bonazzi, “La lotta dei 35 giorni alla Fiat: un’analisi sociologica”, e F. Carmignani, “Il ‘sindacato di classe’ nella lotta dei 35 giorni alla Fiat”, interviews in Politica ed economia, 11, 1984; A. Accornero, A. Baldissera, S. Scamuzzi, “Le origini di una sconfitta: gli operai Fiat alla vigilia dei 35 giorni. Ricerca di massa sulla condizione operaia”, Politica ed economia, 12, 1990. 72. Urbani & Weber 1984: 83. 73. Pertegato, Corriere della Sera, 27 November 1979. 74. Bertucelli 2004. 75. Lerner 1988. 76. Turani, La Repubblica, 22 February 1980. 77. Papuzzi 2007: 165. My emphasis. See also Pennachi 1994. 78. Loy 1999. 79. In the film, however, we see the collapse of two models of masculinity, even if the director’s sympathies lie with the ex-worker who manages to “reinvent” himself in a profession which allows him to recoup a virile identity. 80. Boni 2004: 31 81. Avallone 2010: 25. 82. Portelli 2008: 89.

ABSTRACTS

The article analyzes the representation of industrial workers in Italy during the second half of the XXth century, with a specific focus on their masculinity. It highlights two overlapping public images, that of the man and the industrial worker, because the representation of the industrial worker as a man derives from the belief that work is what defined manhood. Both representations are studied comparing the public images of factories and industrial workers with their self-representations in movies, photographs, novels, and autobiographic stories. The essay explores the connection between the decline of industrial work from the 1970s and the transformation of manliness in the same period, under the influence both of feminism and, more generally, changing social values. During this period male identity was redefined: it no longer stems from work but from a new body-centered self-awareness.

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L’article analyse la représentation des ouvriers durant la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, et notamment de leur masculinité : il pointe la superposition des deux images de l’ouvrier et de l’homme, dans la mesure où la représentation du travailleur en tant qu’homme naît de la conviction que le travail est le principal outil de définition de la masculinité. Ces deux représentations sont étudiées en confrontant les images des espaces de travail et des travailleurs avec leurs propres autoreprésentations, à travers les films, les photographies, les romans et les récits autobiographiques. L’article fait l’hypothèse d’une connexion entre la fin de la centralité du travail industriel depuis les années 1970 et les transformations de la masculinité, sous l’influence, tant du féminisme, que du changement des valeurs sociales, d’une manière plus générale. Pendant cette période, l’identité masculine se redéfinit : celle-ci n’est plus construite à partir du travail, mais plutôt, d’une nouvelle conscience de soi fondée sur le corps.

INDEX

Mots-clés: ouvriers, Italie contemporaine, masculinité, représentations de la masculinité, identités sociales Keywords: industrial workers, Italian contemporary history, manhood, representations of manhood, social identity

AUTHORS

ANDREA SANGIOVANNI Andrea Sangiovanni is a researcher in contemporary history at Teramo University, where he teaches courses on the history of the media. Among his publications on contemporary Italian history, labour history (including media representations of manual work) and the Italian media, are Tute blu: la parabola operaia nell’Italia repubblicana (2006) and Parole e figure: storia dei media in Italia dal’età liberale all seconda guerre mondiale (2012). [email protected]

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Making Men, Making History: remembering railway work in Cold War Afro-Asian solidarity Des « hommes nouveaux » : mémoires de travailleurs du rail et coopération sino- africaine

Jamie Monson

1 During the 1990s I often traveled on the TAZARA railway [Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority] between Tanzania’s coastal city of Dar es Salaam and the southwestern highlands, on the route to Zambia. During the long overnight train journeys I normally booked a sleeping berth in a first or second-class compartment, where I could have extra luggage space and a more comfortable night’s sleep. Once aboard the train, however, I often found the women’s sleeping cars to be filled with so much luggage that there was barely room to stand.

2 Seeking refreshment and a place to stretch my legs, I often wandered up to the first- class lounge and bar cars, where I was sure to find a cold beer and someone to talk to. Many of the (mostly) men sitting in the bar were TAZARA workers and retirees, and I had some interesting conversations there about the railway’s history, while sharing a cold Kilimanjaro and watching the grasslands of the East African plateau rolling by. In those days, I was doing field research for my study of the role of TAZARA in the livelihoods of its users – the traders and farmers that lived along the railway corridor in southern Tanzania. Spending time in the lounge car became an important part of my research methodology, augmenting oral life histories, observations of landscape change and parcel trade data.1. As I listened over time to the stories of workers that had built and operated TAZARA, I began to understand the multiple ways that railway work was connected to livelihoods of family and community. This in turn helped me to see the ways that work was gendered, and how the experience and practice of masculinity in railway work changed over time from the days of socialist solidarity between Tanzania, Zambia and China to the era of commercialization and market reform.

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3 For in fact, the crowded women’s compartments and the male retirees relaxing in the lounge car were linked to one another – because in the 1990s, entire TAZARA families were able to use free passes to travel on the train. For the entrepreneurial women whose husbands were salaried railway workers, the train was an important resource for carrying out cross-border trade between Tanzania and Zambia. I recall one particular first-class compartment that was stuffed full with gunny-sacks of shoes bought in Dar es Salaam, destined for Zambian buyers. And when we passed hill stations like Mbeya the women could not resist purchasing a few sacks of Irish potatoes, certain to bring a profit in the Zambian markets of Mpika or Kapiri Mposhi. I often purchased a few sacks myself, so that I could bring a gift to the Zambian families that hosted me.

4 For the men, having beers in the lounge and sharing stories with old friends was also a part of the railway worker experience. As I chatted over the years with those older workers who had participated in TAZARA’s survey and construction (1968-1975), I learned the life trajectories of a generation of railwaymen who had been born at the end of colonialism, began to work in the heyday of African socialism, and were now retiring in the midst of neo-liberal economic restructuring. Here in the lounge car they were free to reminisce about their youthful exploits and to complain about their impending retirements, feeling at home in a space that simultaneously represented the fruits of their labor and the precarity of their future status.

5 It is no wonder, then, that when free passes were phased out in 2008 it was experienced as a significant loss for TAZARA workers and their families.2 The end of free passes was not only a material loss for the women who had been carrying out their trading business on the train; it was also a symbolic loss for the male workers because the passes had amplified the ability of railwaymen to provide for their families and extended communities. This particular loss was one of many that took place in the larger context of neo-liberal reforms, through which railway workers experienced alienation from the normative masculinity of salaried employment and social benefits including old-age pensions.3 Feeling the indignity of layoffs and the delayed payment of pensions in 2010, one retired Zambian worker opined that the railway authority should provide retirees with their own commemorative lounge car on the passenger train, where they could relax together and be acknowledged by grateful passengers for their heroic deeds during TAZARA’s construction.4

6 While TAZARA has remained a government enterprise since it was handed over by the Chinese to Tanzania and Zambia in 1976, it has undergone several phases of commercialization and labor restructuring from the early 1980s onwards. This restructuring has been experienced in gendered ways, as the predominantly male railway workers who joined the project in their youth now feel dishonored and disrespected by layoffs and other measures. It is not only as individual workers or through their collective experience as a cohort of railwaymen that they express their concerns. It is also their inability to provide for family and community – at the time that they are becoming elders – that has become a major source of grievance. They have taken these grievances to court, publicly claiming their rights as members of the railway’s “construction generation” to be treated with dignity and respect.

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When New Men Grow Old

7 Members of the retiring generation of TAZARA construction workers share with their Chinese counterparts a sense of moral indignation that goes further than the crisis of masculinity as livelihood struggle that has been described for post-socialist reforms more broadly.5 As Hurst and O’Brien show in their study of Chinese working class protest, retired pensioners are more likely to engage in public protest than other workers because “unpaid pensions occupy a special place in the minds of many members of the proletariat.” Pensioners in China feel that the promise of reciprocity by the state – that in return for “eating bitterness” during their working years they would be cared for in old age – has been broken. One worker described the claim to retirement care as a “sacred right not to have to labor,” that included the ability to look after not only oneself but also one’s dependents.6

8 Like China’s pensioners, the Tanzanian and Zambian workers who built TAZARA in the 1960s and 1970s also protest the failures of their contemporary states to recognize their sacrifices materially. They seek simultaneously to retrieve public recognition and also to make claims to material security through the process of remembering work. The absence of a secure pension for railwaymen who recount their life trajectories as a story of progress from “ordinary worker” to senior staff member can be a source of deep humiliation. One worker in Tanzania was so mortified by his penury at retirement that he left the small town where he had served as stationmaster for several years to move to back to a smaller village in the countryside where his decline in status would be unnoticed.7

9 Going further, these stories convey a sense that the railway technology itself has been ill-used by labor reforms, including the permanent way, the rolling stock and the operating system. Disregard for the older ways of doing things – especially practices that were introduced by the Chinese technicians from the 1970s through the 1980s – has led to a decline in service and safety, as the current generation retires. “People aren’t there” to do the work of maintenance and to keep the trains running carefully according to the timetables, lamented one retiree, because “there aren’t [qualified] persons coming in to replace us.” He described the train, like the retiring workers, as suffering from neglect as it ages alongside the men who created it.

10 The grievances of the retiring TAZARA workers can be read as similar to those of other groups in Africa that mobilize memory in order to “overcome their sense of loss, insecurity, displacement and deterritorialization” in the postcolonial world.8 Like veterans of anti-colonial struggles, they feel that the state has only selectively – even divisively – recognized the sacrifice of railway construction work, for some are perceived as receiving benefits that others do not.9 And like workers in the southern African mines, TAZARA retirees feel that the dignity of hard work has been undermined by the dishonor of layoffs and of insecurity in old age.10

11 Yet there is also something distinctive about TAZARA worker experience and its contexts of reminiscence. For this railway was not only a post-colonial state-led development project. It was also a socialist project, carried out by workers from three nations at a specific historical moment of ideological commitment to national construction. The TAZARA project was designed to build a railway; it also proposed to build a cohort of African “new industrial men” (and some women) by shaping youth

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into maturity through hard work.11 These “new men” would be formed through pedagogies of work that emphasized practical training, exhortation and role modeling – pedagogies that were literally drawn from the textbooks of China’s revolutionary industrial experience.12

12 In his memoirs, Zanzibari political leader Ali Sultan Issa described the way he imagined the creation of the “new man” in building East African socialism: One way of creating a New Man, I believed, was to change the environment. By changing the environment, we could change the mentality of the people. That is one reason why I wanted Zanzibar to industrialize rapidly after the revolution – in order to change the work habits of the people. I wanted to build factories and engage in heavy industry not only because we needed to produce tractors and guns but also because an individual cannot remain lazy if he is working on an assembly line – the conveyor belt does not wait.13

13 The “new man” would be instilled with self-discipline, and seek to improve himself through hard work. Collectively, these industrial workers could then be mobilized to build new nations.

14 Like other national development planners in the late 1960s and 1970s, the architects of the TAZARA construction project argued that East African youth (vijana in Kiswahili) were best suited for this kind of industrial training. Project leaders proposed that youth be recruited through the nationalist party leagues in Tanzania and Zambia, as well as through Tanzania’s National Service, because they could be counted on to be “loyal, disciplined and dedicated.”14 It was not necessary for them to have an education beyond the primary level, and even this requirement could be waived in the case of youths who proved to be “efficient and of good character.”15

15 Although the category of “youth” in nationalism was inclusive of men and women, those recruited to participate in the TAZARA project were overwhelmingly male. Evelyn Mwansa was one of two Zambian women who became locomotive drivers; she was trained in 1971 by Chinese instructors in Dar es Salaam. Yet this exception proved the rule: Ms. Mwansa was widely known because of the uniqueness of her experience. She went on to spend several years driving trains in Zambia where she has now retired. 16 African women more often held clerical rather than technical or managerial positions from the beginning of the project; none were sent to China in 1972 for university training.

16 Becoming a “railway worker” as a youth working on TAZARA was therefore constructed as part of a masculine trajectory, one that was understood to be modern and “civilized” – those workers who stayed with the project and became salaried received benefits such as housing and other support for domestic lives and families. One retired worker in Zambia credited his participation in the construction work – including his knowledge of Chinese – as having “built his house” and educated his children. The men who were mobilized as nation-builders in their youth thus matured into a post-colonial context that held both the expectations and promise of male provision for family security and social promotion. Working on the railway was recalled not only as a time of building a train but also building families, as young men matured, married and educated their children.17 The economic reforms that that were implemented after the 1980s therefore held a specifically gendered meaning for men who had had expected to provide for family beyond their working years into their retirements, through old-age pensions.18

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17 This was consistent with Tanzania’s approach to national socialism and self-reliance, which imagined youth to be “hard-working nation-builders” who could be mobilized for service on road-building, agriculture and other rural projects.19 Their expertise in technology and construction could be used for other national development priorities once the railway was completed.

18 The workers who joined the TAZARA project in the 1970s – both Chinese and African – were aware of their role in making nations and in making history. This message was imparted to them publicly through the use of slogans, worker meetings, official ceremonies and other performances. It was experienced in practice, through the work process itself and especially in the railway training schools and workshops. The workers who participated in the TAZARA project therefore developed historical consciousness in several ways. At the moment of construction, they were participants in a nation-building state development project in which they played a central role; indeed it was their own refashioning as workers that was expected to lead to industrial progress and modernization. At the same time, as a cohort of railway workers they developed their own form of historical consciousness through their collective use of memory as a social resource over time. They have deployed this resource in direct engagement with state-level discourses at specific historical moments: both in collective contexts such as labor disputes, as well as in individual grievances such as pension payment.

19 In a sense, then, the memories of these retired workers provide a glimpse into the formation of historical consciousness for a generation of “new industrial men” who are now growing old. At the time that they were recruited, trained and deployed in East Africa, TAZARA railway workers were acutely aware that they were part of a unique moment of Afro-Asian and pan-African solidarity. It wasn’t just that they were made aware of this role through state level ideological transmission; many workers remember their own enthusiasm for the project at the time. Over the ensuing decades, as they have lived through post-socialist processes of liberalization, these workers have developed powerful narratives of nostalgia about this youthful experience that both match and contest those of the nation. Ironically, TAZARA workers seem to have felt most profoundly neglected and forgotten at precisely that moment when government officials have begun to deploy their memory in celebration of the enduring friendship between China and Africa.20

20 For in recent years, it is hard to find a speech or newspaper account about contemporary Africa-China relations that does not contain a glowing reference to the TAZARA project and the heroism of the men who built it. Remembering the railway, especially the sacrifices that were made by the railway workers, has become a customary gesture in China-Africa diplomatic relations. For example, Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce, Fu Ziying, told a press conference on Chinese foreign aid to Africa that he shed tears during his visit to TAZARA. “A few days ago,” he told the audience, “when I was paying respect to the Chinese workers who sacrificed their lives for the construction of Tanzania-Zambia Railway at a public cemetery in Tanzania, I could not help bursting into tears.” He went on to acclaim the “tens of thousands of Chinese workers” who “labored side by side with the Tanzanian and Zambian people to build the railway successfully,” purely out of friendship.21

21 Workers, on the other hand, express skepticism towards this public recognition of their foundational contribution to China’s current relationship with African countries.

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Stages of Work, Stages of Memory

22 Like United States autoworkers interviewed by John Bodnar, TAZARA workers frame their memories using narrative structures that reflect not only their personal life course but also larger patterns of change in the institutional and social order.22 These narrative “plot structures” convey meaning by fashioning experience within specific moments or conjunctures of historic significance. For the Studebaker workers interviewed by Bodnar, for example, the early years of the company’s operation in the 1930s were recalled as a time of stability and order, while after WWII the plant was remembered as torn by conflict. Because contexts of remembering – both personal and institutional – are constantly shifting, these narrative “plots” are not fixed but fluid, as they are constantly reconstructed.23

23 For the TAZARA project, three broadly defined eras have framed worker memory and historical consciousness. The first is the period of railway construction, lasting roughly from 1968 to 1976. The second is the period of economic reform (in both Africa and China) starting in the mid-1980s, when institutional restructuring led to worker layoffs at TAZARA. The third period begins in the mid-1990s and was characterized by commercialization policies that affected TAZARA’s construction generation just at the time of their retirement.

Construction: Building a Railway, Making History

24 The TAZARA railway was built between 1970 and 1975, following a two-year survey and design period.24 The full 1865-kilometer rail line was officially opened and handed over by China to Tanzania and Zambia in July 1976, in a formal ceremony at New Kapiri Mposhi. Although precise figures are not known, it is estimated that some 30-40,000 Chinese railway workers were joined by about twice that number of African workers during construction. At the height of the project in 1972, there were 38,000 African workers and 13,500 Chinese at work.

25 Work on the project was organized through twelve base camps, with centers of operations at Dar es Salaam and Mang’ula in Tanzania. Teams of workers were sent out from the base camps in smaller sub-teams, directed by African foremen and Chinese field assistants. The work gangs varied in size; at one base camp in 1972 there were 64 labor gangs involving some 5,500 workers. Work took place in isolated conditions, as the gangs could be spread out two to three miles apart during the workday. In some critical sections work continued around the clock in 8-hour shifts, with diesel generators providing electric light.

26 The first section of the rail line, from Dar es Salaam to Mlimba (502 kilometers) was completed within one year, despite the challenges of construction in the unpopulated Selous Game Reserve. The next section, a 158-kilometer climb over the steep escarpment of the Udzungwa Mountains, took a full second year because of the engineering challenges of the steep terrain. It was in this section that the majority of the tunnels, bridges and culverts were constructed. Once the plateau highlands of Mbeya had been reached in 1973 and the rails were laid across the border into Zambia, the remainder of the construction work progressed quickly.25

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27 The construction phase of the TAZARA project required the application of both hard physical labor and also technically sophisticated engineering skills. In the first years of the project, African workers carried out the bulk of the unskilled manual labor while the Chinese workers took on more technical responsibilities. From the beginning, however, the project emphasized training of the African workers so that they would be able to take over and manage the railway after its completion. Worker training was therefore put forward as the key to self-reliance for the African workers and their newly independent countries. One Chinese instructor explained it this way: After we complete this railway, if they [Tanzanians and Zambians] themselves do not know how to manage it, they will not know how to operate the railway. They will then invite foreign countries, which means the west. Inviting foreigners to operate the railway is equivalent to having westerners hold this railway, specifically, the railway would be held by imperialists as in the past. Under these circumstances, we decided that the Chinese government should let us cultivate their own people. In other words, the management has to be localized, which means that we will help Tanzania and Zambia to cultivate their own talent to manage this railway. Therefore, we will not only build this railway for them but we will make them feel that they are managing the railway themselves.26

28 The agreements that were signed between the three countries explicitly stated that a primary goal of the project would be the training of an African railway worker cohort. The bulk of this training would take place at the work sites rather than in formal training institutions. There were several reasons for this emphasis on “on the job” technical training. It would allow construction to begin immediately and to progress quickly, in keeping with the TAZARA project’s goal of early completion.27 It also reflected the focus in China at the time on learning through practical lessons instead of in the classroom. In 1969, the tripartite agreement specified that, “training of technical personnel in various fields shall, in the main, be carried out in the practical work of construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway and be supplemented with necessary theoretical lectures.”28 Learning through experience was the official Chinese government approach to instruction at that historical moment, remembers one retired teacher: “They believed that practice was the only [training] standard that examines truth.”29

29 Yet from the beginning there was also a bifurcated structure to the TAZARA training program. While the rank and file workers were trained on the job, a carefully selected group of educated African workers was sent to China for a two-year course of study at Beijing Jiaotong [Communications] University. And engineering instructors from that university also established formal training schools at Mang’ula, Mbeya and Mpika.30 While these three schools had only trained some 1000 or so railway workers in total by the end of the construction period, it was the workers who gained this level of technical education that went on to become the management and operations staff of TAZARA.31 A small number of these engineering and management level TAZARA employees returned to China in the 1980s and the 1990s to gain further education including Master’s degrees; some were also sent to Europe and to the United Kingdom.

30 The Chinese workers also participated in the “hard work” of manual labor during TAZARA’s construction. The memory of Chinese workers’ willingness to join in with Africans in every task – from ditch digging to blasting tunnels – remains one of the most powerful images from TAZARA’s construction. A Zambian worker remembers,

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We were expecting what we used to see with the Europeans from England or Germany, where someone is the manager: a white manager just sitting in the office … But they themselves [the Chinese] were engaged in the actual labor work. If it was digging they were there, if you were supposed to dig a foundation for a certain building they were also involved in that. So because of that, the Zambians were happy. They said, these guys they can even do this kind of work, and there was no difference [among different levels of workers].32

31 The Chinese dedication to performing manual labor during railway construction was closely connected to the pedagogical focus of the project. The lessons that they hoped to impart to their African “friends” included not only technical know-how but also the “all around skills” of work discipline and character building. Working hard under “bitter conditions” would therefore be the best form of education for the African youth recruits. This was also the form of education that had taken hold in China during the years of the Cultural Revolution; the engineering experts who became leaders of the TAZARA worker training program had themselves been posted out to rural areas of China just before the African project began, and many of the Chinese rank and file workers had participated in the grueling railway building projects of China’s ‘third line defense’ and the Korean War.

32 The new African “industrial men” that TAZARA’s founders envisioned would therefore be shaped through labor practice: they would gain technical know-how, work discipline and other skills of modern citizenship from their Chinese mentors. The Chinese technicians in turn would serve as role models for emulation; in revolutionary China “to be a model meant not only fulfilling one’s own duty well but also helping others by example.”33 A slogan that was used at the time of TAZARA was 一对一， 一对红 (one helps one, both become red) meaning that one-on-one assistance would cause both African and Chinese technical partners to become ideologically strengthened.34 Emulation rather than exhortation was emphasized in the mentoring relationships between Chinese and African workers. As one Chinese expert remembers, he was not allowed to expose his own political ideas in the workplace, thus “we really did not have any official way to motivate them [the African workers] except through our own example… Everyone was a “China rafiki (Chinese friend, Kiswahili).”35

33 African workers who participated in the TAZARA project have strong memories of their work experience. They recall specific details of their work practice that highlight the challenging parts of railway work, for example building the tunnels and bridges from Mlimba to Makambako. For the cohort of TAZARA construction workers that is now retiring, their sense of “making history” as railway workers is closely linked to their experience of working under the tutelage of the Chinese experts. The transfer of technical skills through the Chinese method of teaching “hand in hand” or shou ba shou is an especially powerful component of their memory of work, and of their capacity as a cohort of workers to operate the railway after handing over. One retired worker remembered a Chinese demonstration of work practice in this way: The Chinese were teaching us using actions, to the extent that, for example, if we had just arrived there at the workplace, [the Chinese worker] began to work [at first] all by himself. He told us, “you all just rest, the work that you are about to begin here is done like this,” and then he did the work so intensely [kweli kweli] that sweat began to pour [from his body]. Then he asked us all, “Okay, friends, have you seen the work?”36

34 The image of sweat pouring from the body, or even bleeding due to heavy exertion, is a characteristic of the “self-scarifying” heroic labor of the socialist “new man.”37

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35 Technology training was experienced differently for different groups of workers, in ways that belie the retrospective reconstruction of a common or collective experience of the first generation of TAZARA workers. The most significant difference among workers was probably that between Tanzanian and Zambian recruits. In both countries there was an emphasis on recruitment of youth workers who could then be molded into trained technicians and disciplined citizens. Retired Zambian workers, however, are more ambivalent than Tanzanians about the roles played by modernization strategies and technology transfer during their lives working on TAZARA. Like many of their Zambian contemporaries, they recall the 1960s and 1970s as a time of industrialization and technological advancement, when those with secondary school and vocational educations hoped to find a secure and well-remunerated place within the Zambian mining-industrial economy.38 In their narratives of railway construction they often described themselves as urban youth (or youth destined for modern urban life) who had been sent out to the unfamiliar and backward countryside to build the railway. Those who were sent to China for higher education sometimes described China in similar terms, as representing a backward step in their own modernizing (and capitalist) progress.39

36 John Mulenga remembers that young Zambian men like himself who were used to the urban life of the copperbelt found it difficult to work in the rustic TAZARA camps. He compared his working conditions unfavorably to those of his high school classmates who he felt had better opportunities: [TAZARA construction] was in the rural areas, so all the amenities that we used to know where I came from were not there. Like going to cinema clubs, going to watch football on the weekend and all other amenities which were found in the urban areas, they were not there, you have to forget them. Then the issue… the issue also of the railway salary came in, the railway salary [meaning that it was low]. And then those fellow colleagues that you know in school they went on to colleges and universities, but we just continued working [at TAZARA] hoping that after construction we will be happy.40

37 Overall, many of the Zambian recruits for railway training had higher levels of education and technical background than those in Tanzania. And according to their own accounts, the costs for them of staying with TAZARA rather than moving into the mining and industrial sectors in Zambia could be high. Still, retiring Zambian workers feel that they learned valuable skills that could not be easily measured against classroom learning. John Mulenga looked back on his own experience and concluded, So I learned a lot of skills from the Chinese without having gone to college or university. And most of the Zambians who learned skills from the Chinese perform better than those who come from colleges or universities. Because later on after handing over … they started recruiting people who didn’t participate in the construction [who were degree and diploma holders] … but when it came to actual work the Zambians who had been in the construction, who learned skills from the Chinese, performed better than those from the universities. Even today those Zambians who participated in the construction are better than those from the universities, they are better in terms of actual performance. Be it in engineering, be it in accountancy, be it in revenue collection whatever … they are better.41

38 Tanzanian workers were recruited in much larger numbers during the first phases of the project, and most of them had only some primary level education. They were recruited from throughout the country through the offices of the TANU party, many of them through the National Service. The greatest percentage of the Tanzanian workers

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came from the districts along the line of rail in southern Tanzania, particularly from the Southern Highlands. They were more likely than Zambians to spend several years in the company and tutelage of Chinese mentors, from whom they learned Chinese and a diverse array of skills. Those who were later recruited for higher education in China, as well as for more advanced training in workshops in Tanzania and Zambia, were most often workers who had several years of experience on TAZARA and familiarity with multiple sectors of railway construction and operations. Retired workers praised this development of “all around skills”, as one commented: I carried out almost all types of work, especially during the period of constructing the TAZARA railway, because when you do work with the Chinese you are transferred from one kind of work to another. And this was done because they wanted us to have knowledge of many different types of work, and this was a form of assistance to us individually and for the nation as a whole. 42

39 The same worker testified that, “we received a very high level of experience from the Chinese, a level that now surpasses even that which people receive from the universities.”43 Like John Mulenga, Tanzanian retired workers emphasize their years of experience working under the guidance and supervision of the Chinese experts as the asset that divides them from other workers, especially younger workers who received their education from vocational or university institutions. Those who worked for long periods of time, learned Chinese, and had a close interpersonal relationship with a Chinese mentor were most likely to view their technical education and skill levels favorably. Chinese retired workers also emphasized this aspect of training and education, especially the education that took place in the workplace.

Reform and Retrenchment: the 1980s

40 At the time of handing over TAZARA to the Tanzanian and Zambian governments in 1976, selected African workers were given salaried positions as railway workers and managers. The remaining workers were let go, to return to their former lives or to build new ones. The Chinese instituted a careful selection process for determining which workers would stay on to become salaried, according to worker memories. They recommended workers who showed qualities of good character, hard work and discipline. One worker from the bridge team recalled that the Chinese really wanted a person who had good manners …. If you were very arrogant, well then they would just look at you and keep quiet. Now when it came time to reduce the labor force, they would begin to choose those who had discipline. Those who were respectful were the ones who were selected to work [as salaried workers].”44

41 Those who were selected for salaried employment were drawn from the group of workers that had received training in the Chinese railway workshops and training schools. They were first given an examination that tested them on their railway skills and basic education. As Paschal Kihanza remembers, each worker also had to undergo an interview: He had an interview, and if he had been educated he would be employed.... He was given an examination. Even if he had studied up to standard seven and he had a certificate, there were additional questions that he was asked, for example ‘so, will you really be able to do this work?’ Because there was a lot of work to be done: To conduct this railway you needed to have some education. On the train itself you had to have training, you just couldn’t just go there on your own. There was a

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conductor. There was a driver among those who were driving. There was that other person who looks after the wagons, the train guard. Aaah, it was necessary to have had an education.45

42 The workforce that was brought on board as the first cohort of salaried TAZARA employees after the inauguration of the railway in 1976 was therefore made up of laborers who had participated in the construction, then gone through a recruitment and selection process that emphasized education and training as well as personal character. The “construction generation” that formed at this moment in TAZARA’s history had several attributes in common. They had carried out the “hard work” of railway building. They had been trained by Chinese railway experts, most of them by this time not only on the job but also in training schools or workshops. And they had passed a test of their qualifications based on both technical and personal preparedness. This moment therefore marked an important moment in worker consciousness, as a selected group of workers passed from the category of casual worker to become a salaried cohort of TAZARA staff members.

43 It did not take long for the mobilization of this TAZARA worker consciousness to become necessary in defense of railway workers’ rights. In 1982, remembers University of Dar es Salaam law professor Issa Shivji, 300 TAZARA employees from Tanzania were made “redundant.” They were laid off as part of economic reform policies that identified an “excess labor” problem within the railway operations. Layoffs were needed, the railway authority argued in public, for cost reduction since “TAZARA had fallen into making losses through thefts, negligence and indiscipline among workers,” and “the shortage of motive power and spare parts had further aggravated the situation.”46 In private, some laid off workers felt at the time that they had been targeted for their class status – many in their group were “field workers, not well educated.” And they suspected that managers may have hoped that they had limited knowledge of their rights as workers.47

44 The group of laid off workers met together and sought assistance from the Legal Aid office at the University of Dar es Salaam, where Professor Shivji agreed to work with them. They took their case to the labor court after the Tanzanian national labor union (JUWATA) refused to support them.48 The Permanent Labor Tribunal (PLT) ruled in favor of reinstating 116 of the workers, who were judged to have been unfairly dismissed due to the failure to observe labor laws. This was then appealed to the Tanzanian high court by TAZARA, and appealed again by the workers. In the end the railway authority was forced to reinstate the workers.49

45 The railway workers who had been laid off had all been part of the construction teams. This aspect of their background and experience was held up by Professor Shivji in court: “The workers who were made redundant were almost all the original construction workers,” he remembers. “Those who remained on the job included some who had come later – and TAZARA actually hired new workers to replace those who had been made redundant.” As he presented their case, Shivji argued that this group of workers had been trained by the Chinese through on the job experience: “These workers were ex-primary school people who were trained in skills, who then took over the operation of the railway.” In his case, he argued that their experience and training with the Chinese experts made them a national treasure. The workers were well organized throughout the hearings, he remembers, and they became skilled at collecting evidence and participating in the development of their own case.50

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46 One of the leaders of this group of workers, Charles Musowela,51 remembers that he and other workers mobilized themselves during the 1980s layoffs using their consciousness of themselves as members of a unique generation. Under the tutelage of Dr. Shivji, they went on to learn through experience about labor law and workers rights. Armed with this background, they were able to provide advice and support to other aggrieved workers in the years that followed. This knowledge and experience of labor issues, Musowela remembers, was a cause for concern at TAZARA headquarters. A core group of ten worker activists from the 1980s court case were posted afterwards to a remote rural station in Tanzania. They were now viewed as agitators, he explained, who could cause trouble if they were based in the city. As we will see below, their rural posting did not prevent them from taking up future legal actions.

Commercialization and Liberalization in the 1990s

47 The management turn towards economic reform and liberalization intensified in the decade of the 1990s. During this period TAZARA faced additional economic pressures as southern African states achieved independence and the rail routes from Zambia to the south were opened. In March 1995, the Managing Director of TAZARA announced that the railway would lay off as many as 2,600 workers over the next fourteen months. The press announcement stated:

48 The TAZARA boss said that a careful multiple redundancy scheme had been worked out, in which some incompetent and unsuitable personnel have been identified.

49 He said TAZARA would also welcome voluntary retirement offers from those displaced as a result of organizational restructuring and work methods improvements.

50 He, however, refused to disclose if there were plans to reward the retirement volunteers with a “golden handshake” incentive package to enable them to start off well the new life.52

51 The decision to “streamline” TAZARA operations was the right one to take, according to a newspaper editorial that appeared the following day on the front page of the Daily News. The “political” rationale for the railway had now passed with the removal of the white settler regimes that once ruled southern Africa, this writer argued, and the TAZARA leadership needed to change with the times. In a somewhat contradictory way the writer went on to observe, “Worst still, TAZARA running staff have lost all the good qualities the general public used to know and love them for. The poor services of the private firms contracted to run buffet services do not help matters one little bit.”53 Thus even in his support for commercialization and layoffs this writer tipped his hat to an earlier generation of TAZARA workers. Ironically, it was the older generation of railwaymen who were most affected by the changes this writer advocated. Many of them were near retirement and some took early retirement options in the 1990s, only to discover that their pension packages were not forthcoming. There was no golden handshake.

52 The commercialization package was not only promoted by the western countries that were advising the TAZARA management at the time of economic liberalization. It was also supported by the Chinese Railway Expert Team that had continued to provide support to the railway since 1976. When Chinese Vice Premier Zhu Rongji visited Tanzania in 1995, he stated that the railway’s commercialization would improve performance and that there was no alternative to laying off workers.54 In 1996 the

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railway management took another step and restructured the workforce into two grades. The top grade was for management level workers and the lower grade was for all other salaried workers. This reclassification of the workforce created a dual system of salaries, benefits and other privileges that came on line just as the construction generation was nearing retirement.

53 The workers that began to retire in the 1990s were almost all members of the cohort of railwaymen that was hired at the time of the handing over in 1976. They were hired at the same time in their own personal lives and at the same historical moment of TAZARA’s inauguration. They feel betrayed by the commercialization measures because they created divisions in the workforce that have excluded them from the material and symbolic recognition of higher salaries, benefits and other privileges. At the moment when they are about to retire, therefore, instead of feeling honored and respected they feel dishonored and betrayed. Many of them in both Tanzania and Zambia have not been paid their pensions, or have received only partial payments. This has meant that they have no means to invest in business or farming enterprises that could sustain them into the next years of their lives.

54 In the last decade, the worker consciousness of TAZARA’s construction generation has been rallied once again – perhaps for the last time – as a retiring cohort of experienced railway workers bring court cases against TAZARA for failures by the railway authority to pay their pensions in full or on time. Workers who retired between 2000 and 2005 had not received their full pensions in 2011, or had only received them piecemeal. Yet their pension funds (now bankrupt) were built through deductions from worker salaries. Some have elected to take their case to court, once again with a collective consciousness of their special place in history. They believe – some citing lessons learned during the 1980s when they turned to Dr. Shivji for his assistance – that their rights and their important role in history can only be fully recognized if they make their cause a legal and national one. “We were all hired at the same time and we have all been given retirement at the same time [but without pensions],” explained one retired worker. “It is a big issue and a national question.”55

55 In response to worker claims, the TAZARA management has requested that the governments of Tanzania and Zambia find the resources to settle the pension issue. But this will take time.56 Meanwhile, it is not only the loss of financial resources but the symbolism of the issue that is important to the construction generation. One recently retired worker from Zambia expressed his views in this way: During the period of railway line construction, it was a time of working. We worked according to the guidelines given by three Governments, China, Tanzania and Zambia. We all worked together from the beginning of railway line construction to the end. After the railway construction was over, we thought it would have been proper for the two governments [Tanzania and Zambia] to consider what to do for us when we retire, for example we hoped that they would find settlements and farmland for us where we would live with our families. But the situation is not like that, so it’s a very big problem, because what we did during construction was such a significant job indeed, but it turns out that they are not respecting us now. We [retirees] are living as if we had never worked on the railway’s construction at all, they treat us as if we did not do a great and noteworthy thing.57

56 Lawsuits and other public actions taken by retiring TAZARA workers over pension payments have emphasized their contribution to nation building at the time of construction. “What makes us sorrowful is that we are not given our rights,” explained one Tanzanian retiree. “What would make us very happy would be if [the railway

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authority and the participating states] would give us our rights because we suffered so much when we built this railway.” Another worker declared his deep frustration with government officials who praise the railway in their public statements, yet when it comes to honoring the workers in practice, no recognition is forthcoming. These comments often compare leaders of the past like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania with those in the present, stating bitterness over the faith they placed in promises made in the 1960s and 1970s that they feel have not been honored.

57 The grievances brought forward by retiring TAZARA workers have to do with state- level financial and other social security promises. Equally and perhaps even more painful for retiring workers is a feeling that they are no longer valued, whether for the heroic labor of their youth or for the wisdom of experience that they developed over their working lives. Worst of all, retirees feel, the newly hired workers that have come in to replace them over the last decade do not understand the intricacies of operating “their railway,” having been educated in the generic curriculum of vocational institutions rather than through the hands-on, experiential process of mentoring favored by the Chinese. “The train is being operated by very, very young men” who have no experience, explained one retiree. And when elders with experience are hired back as contract workers, he said, they are just treated as casual laborers (vibarua). “You come back as an expert and you should be treated as an expert,” he stated, “but now you are just paid as a casual worker, there are no privileges.”

58 What was “made” when TAZARA was constructed was therefore not only a railway but also a cohort of trained workers and a set of experiences that have continued to be remembered and reconstructed over the course of time. Retired workers and state officials alike call on the legacy of the TAZARA project to meet their discursive needs in the present. Retiring workers made and continue to “make history” through their narration of an ongoing relationship to a specific event in the past. By emphasizing the sacrifices they made as a cohort of young men who participated in a nation-building project, they intentionally implicate the state in their claims for recognition and support in their old age. As one retiring worker explained, In the year 1976 we were promised … by Minister of Transportation Job Lusinde that if we did our work well, we would be made into experts [i.e. permanent railway staff] after the departure of the Chinese. And on our retirement we would be paid very good money. But now I do not know, the location of this good money itself is something that is impossible to understand (haieleweki kabisa)

59 The fact that a number of retired workers have already begun to pass away before the pension issue is resolved has caused a whole new discourse of martyrdom to develop among the workers, more than thirty years after the deaths of the Chinese experts memorialized in the cemetery visited by Mr. Fu Ziying.

*

60 In a recent editorial in the Tanzanian Daily News, the reporter argued that if only the Chinese had been allowed to do more infrastructure development in Tanzania during the last two decades (as they are currently doing in Kenya), not only would the country as a whole be better off but the ruling party would be enormously popular: The Chinese using old technology in the 1970s, spent five years in building a 1,800 railroad, and traversing across some of the most difficult terrains in the world – from Dar es Salaam to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

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Had the same people been given the massive project of handling the central railway line in 2006 from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma and Mwanza, Tanzanians would have been enjoying the most reliable rail transport in the country by the time they were going to polls last year and one does not need to be Goebel in order to appreciate the massive propaganda the project would have provided to the ruling party, CCM during its election campaigns.58

61 The Chinese, this observer suggested, used technology to build TAZARA that may have been outdated when compared with what was available in the rest of the world at the time. Their initiative succeeded, however, because they have a “pragmatic way of handling urgent issues” that has continued to this day. In fact, the technology used to build TAZARA stood up to the abuse of the El Nino flood of 1997, an episode that wiped out the Central Railway Line. The editorial writer also stated in no uncertain terms the ways in which the legacy of Chinese infrastructure assistance would provide an invaluable “propaganda” tool for the government over time – reflecting the actual ways that the TAZARA legacy has been used by states to support their development agendas and their relationship with China.

62 States and newspapers and workers – all point to the history and memory of TAZARA in the context of present-day concerns. The technology itself, whether described as “old” or as irreplaceable, plays a strong role in these narratives. The Chinese Railway Experts themselves recall their wariness when western technical assistance and technical experts were brought into the TAZARA system in the mid-1980s, as they worked together for the first time with “blond haired and blue eyed European and American experts.”59 Workers from China and Africa who participated in the project recall its significance in technological terms, at a time when pulling together the personnel, the machines, the operations manuals and the training materials was an enormous challenge.

63 The imperative to train African workers while completing a project of global visibility in the midst of the Cultural Revolution was accompanied by a call to heroic action on the part of the Chinese experts. For the Africans who joined TAZARA in their youth, the experience of working together with the Chinese has become an identifying marker of knowledge and practice for a construction generation. Those who now seek recognition as the heroes and martyrs of the TAZARA project have challenged state memory with their own individual and collective historical consciousness. Their sense of having “made history” was formed at the moment of construction itself, then reconfigured and renarrated over time as Africa, China and the world have undergone the upheavals of economic liberalization. And as China’s role in Africa has shifted the narratives of TAZARA, its heroes and martyrs in the foreground, continue to be told and retold in the public forums of diplomatic speeches, legal actions and newspaper editorials.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BODNAR, John. 1989. Power and Memory in Oral History: workers and managers at Studebaker. The Journal of American History 75(4): 1201-1202.

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BRENNAN, James. 2006. Youth, the TANU Youth League and managed vigilantism in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 1925-1973. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 76(2): 221-246.

BURGESS, G. Thomas (ed.). 2009. Race, Revolution and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar: the memoirs of Ali Sultan Issa and Seif Sharif Hamad. Athens: Ohio University Press.

CHENG Yinghong. 2009. Creating the ‘New Man’: from enlightenment ideals to socialist realities. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

FERGUSON, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley: University of California Press.

GORDON, Robert. 1977. Mines Masters and Migrants. Cambridge.

HARRIES, Patrick. 1994. Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

HURST, William and Kevin O’BRIEN. 2002. China’s Contentious Pensioners. The China Quarterly 170(1): 345-360.

ILIFFE, John. 2005. Honour in African History. Cambridge.

MONSON, Jamie. 2010. Working Ahead of Time: Labor and Modernization during the Construction of the TAZARA Railway, 1968-1986. In Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher LEE, 235-265. Athens: University of Ohio Press.

MONSON, Jamie. 2009. Africa’s Freedom Railway: how a chinese development Project changed lives and livelihoods in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

SCHMIDT, Elizabeth. 2007. Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958. Athens: Ohio University Press.

STRAKER, Jay. 2009. Youth, Nationalism and the Guinean Revolution, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

STRAUSS, Julia. 2009. The Past in the Present: historical and rhetorical lineages in China’s relations with Africa. China Quarterly 199: 777-795.

WERBNER, Richard. 1998. Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the critique of power. London and New York: Zed Books.

WERBNER, Richard and Terence RANGER. 1996. Postcolonial Identities in Africa. London and New York: Zed Books.

YANG, Jie. 2010. The Crisis of Masculinity: class, gender, and kindly power in post-Mao China. American Ethnologist 37(3): 550-562.

YANG, Jie. 2006. Crisis of Masculinity. In “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms”, ed. Anne PITCHER and Kelly ASKEW, introduction to special issue of Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 76(1): 1-14.

YU George T. 1980. The Tanzania-Zambia Railway: a case study in Chinese Economic Aid to Africa. In Soviet and Chinese Aid to African Nations, ed. Warren WEINSTEIN and Thomas H. HENRIKEN, 117-144. New York: Praeger.

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NOTES

1. Monson 2009. 2. Family passes were phased out during the management term of Henry Chipewo, who recently argued in an online posting that free passes had been reducing passenger train revenues by 85,000,000 Tanzanian shillings per train. Henry Chipewo, posting on news website Zambian Watchdog, responding to article “Tazara workers not paid for past 3 months,” January 14, 2013. http://www.zambianwatchdog.com/tazara-workers-not-paid-for-past-3-months, accessed May 10, 2013. 3. Yang 2010. 4. Interview with Simon Munga and John Chitala, Mpika Zambia, June 24, 2010. 5. Yang 2006. 6. Hurst & O’Brien 2002: 351. 7. Interview with Benedict Mkanyago, Dar es Salaam, August 13, 2010. 8. Werbner 1998: 4. 9. Werbner & Ranger 1996. 10. Iliffe 2005: 350; see also Gordon 1977; Harries 1994; Ferguson 1999. 11. Cheng 2009. See also Straker 2009, and Schmidt 2007. 12. And this Chinese revolutionary approach to “new industrial men” was in turn influenced by Soviet models. Cheng 2009.’ 13. Burgess 2009: 94. 14. National Archives of Zambia (NAZ), MFA 1/286/144, “TAZARA Brief Progress Report,” March 16, 1970. 15. National Archives of Zambia (NAZ), MFA 1/286/144, “TAZARA Brief Progress Report,” March 16, 1970. 16. Interview with Evelyn Mwansa, Kapiri Mposhi, August 10, 2011. 17. This experience echoed expectations of masculinity among colonial railwaymen: Lindsay 1998. 18. This was true for other technical workers as well in Zambia as well as Tanzania, Ferguson 1998; Giblin 2004. 19. Brennan 2006: 244; Ivaska 2005: 206-207. 20. In public speeches and policy papers regarding China’s current engagement with African countries, the legacy of the TAZARA project is frequently cited as a founding example of the “enduring friendship” and continuity of relationships between China and Africa. For a summary of this rhetorical practice see Strauss 2009: 777-795. 21. Vice Minister of Commerce, Fu Ziying, is addressing the press,” China.com.cn, accessed April 26, 2011. 22. Bodnar 1989: 1201-1202. 23. Because our oral history methodology involves long-term relationships and multi-year conversations with retired workers, we have been able to witness and document some of the complex ways that memories can shift and change, even when stories are told to the same listeners. 24. These are the official construction dates; in fact some construction-related activities began earlier as the survey and design teams established forward bases along the planned railway route; 1975 was the year that the first trials began along the full length of the line. 25. Monson 2009; Yu 1980. 26. Interview with Yao Pei Ji, Beijing, 2005. 27. Monson 2010. 28. National Archives of Zambia (NAZ), MFA 1/286/144, “TAZARA Brief Progress Report,” March 16, 1970.

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29. Interview with Yao Pei Ji, Beijing, 2005. 30. While they adjusted their curriculum to meet the revolutionary expectations prevailing in China in the early 1970s, these professors also incorporated much of their earlier curricular material into these courses. Interviews with retired Beijing Jiaotong Daxue professors, 2005; Archives of Beijing Jiaotong Daxue. 31. Archives of Mpika Training School, Mpika Zambia; Archives of Beijing Jiaotong Daxue; interviews with retired workers. 32. Interview with John Mulenga, Kapiri Mposhi, August 2010. 33. Cheng 2009: 33. 34. Interview with Li Jin Wen in Tianjin, China, July 2007. 35. Interview with retired railway workers at February 7 Factory, Beijing, June 2009. 36. Interview in Chimala. 37. Chen Yihong, p. 28, citing Great Soviet Encyclopedia, “Russian Communist Youth League.” 38. Ferguson 1999. 39. Interviews with Moses Mutuna and John Mulenga, Mpika, summer 2011. 40. Interview with John Mulenga, Kapiri Mposhi, summer 2011. 41. Interview with John Mulenga, Kapiri Mposhi, summer 2011. 42. Tanzanian worker interviewed by George Ambindwile in Chimala. 43. Tanzanian worker interviewed by George Ambindwile in Chimala. 44. Interview with Paschal Kihanza, Iringa, 2010. Interview by Frank Edwards. 45. Interview with Paschal Kihanza, Iringa, 2010. Interview by Frank Edwards. 46. Daily News, Tuesday, January 28, 1986, p. 3, “TAZARA dispute taken to Court of Appeal.” 47. Interview with Benedict Mkanyago, Dar es Salaam, August 2010. 48. Uhuru, Jumamosi, March 1, 1986. p. 5. “JUWATA haikushirikishwa katika kupunguza wafanyakazi TAZARA.” 49. Uhuru, Jumatatu October 28, 1985, p. 5, “Kesi ya TAZARA: Mahakama kuu yatengua amri za wizara na PTL.” 50. Interview with Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, 2007. 51. A pseudonym. 52. Daily News, Wednesday March 8, 1995, p. 1, “TAZARA to lay-off 2,600.” 53. Daily News, Thursday March 9, 1995, p. 1, “Tazara lay-offs no surprise,” front page editorial without attribution. 54. Records of Chinese Railway Expert Team from TAZARA Headquarters in Dar es Salaam. 55. Interview with retired worker who wished to remain anonymous, Dar es Salaam, August 2010. 56. East African Business Journal, cited on railwaysafrica.com; Interview with Conrad Simuchile, July 2010. 57. Interview with retired railway worker in Mpika; this interviewee asked that his name not be used for personal reasons. June, 2010. 58. Attilio Tagalile, “Tazara Provides Best Practice for Rail Infrastructure,” Daily News, May 28, 2011. 59. Records of Chinese Railway Expert Team, TAZARA Headquarters, Dar es Salaam. Transcription of CRET internal meeting minutes, March 3, 1987, translation by Liu Haifang.

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ABSTRACTS

In Zambia and Tanzania, a generation of railwaymen is retiring. They are the workers who constructed the TAZARA railway, who labored alongside their Chinese counterparts in the 1970s to build a link from the landlocked Zambian Copperbelt to the Indian Ocean. In their youth they formed a cohort of “new industrial men,” who shared not only the promise of East African socialist nation-building but also the expectation of providing for families into their old age. As they now retire in the era of economic liberalism, they express feelings of loss and alienation as the state has failed to recognize their contributions. In the face of layoffs and pension payment delays, TAZARA workers mobilize individual and collective memories of railway building to seek both recognition and material security.

En Zambie et en Tanzanie, une génération de travailleurs est en train d’atteindre l’âge de la retraite : il s’agit de ceux qui, aux côtés de leurs collègues chinois, ont construit dans les années 1970 le chemin de fer TAZARA, reliant le bassin minier (Copperbelt) zambien à l’océan Indien. Façonnés dans leur jeunesse, ces « nouveaux ouvriers » ont souscrit à la promesse et à l’édification de nations socialistes en Afrique de l’Est, avec l’espoir d’une retraite qui assurerait leurs vieux jours et soutiendrait leurs familles. Mais, prenant leur retraite en pleine époque de néolibéralisme économique, ils expriment leur frustration et leur déception, estimant que l’Etat ne reconnaît pas leur contribution passée à un grand projet. Confrontés à des licenciements ou à des retards dans le versement de leurs pensions, les travailleurs du TAZARA se mobilisent, et mobilisent leurs souvenirs individuels et collectifs, pour obtenir à la fois une reconnaissance et une meilleure sécurité matérielle.

INDEX

Keywords: Africa, China, masculinity, railway, labor, neo-liberalism, aging, memory, narrative Mots-clés: Afrique, Chine, masculinité, travailleurs du rail, travail, néolibéralisme, vieillissement, mémoire, récit

AUTHOR

JAMIE MONSON Jamie Monson is professor of history at Macalester College (USA) Her research is on Sino-African relations during the Cold War, especially Chinese technical aid in the 1970s and the history of labour. She has published on the TAZARA railway and on environmental history in Africa, including Africa’s Freedom Railway: how a Chinese development project changed lives and livelihoods in Tanzania (2009); Maji Maji: lifting the fog of war (co-edited with James Giblin, 2010) and a joint edition of a special number of African Studies Review on China and Africa (2013) [email protected]

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Complementary points of view

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Hazing amongst blue-collar workers in France in the contemporary period Les bizutages dans le monde ouvrier en France à l’époque contemporaine

Xavier Vigna Translation : Regan Kramer

1 Hazing or “ragging” [French: bizutage] describes practices presented as tests or ordeals, roughhousing, chants, etc., that “old-timers” impose on “newcomers” entering an institution, usually an educational one, but it might also be military or professional. This period of entry and testing, which also represents a moment of domination and bullying, is legitimized by implied tradition, and supposedly serves as a rite of initiation. The world of blue-collar labor – where professional training was traditionally performed on the job or during a period of apprenticeship1 – also has its hazing rituals, however anachronistic the term may be (particularly in French). But these practices are not well known, on the one hand because they are informal, and on the other, because they are not approved of (being either criticized or barely tolerated) either by those in authority or by the labor movement, which has developed its own rituals.2 Therefore they show up only in autobiographical accounts, reminiscences or, more rarely, in investigations and surveys.

2 Undertaking an analysis of such practices allows us to overturn some clichés: in contrast to a non-confrontational vision of permanent, automatic working-class solidarity, it reveals horizontal forms of bullying and domination that could be extremely brutal. In contrast to a vision of female workers exclusively as long-term victims of their male colleagues’ or supervisors’ clandestine (because illegitimate) sexual harassment,3 it points out that women also imposed collective, public rites including a manifestly sexual dimension, almost exclusively, it seems, to the detriment of young men. Taking both gender relationships and bullying/domination into account, the present article unearths and explores practices that, unlike hazing in an educational context, such as the Arts et Métiers School’s’ “machining,”4 are not

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codified. For this reason, they fluctuate between three categories: rites of passage; out- and-out bullying and domination of younger people by older ones; and practical jokes, roughhousing and horseplay.

Hazing as rite of passage

3 In the mid-1930s, a blue-collar woman explained what the women at a spinning mill in the Montbéliard region would do5: And then, you know, the women were pretty cruel too, back then. Bad things happened when they could get their hands on a young lad! They called it “warming his timbers!” They… I’m talking about married women, mind you! They would catch a 12- or 13-year-old boy, and if they saw he was a bit shy, they’d pull his pants down. To embarrass him. It was really stupid. Sometimes girls would get “passed through the heater” to see if they had any hair yet. You can see why the women from the mill had such a bad name back then!

4 So this type of sexual hazing involved young boys, who had their pants pulled down by older women, while girls were rarely bothered6. The same thing took place elsewhere in the region, in the same industry.7 In the mines in the Nord département, at least after World War I, women coal-sorters, known locally as “cafu”, would smear truck-grease on boys’ genitals,8 thereby justifying the disapproval that was expressed of them, as it was of their counterparts in St. Etienne, where they were called “clapeuses”.9 This type of roughhousing lasted until late in the century. At the Permali factory near Nancy, in the 1970s, a former employee, Germaine, used to organize a “ceremony she reserved for newcomers. Usually, a small commando of women would kidnap the ‘rookie’, pull his pants down and coat his genitals with wax”.10

5 Through this roughing up of young men and/or those who had recently entered the workforce, the women would both humiliate them and offer a hand up: they seem in fact to be both mocking the boys’ impotence – greased genitals are no good for anything – and urging them to overcome it – but they might be good for something after all. Thus the roughhousing acted as a rite of passage from childhood into adulthood. The entry into the world of work, which takes place at puberty, becomes a potential opening up to sexuality. Which is why men also indulged in similar types of roughhousing: in the textile industry near Roubaix in the 1880s, boys were stripped and masturbated to see if they were men.11

6 This enforced nudity, in a hazing ritual that acted as an initiation,12 presents an analogy with going in front of the draft board, another initiatory step in young men’s lives. Until the 1960s, 20-year-old men would literally have to expose their manhood to the draft board, which literally checked it.13 That is undoubtedly why, in a brewery in Lille in the 1930s, one particular apprentice – future union leader Eugène Descamps – resorted to fisticuffs to escape the tradition of sending apprentices “to the draft board”, i.e. taking his pants off.14

7 But hazing as initiation also has a distinctly professional dimension to it, particularly in trades with a strong identity, like typesetters and printers. Among typesetters during the Enlightenment, apprentices were truly whipping boys, obliged to perform all sorts of unpleasant tasks, as well as being the butts of April Fools type jokes, like being sent for “the hammer to drive in hard spaces” or “the machine for bending quote marks”.15 This type of hazing, which made fun of the youths’ incompetence and naivety, while

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indirectly highlighting the experienced workers’ professional knowledge and skills, hung on longer. As late as October 1969, an apprentice at a Parisian printing shop was sent for “the pump to inflate the cylinders”;16 but to deflate the pride of recent graduates from the École Estienne (France’s Advanced School of Arts and Printing), more senior printers had no qualms about having them grind corks in an ammonia bath… Hazing’s professional dimension can perfectly well co-exist with or follow up on its sexual dimension. Thus in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1941, an apprentice in training to become a “choumac” (a boilermaker or coppersmith in industrial slang) was sent for the inexistent pedal-driven marking gauge, but his co-worker told him about older, tougher forms of hazing, particularly “cock-waxing”.17

8 It stands to reason that in “compagnonnages” (the apprenticeship routine for traditional guilds), the professional dimension of such practices was most pronounced. Because these initiatory rites – known variously as ceremonies, receptions or baptisms – recognize that mastery in the craft has been acquired.18 In fact, they exactly reproduce the three phases Arnold Van Gennep identified in rites of passage: separation and transition followed by incorporation.19 Except that these rites were sometimes also the occasion for particularly brutal forms of roughhousing, which leads to another facet of hazing: brutal and even sadistic bullying.

Hazing as pure bullying

9 In 1909, for example, writing under the name Jean Connay, Henri Bricheteau described in great detail the shocking brutality of the rites that the “Charpentiers du Devoir” (“The Carpenters of Duty”), imposed upon candidates to their guild, who were christened “foxes”, as those rites took place in 1884.20 The “baptism”, which lasted about a week or more, included a slew of ordeals, known as “passages”, which become more and more violent as the week went by: the candidates were beaten and whipped repeatedly. On the seventh night, the sixth passage, called “The Knot and the Roofer’s Apron”, which is described below, took place after the foxes had been stripped. They stick a 4- or 5-inch piece of candle into his [the fox’s] anus, leaving barely a half-inch sticking out. Number 1 bites off that bit of candle: that’s known as bolting and unbolting the staircase; then, they dribble wine down his back to his anus, which they wash with the wine, Number 1 has to drink it, with his nose in his colleague’s anus; this is called drinking from the knot; then the other one stands up, squeezes his testicles as tight as he can, wine is poured on top and Number 1 has to drink it all; that is called drinking from the roofer’s apron. There, now you know the secrets and sacred mysteries of “compagnonnage”; Number 1 is done, except that then it’s his turn to get bolted and to have the other one drink from his apron. This passage can take a very long time, because many of them vomit.21

10 The scandal caused by the gradual revelation of these acts (foxes were also forced to swallow excrement and urine) led to a reform of the baptism process, between 1905 and 1907. This ritual clearly included “homosexual situations”, which could also be found in cabin-boys’ baptisms in the nineteenth century: after having drunk liquor and been given tobacco, the young sailor was undressed and his body rubbed with gravel. The older sailors scrubbed him, in their parlance. The others salted him: they kneaded his genitals with handfuls of worms until he fainted or passed out.22

11 It should also be pointed out that the near-sadistic brutality of these acts was a reflection of the violence that young workers were subjected to regularly:

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autobiographies23 and studies24 about child labor describe daily life filled with bullying and blows that were meant to pound the trade into their young minds and hands and/ or punish mistakes. Consequently, the brutal domination and bullying involved in hazing was nothing more than the radical and virtually final act (because afterwards, the victim had become an adult) of an every-day violence. In 1871, for example, a mechanic from Douai pressed charges because his son, a saddle-and-harness maker, was subjected to hazing by three workers who beat him, dabbed dyes on his face and mouth, and shaved his head in a patchy way. Yet this sort of violence continued for a long time. As late as 1935, in the shipyards in Bordeaux, an older worker known as Tarzan subjected a red-headed apprentice to especially ghastly bullying, in particular, something known as “stretching”. One worker would grab the young man, hoist him on his back, and kneel down, and another would grab the apprentice’s feet in such a way that he was pinned in a horizontal position. At that point, the third man, Tarzan, would pull his own pants down and rub his buttocks on the apprentice’s nose, accompanied by the hoots of laughter of those watching.25

12 Like all hazing, the violence and humiliation in these examples acted as calls to order, and were meant to show the importance of hierarchy, the “barriers and levels” within the trade,26 particularly to those, i.e. the apprentices, who were first being introduced to this world, as well as to a hierarchy they would inevitably seek to overturn, in that they would rise up within it. Publicly humiliating and striking these beginners was a way of showing them a hierarchical world they would have to start out by submitting to, whose codes and customs they would have to accept before they could really become a part of it.

13 That is because hazing always works on the principle that the hazed will later become the hazer, and the victim the bully, once his incorporation into the professional community has been achieved. That is the paradox of, or rather the justification for hazing – it demonstrates violence that is pure, but/and incorporating; bullying and domination that are brutal, but/and integrating: hazers aim to humiliate, bully and dominate temporarily, the better to welcome definitively. That is why these moments of violence are also filled with the laughter of those looking on. Joining a profession means finding camaraderie woven from shared struggle and, on a daily basis, from tomfoolery, fake fights, horseplay and, indeed, rituals.27 So in fact, workers’ hazing is also a kind of practical joke.

Hazing as practical joking or horseplay

14 A worker in a shoe factory describes what went on in Paris in the 1920s:28 There was plenty of roughhousing and lots of practical jokes played, especially on newcomers; it was the tradition. Aside from the “when is it?”round of drinks that every new recruit was supposed to offer the whole shop-floor, we also went in for what’s known elsewhere as hazing. The classic trick was “gluing”. The old-timers would work it out so that when the new guy was walking by, a bunch of them would tackle him. They would get him on the ground, and while the rest of them pinned him down, someone would open his fly: then one of them would quickly shove a brush with shoemakers’ glue into the opening. The bigger the brush, the more glue the novice got on him, and the happier the pals were. Not that they were bad guys at heart, but there weren’t that many chances for a laugh, and nobody was concerned with the morality of this pretty gross bit of fun.

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I was subjected to the gluing ordeal several times myself, and being no better than my colleagues, I took part in hazing newcomers as well.

15 Once again, this hazing ritual has a markedly sexual nature, especially since the men use a brush rather than their hands, in order to avoid any ambiguous gestures.29 What’s interesting about this account is that it points out that the hazing goes along with the “when is it?”, the drink that the newcomer has to buy his elders, which we find mentioned elsewhere as well:30 that it gives the “pals” a good laugh, and, most of all, that it can be done more than once. In that sense, the hazing ritual no longer acts as a rite of passage, which is by definition unique, but is more like horseplay amongst equals31 or roughhousing on the shop floor. This is a vast area that, to my knowledge, social science has hardly explored at all. Narratives by32 and studies of 33 blue-collar workers do show the frequency of this type of joking and roughhousing, which was at once entertaining and confrontational, demonstrating both complicity and rivalry, uniting men and women, young and old, and featuring an important bodily dimension. In fact, the most common victim of this horseplay could be either the newcomer or an old acquaintance. Which is why the hazee who is the butt of the joke has to try to take it on the chin and accept the insult: his/her ability to become integrated into the work group depends on it.

*

16 This unearthing of hazing practices is hard to bring into historical perspective.34 It is in fact difficult to establish how they evolved, even if we have every reason to believe that they were significantly reduced by several things: longer schooling (which, in France, became mandatory up to age 14 in 1936, and to age 16 in 1967), increased training of young blue-collar workers, the disappearance of the most specific forms of working- class culture, and finally, by the slow transformation of attitudes towards children’s bodies, which can no longer be abused as they once were.35 By the same token, in Britain, the arrival in the mid-1970s of female compositors led printers to replace their brutal integration ceremonies with parties.36 In addition, as a hypothesis, one could correlate their gradual elimination with the arrival of immigrant workers from non- European countries, whose presence might have made hazing’s bodily horseplay, with its strong sexual connotations, essentially impossible. It is as if racial differences – fantasized obviously – put a stop to the horseplay, and the promiscuity that went along with it. Put another way, it is as if it was absolutely unthinkable that an “Arab” or a “black”– to whom colonial imagery had assigned two contradictory sexual roles: passive homosexual, or macho rapist37 – could watch, or worse, participate in the hazing of a French (i.e. white) youngster, whether male or horresco referens, female.

17 The function of these practices is, at any rate, easier to see. In the same way that machining tries to make both metal parts and hazees perfectly homogeneous, these traditions, which sanction or accelerate an entire socialization process, tend, in part, to consolidate workers’ collectives by integrating novices, however brutally. Yet at the same time, hazing transmits – in a way that is meant to be more or less humorous – a sense of and a respect for a hierarchy that is inextricably generational and professional. Thus the horseplay is simultaneously informal38 and a reminder of the rules.39 In addition, insofar as it includes a sexual dimension that can sometimes be extremely explicit, this type of hazing surely contributes to reinforcing yet again, in representation, the association between blue-collar masculinity and virility. Getting

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through these ordeals proves to both the laborer and his co-workers that “he’s got balls”, and that for this reason, he deserves a place amongst his peers, who are, consequently, as well-endowed as he. Lastly, women workers’ sometimes active role in hazing demonstrates their importance in maintaining shop-floor culture, and shows that they too can enjoy defying the codes of respectability.40 But the roughhousing has surely also contributed – along with the swearing, the obscenities and the provocations – to female forms of resistance to patriarchy on the shop floor, about which a great deal of work remains to be done.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AUMONT, Michèle. 1953. Femmes en usine. Les Ouvrières de la métallurgie parisienne. Paris: Spes.

BENDER, Daniel E. 2004. ‘Too Much of Distasteful Masculinity’: historicizing sexual harassment in the garment sweatshop and factory. Journal of Women’s History 15(4): 91-116.

BLANCHARD, Emmanuel. 2008. Le mauvais genre des Algériens : des hommes sans femme face au virilisme policier dans le Paris d’après-guerre. Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 27: 209-224.

BLAZES, Valentin. 1997. Le folklore des ouvriers russes. Revue des études slaves 69(4): 645-655.

BLEWETT, Mary H. 2006. Yorkshire lasses and their lads: sexuality, sexual customs, and gender antagonisms in Anglo-American working-class culture. Journal of Social History 40(2): 317-336.

CHABOT, Michel. 1978. L’Escarbille. Histoire d’Eugène Saulnier, ouvrier verrier. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance.

CONNAY, Jean. 1909. Le Compagnonnage, son histoire, ses mystères, préface de Léon et Maurice Bonneff. Paris: L’Union des charpentiers de la Seine.

COROUGE, Christian, and Michel PIALOUX. 2011. Résister à la chaîne. Dialogue entre un ouvrier de Peugeot et un sociologue. Marseille: Agone.

CUCHE, Denys. 1985. Traditions populaires ou traditions élitistes : rites d’initiations et rites de distinction dans les Écoles d’Arts et Métiers. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 60: 57-67.

DURAND, Marcel. 2006. Grain de sable sous le capot. Marseille: Agone.

GEORGI, Frank. 1997. Eugène Descamps, chrétien et syndicaliste. Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier.

GOUX, Jean-Paul. 2003 [1st edn 1986]. Mémoires de l’enclave. Arles: Actes Sud – Babel.

HEYWOOD, Colin. 1988. Childhood in Nineteenth Century France. Work, Health, Education among the “classes populaires”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HOBSBAWM, Eric J. 1984. Worlds of Labour. Further Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

HUG, Eugène, and Pierre RIGOULOT, 1980, Le Croque-rave libertaire. Mémoires (1898-1980) d’un ouvrier du Pays de Montbéliard. Paris: Les Presses d’aujourd’hui.

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LEQUIN, Yves. 1989. L’apprentissage en France au XIXe siècle : rupture ou continuité ? Formation Emploi 27-28: 91-101.

LEQUIN, Yves. 1997 [1st edn 1992]. Le métier. In Les Lieux de l’histoire, tome 3, ed. Pierre NORA, 3351-3384. Paris: Gallimard. Coll. « Quarto ».

LIME, Maurice. 1949. Les Belles journées. Paris-Bordeaux: Éditions Bière.

LOTH, Bruno. 2010. Apprenti. Mémoires d’avant-guerre. Antony: La boîte à bulles.

LOUIS, Marie-Victoire. 1994. Le Droit de cuissage. France, 1860-1930. Paris: L’Atelier.

LÜDKTE, Alf. 2000. Des Ouvriers dans l’Allemagne du 20e siècle. Le quotidien des dictatures. Paris: L’Harmattan.

MAROLI, Richard. 1977. Tu seras choumac. Paris: Librairie du Compagnonnage.

MARTY, Laurent, 1996 [1st edn 1982]. Chanter pour survivre. Culture ouvrière, travail et techniques dans le textile. Roubaix 1850-1914. Paris: L’Harmattan.

MICHAUD, René. 1983. J’avais vingt ans. Un jeune ouvrier au début du siècle. Paris: Syros.

MINARD, Philippe. 1989. Typographe des Lumières. Seyssel: Champ Vallon.

PERROT, Michelle. 1996. La jeunesse ouvrière : de l’atelier à l’usine. In Histoire des jeunes en Occident, ed. Giovanni LEVI, and Jean-Claude SCHMITT, 85-141. Paris: Seuil.

PILLON, Thierry. 2012. Le Corps à l’ouvrage. Paris: Stock.

ROBERTSON, Emma. 2005. ‘It was Just a Real Camaraderie Thing’: socialising, socialisation and shopfloor culture at the Rowntree Factory, York. In Women and Work Culture, Britain c. 1850-1950, ed. Krista COWMAN and Louise A. JACKSON, 107-120. Aldershot: Ashgate.

RONDEAU, Daniel. 1988. L’Enthousiasme. Paris: Quai Voltaire.

SOHN, Anne-Marie. 2009. « Sois un Homme ! ». La construction de la masculinité au XIXe siècle. Paris: Seuil.

THÉVENIN, Jean-Louis. 2006. « Mort d’un métier, mort d’un monde ». Entretien avec J.-L. Thévenin ouvrier du Livre. Drôle d’époque 19: 175-188.

TODD, Selina. 2005. Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918-1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

TRUANT, Cynthia Maria. 1994. The Rites of Labor: brotherhood of compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

TRUQUIN, Norbert. 2006 [1st edn 1888]. Mémoires d’un prolétaire, Marseille: Le mot et le reste.

VAN GENNEP, Arnold. 1981 [1st edn 1909]. Les Rites de passage. Étude systématique des rites. Paris: Picard.

VISEUX, Augustin. 1991. Mineur de fond. Paris: Plon.

WILLIS Paul. 2011. L’École des ouvriers. Comment les enfants d’ouvriers obtiennent des boulots d’ouvriers. Marseille: Agone [Translation by Bernard Hoepffner of Learning to Labour. Farnborough, UK: Saxon House. 1977].

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NOTES

1. Lequin 1989. 2. Hobsbawm 1984: 66-82. 3. Louis 1994; Bender 2004. 4. Cuche 1985. 5. Goux 2003: 211. 6. In inter-war England as well, women workers were sometimes welcomed with something like rites, but those rites didn’t have a sexual dimension. Parties and games were more likely to be organized on the shop floor when one of the women was getting married; see Todd 2005: 153, 157. 7. Hug & Rigoulot 1980: 24-25. 8. Viseux 1991: 101-102. 9. Lequin 1997: 3367. 10. Rondeau 1988: 74. 11. Marty 1996: 48. Women workers in the north-western United States indulged in the same kind of roughhousing, known as sunning, which may have been brought over from Yorkshire in the early twentieth century: Blewett 2006: 325-327. 12. Pillon 2012: 74-79. 13. Perrot 1996. 14. Georgi 1997: 31. 15. Minard 1989: 78-79 and 147-150. 16. Thévenin 2006: 175-176. 17. Maroli 1977: 40-43. 18. Truant 1994: 80 ff. 19. Van Gennep 1981 [1909]: 146-147. He makes only glancing reference to entering professions, indicating only that a rite of incorporation marked the end of apprenticeship in the guilds. 20. Connay 1909: 120-183; Truant 1994: 297-305. 21. Connay 1909: 153. 22. Sohn 2009: 164-165. 23. Truquin 2006 [1988]: 19-23; Chabot 1978: 70-77. 24. Heywood 1988: 135-138; Perrot 1996: 108; Sohn 2009: 383-386. 25. Loth 2010: 13-14. 26. Lequin 1997: 3373. 27. Lequin 1997: 3373. 28. Michaud 1983: 89. 29. Pillon 2012: 78. 30. Loth 2010. 31. Pillon 2012: 92-97. 32. Lime 1949: 77; Durand 2006: 1st part; Corouge & Pialoux 2011. 33. Aumont 1953: 128; Lüdkte 2000: 44-50; Willis 2011. 34. Hobsbawm 1984: 68. 35. My thanks to Éliane Le Port for this suggestion. 36. My thanks to Siân Reynolds for this information. 37. Blanchard 2008: 210-213. 38. Willis 2011: 52. 39. In a similar vein, in the Ural Mountains, laborers use practical jokes to remind their forgetful or reckless co-workers about various safety measures: Blazes 1997. 40. Robertson 2005.

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ABSTRACTS

Up until the 1970s in the working classes, informal practices of ragging existed among both male and female workers to celebrate young people’s entry into factories. They served a variety of functions: as rites of passage, as brutal manifestations of domination or violence, or as pranks intended to make others laugh. Because of their obvious sexual dimension, they contributed to the association of workers’ masculinities with manhood.

Dans le monde ouvrier, des pratiques informelles de bizutage se repèrent, accomplies par des hommes comme par des femmes sur les jeunes jusque vers les années 1970 environ, pour accompagner leur entrée dans les usines. Elles fonctionnent à la fois comme rites de passage, manifestations brutales de domination voire de violence, et blague dont il convient de rire. Mais, parce qu’elles revêtent une dimension sexuelle manifeste, elles participent de l’identification des masculinités ouvrières à la virilité.

INDEX

Keywords: workers, violence, masculinities, sex, gender Mots-clés: ouvriers, violences, masculinités, sexe, genre

AUTHORS

XAVIER VIGNA Xavier Vigna teaches contemporary history at the University of Bourgogne (Centre Georges Chevrier) and is a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. His research on the 1968 period and factory workers sets the French case in a West-European context. Publications include L’Insubordination ouvrière en France dans les années 1968 (2007) and Histoire des ouvriers en France au XXe siècle (2012). [email protected]

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Working-class against their will: “Recognized” refugees in France and Bulgaria in the early twenty- first century Ouvrier malgré soi : réfugié-e-s « reconnu-e-s » en France et en Bulgarie (début XXIe siècle)

Albena Tcholakova Translation : Marian Rothstein

1 There have been few studies of officially recognized refugees,1 still less of recognized refugees who have “become working class”.2 These refugees share conditions common to other immigrants, including the loss of class status (both social and professional), and being subject to the sexual division of labour (having employment and status assigned by gender). Moreover, historical circumstances have tended to create a convergence between the refugee, no longer simply defined as a political dissident, and the immigrant worker, [or economic migrant]3 who today can no longer be assumed to be a single man doing manual work. Finally, the geographical and social roots of refugees constitute an unquestionable source of heterogeneity. At the same time, their experience in exile is marked by specific characteristics. These have to do on the one hand with “paths of suffering”4 beginning before their exile, and continuing in exile, in which the relationship to work (sometimes to blue-collar work) has a significant place. On the other hand, they depend on the contrast between these paths of suffering and the promises associated with the status finally obtained. In this article, my objective is to open the way to the study of the gendered dimension of refugees' changes of identity, based on existing literature and on my own research in France and in Bulgaria into refugees’ search for employment, understood as a quest not only for work, but also for recognition5 and biographical coherence.6

2 The only published research on working-class refugees in France has been focused on refugees from South-East Asia.7 It shows that, contrary to pre-conceived notions

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according to which refugees are economic migrants taking part in “ethnic exchange”, most of these refugees are people who have become working-class. 8 It has focused particularly on the ethnically-centered perceptions of Cambodian refugees which explain the persistence of stereotypes of docility and malleability, of offering no resistance to the demands of bosses, and the depoliticization of the working-class condition. It has also examined prejudices with respect to gender on the part of employers, colleagues, and labor unions. The so-called fragility, docility, attention to detail and depoliticization of the Cambodian refugees are said to contrast with the common associations of “toughness”, “strength, and the threatening nature of immigrant workers”.9 Working-class refugees are here considered as the objects of stereotyping and essentializing classificatory systems that should be deconstructed.

3 The relationship to work of refugees who have become working-class is also worth examining. That is what we will do here, attempting to show that this relationship is part of a loss of social standing which may at times be strongly gender-specific.

The survey material

4 My research was conducted between 2004 and 2009 in two sites: Lyon and the surrounding area for France, and Sofia and its inner suburbs for Bulgaria. In these two locations, 143 interviews were carried out. There were 109 biographical interviews with refugees aged between 18 and 65, of whom 53 were in Bulgaria (38 men and 15 women) and 56 in France (36 women and 20 men) plus 34 in-depth interviews with socio- economic agents working either for a private social service or for the state, helping refugees to get work. In addition to these interviews, many observations were made in situ. There was occasional use of personal documents; administrative documents were collected and analyzed. Data connected to employment and immigration10 was also subjected to analysis. The refugees I met in France were originally from Eastern Europe (43), Sub-Saharan Africa (10), the Near and Middle East (2), and North Africa (1). The refugees in Bulgaria were originally from the Near and Middle East (27), both Sub- Saharan and East Africa (23), Eastern Europe (2), and North Africa (1). The over- representation of refugees from Eastern Europe as well as of women and families (in France), and of those from the Near and Middle East and Africa as well as of men (in Bulgaria) can be explained in two ways: on the one hand, as a result of putting together a qualitative sample and the general conditions surrounding the investigation; and on the other, by the migratory tendencies of the refugees, observable in both sites during the period of the study. Since we cannot here undertake an overall analysis of the contexts of immigration and asylum policies and of the labor market, nor of the socio- economic profile of refugees in the two countries (at the end of 2009 there were 196,364 refugees in France and 5,394 in Bulgaria)11, suffice it to say that the long history of receiving refugees in France contrasts with how recently Bulgaria has begun doing this. Bulgaria is neither a traditional locus for immigration nor a former colonial power. Since the fall of the communist regime, the country has simultaneously been discovering both sides of the migratory process – both emigration and immigration. Overall there is more emigration than immigration. Moreover, Bulgaria, unlike France, continues to be thought of rather as a country of transit for immigrants and refugees than a final destination.

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5 Refugees have varied professional backgrounds and levels of education, but in general, they experience loss of social class more intensely than economic migrants, because of the expectations of social and professional integration they associate with receiving refugee status. They are more likely to find themselves unemployed than other immigrants, and when they do find a job, it rarely meets their expectations and their hopes of retaining a degree of biographical and professional coherence. Women, more than men, not only find themselves unemployed, but when they do work, they are more likely than men to do so under short-term or part-time contracts. These empirical observations are confirmed by research undertaken by the OECD.12 What are the socio-professional profiles of the refugees I met, and what place in this group is occupied by blue-collar workers? The answer is not simple, and the tables below only partially convey their profiles. This is because the research was not specifically focused on the [gender] problematic treated in this article. In fact, in order to create a statistical profile based on the biographical interviews, multiple work experiences were translated into socio-professional categories based on the most frequent (or important) professional situation. Some refugees were in working-class jobs in their home country. This tended to be the case for those interviewed in Bulgaria, and especially the newly arrived Somalian refugees who had been farm-workers, or the forty-year-old Chechen woman encountered in France who in both Chechnya and France worked in construction. Women refugees, like French, Bulgarian or immigrant women, rarely take manual jobs in their adoptive country, and when they do, it is work categorized as that of “unskilled workers in the small trades sector”.13

Table 1: France. Comparison of Socio-professional Categories (SPC) in the home-country and in the adoptive land of refugees interviewed.

Tradesmen Executives, Unemployed, White- Total or women, professions Blue- including Intermediate collar/ home- Professions Farmers shopkeepers, requiring a collar students and professions office country and business university workers retired workers SPC managers education people.

Farmers 1 1

Tradesmen or women shopkeepers, 2 3 5 and business managers

Executives, professions requiring a 5 7 12 university education

Intermediate 6 6 12 professions

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White- collar/office 7 1 10 18 workers

Blue-collar 3 3 workers

Unemployed, including students and 1 4 5 retired people

Total SPC as 0 0 0 0 21 4 31 56 refugees

Note: Of the 18 refugees who had been white-collar/office workers in their home country, seven had similar work in France, one was a manual worker, and 10 were unemployed.

Table 2: Bulgaria. Comparison of Socio-professional Categories (SPC) in the home-country and in the adoptive land of refugees interviewed.

Tradesmen Executives, Unemployed, White- Total or women, professions Blue- including Intermediate collar/ home- Professions Farmers shopkeepers, requiring a collar students and professions office country and business university workers retired workers SPC managers education people.

Farmers 1 1

Tradesmen or women, shopkeepers, 1 4 5 and business managers

Executives, professions requiring a 1 1 2 4 university education

Intermediate 1 6 2 9 professions

White- collar/office 6 2 8 workers

Blue-collar 9 1 10 workers

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Unemployed, including students and 1 11 1 4 17 retired people

Total SPC as 0 2 0 2 24 10 15 53 refugees

Note: Of the 8 refugees who had been white-collar/office workers in their home country, six found similar work in Bulgaria, two were unemployed.

6 There is a considerable concentration of refugees in a small number of categories: white-collar and blue-collar workers (especially in Bulgaria), and unemployed – whereas they were more broadly spread over the whole range of socio-professional categories in their home countries. For example, of the refugees in France, 12 had been in intermediate professions and 12 in executive posts or the higher intellectual professions in their home country. Today, none of them has remained in those categories: they are now either in white-collar jobs at lower levels or unemployed. The concentration varies however as between the adoptive countries. Refugees in Bulgaria are more likely to be in work: 34 are either in office jobs or manual work, as opposed to 25 in France.

7 These data fail to take into account however that for most refugees, the experience of exile is accompanied by the experience of blue-collar work. Among those for whom doing such work was neither the most usual or significant situation, whether in their homeland or in their adoptive land, there were many who had had to take manual jobs during their migration, and/or who did so at some point during their career in their adoptive country, either working in industry or in services. These tendencies are more pronounced for men than for women.

8 One of the specific traits of the refugee experience is loss of social status, the struggle to be recognized, and the reshaping of identity this implies. Nearly six out of ten refugees (64 out of 109) had university degrees. This is more true of those in France than in Bulgaria: (40 of the 56 interviewed in France, that is 8 out of 10), as opposed to a scant half in Bulgaria (24 of 53). In France, men were proportionately a little more likely than women to have university diplomas, while in Bulgaria, the situation was reversed. In many cases, among the refugees in our sample with university degrees, the experience of doing manual labor was presented as one of the most life-changing in their downward trajectory, and this was true even when they were no longer doing manual labor at the time of the interview.

Blue-collar work and gendered loss of status

9 For most of these refugees, blue-collar work represents a loss of status which contrasts with their expectations of work-related recognition, which were encouraged by obtaining formal refugee status. Refugees of both sexes, in France as well as in Bulgaria, wanted recognition of their qualifications and of the skills acquired in their pre-exile professional experience, and once again to be able to have access to work which reflected these. But their access to employment turned out to be difficult, and their

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opportunities were often limited to sectors of the labor market that were well below their expectations, and furthermore, strongly marked by notions of ethnicity and gender. Ethnic and gender stereotypes are at the heart of the experience of loss of status. Most of the people, both men and women, whom I met in France and in Bulgaria were working, or had worked, in strongly gender-marked jobs, and had been urged to do so as a result of the advice and training offered by agents of both state and private social services. Men found themselves on construction sites, in warehousing, automobile repair, meat-packing factories. Many female refugees had worked or were working in the “care” sector: with children, as care-workers for the disabled or elderly, as domestic help, and some had entered the service sector as contract cleaners. Echoing the paths of suffering during exile, this experience of loss of status is a specific source of suffering for refugees: it means a change in their perceived identity which also has an impact on their sense of masculinity or femininity.

Masculine silence, solitude, competition, and return to the body

10 In our interviews with male refugees, the “shame associated with having become a manual worker”, and performing a difficult job seen as ”bad for your health”, was expressed not by describing the tasks required by the job, but by silently suppressing difficult working conditions experienced as a humiliation or disregard for social rank. The refusal to accept the condition of a worker was equally expressed in the interviews when male refugees cried, or when they laughed nervously, turning their eyes away, or when they showed the scars of a work-related accident that had taken place on a building site where they worked to “provide for their basic needs”, to “survive”, whereas they defined themselves, for example, as musicians. This was notably the case of Serge, a thirty-six year old refugee from Cameroon, living in Bulgaria since 2003, who had trained as an electrician. This refusal to accept their new status is also expressed in striking stories of betrayal, of never being offered jobs that matched their expectations. We also observed that some refugees tried to hide the nature of their work from those whom they had known in their “former life”.

11 Women did not seem to have the same difficulty openly expressing the suffering associated with their new condition. Theoretical approaches to the psychodynamics of work and its connection to the sociology of work, which stress the importance of gender relations,14 cast light on these differences in the way of experiencing and expressing suffering. Using the example of nurses and nurses’ aides, Pascale Molinier argues that there is a gendered distinction in defense mechanisms. The dimension of self-mockery “with respect to one’s own vulnerability is the essential component of ‘feminine’ defense mechanisms”.15 The counterpart of the men’s denial of suffering is the female tendency to exchange within the workplace not only their reactions to work, but also emotions, feelings, doubts. This is a difference with respect to suffering that also shows up outside the workplace, even during the interviews in our survey. Women’s “feminine” expressions of vulnerability contrast with the men’s “macho” perspective, the latter being marked by men’s learning to suppress emotions from their earliest socialization16 making it impossible to cast a glance of self-mockery on one’s failures or weaknesses, and more generally, to talk about them.

12 The lack of acceptance of working-class status is also expressed in a double problematic of solitude: solitude with respect to colleagues, emotional solitude. The experience of a

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loss of status can in fact create a second difficulty in integration into a work-collective: the desire to show that one is better than other people, and trouble identifying with others. Andreï is an example of this, a forty-year old Moldovian refugee, trained as an engineer. In France, he worked for a month in a factory producing pneumatic tubes, but he was not kept on as a permanent employee, because his colleagues felt that he worked “too fast”. In his account, he described his exacting relationship to his work, repeating several times, “I know how to do everything”, “I’m a good worker”, “I don’t know how to work slowly”, placing himself as superior and in competition with his colleagues when he affirmed “I can do two people’s work”. The experience of loss of status here was accompanied by a “macho” defense against suffering, which valorized his capacity to bear such suffering17: the defense of a man who “had always worked”, who, before his exile, was able to supply the needs of his wife and children, and who intends to continue doing so, whatever the conditions he is faced with.

13 Another form of solitude is connected to what [male] refugees describe as an inability, out of shame for what they have become, to create durable emotional relationships with women. The gendered dimension of the problems associated with loss of status is then expressed in the feeling of shame in the face of financial dependence on their partners. Whether they work without being able to supply all the family’s needs, or are forced to give up manual labor because their bodies are physically exhausted, the fact of being “dependent” on their partner was experienced as negative by the male refugees we met. The image of head of household or of male breadwinner was turned upside down. In this case, the reworking of identity linked to the experience of loss of status affects the gendered part of their identity.

14 The accounts of refugees from Africa whom we met in Bulgaria, whether they were “former students” become refugees, or newly arrived refugees, lead us to insist on the physical dimension of the reworking of identity. Refugees who were doctors, engineers, electricians, or police officers in their home country or by training, but in Bulgaria were working on construction sites or in warehousing, long-term or just for the moment, see part of their problem as being reduced to their bodies in two ways: they have become a “worker’s body”, a mere source of physical strength, but also a body “of color”, a racialized body. These two reductions seem especially painful when they invoke sexual stereotypes. So, for example, [male] African refugees in Bulgaria are “invited” to take walk-on roles in movie productions and musical videos filmed in Sofia, not because they are actors but because they are “black” and “commercially” valuable in a country where blacks are rare. They speak with shame of their participation in videos alongside women portrayed as sex-objects. Some accept a role in these videos because they are better paid than a day's work on a building site or a stall at the wholesale market in Sofia. Their relation to manual labor is colored by their shame at being reduced as a consequence of their low earning-power to sex-objects, at the same time that their bodies are involved in a complex network of domination and reification. To the experience of domination at work (the sense of being constantly exploited), to the experience of racism (which they encounter daily in Bulgaria, and which can go so far as to leave physical marks on their bodies as a result of attacks by skinheads), we can add the experience of suffering connected to a kind of eroticization undergone as a function of their ethnic origin, something that should be taken into consideration in order to understand their relation to manual work.

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Distaste for being a “care-giver”

15 Women’s connection to suffering as a result of loss of status seems to have a gendered dimension, associated in two ways, and paradoxically, to the problematic of “care”.

16 One might consider that being assigned tasks and roles associated with care-giving faces women with the need to accept their own suffering and that of others, and to promote a certain kind of relationship to oneself and to the world, which constitutes an element of the gendered part of their identity. But if the work of care-giving is associated with loss of status, this relationship to oneself and to the world may become problematic. Women, as we have said, seem to find it easier than men to speak of the suffering connected to their new situation, and we met women who expressed distaste for being allocated to the “care” sector [which might mean working as a cleaner]. Refugee women working as industrial cleaners suffered by being reduced to cleaning up other people’s filth, to being badly paid, to working outside of normal hours, to spending a lot of time on public transport, all with little recognition. That was the case of Shereen, an Iranian woman aged 45, married and the mother of four children, who had been living in Bulgaria for the past ten years; in Iran she had been a high-school teacher of Persian language and literature. The example of Zeina, an Iraqi woman of Shereen’s age whom we met in France, also fits this pattern. She had fourteen years of experience as a physics teacher in Iraq. For her, the job cleaning offices offered her by the central employment agency, Pôle emploi, seemed a “social death”.18 Nevertheless, that is what she did for several years, before opening a small business with her husband in 2012. For these women, working as cleaners, or finding that they were only offered work they considered degrading, was experienced as proof of a refusal to recognize their qualifications and competencies, and as a reduction of their social existence to a female stereotype. Here again, the change of identity resulting in the experience of loss of status was effected by means of gendered stereotypes, and affected the gendered part of the women’s identity.

Living with working-class status

17 Refugees who found they had become working-class did not simply suffer this situation, they reacted to it in varied ways, and here too gender matters.

The discourse of courage and engagement in “masculine” activities

18 The discourse of courage is one example. Men's accounts sometimes recognized the work of a manual laborer as being admittedly difficult and putting a strain on their bodies, but it remained work of which they “had no fear”. There is nothing original about these accounts, but we might reflect that those refugees who had already lived through life-threatening events and done difficult work in their home countries or on the road, could in exile, more readily than other refugees, use their past courage to valorize their present situation. We might wonder whether the discourse of rejection towards those without work and who were hiding behind the difficulties of finding work, especially in France, does not function on analogous principles. To show or express courage, strength, even insubordination, not to complain, not to show concern for one’s physical health, to dismiss all those who refuse to accept the same (difficult)

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working conditions – all this is part of being a real man. These two types of discourse are “manly defense strategies” directed against suffering, echoing the clinical findings of Christophe Dejours.19 The discourse of courage and the language of “manly” rejection both come from an attempt to “live with” the situation of being working- class, all the while denying the difficulties this new situation brings with it. Inversely, the fact that the female refugees we met did not resort to this kind of discourse does not mean that they were not courageous. If the discourse of virtue is gendered, that does not mean that the virtues themselves are.

19 For men, participation in sports, in music, and in religious observance constitutes another form of adaptation to their new working-class situation. They seek other sources of satisfaction and recognition, to make up for what they have lost. Among the women we met, this takes other forms.

“Care for loved ones” and the language of autonomy

20 In fact, among female refugees who have become working-class, compensatory recognition takes place inside the family circle, in both France and in Bulgaria. Paradoxically, while being a paid “care-giver” for outsiders, a mark of working-class status, can be a source of shame, “caring for loved ones” becomes a vector of valorization and biographical continuity. Being involved in their children’s success at school is another resource which compensates for the difficulties such women experience in work situations which they associate with a refusal to recognize their pre-exile professional competencies. The family then is no longer merely a vector of compensatory recognition, but also of biographical continuity.

21 Another example of a gendered compensatory strategy concerns participation in community organizations helping the poor (especially in Bulgaria), helping other immigrants, helping people in distress. Such “volunteer care” efforts then become a way to repair injured self-esteem. By means of these two examples, we might posit the hypothesis that the reworking of the identity of female refugees-turned-working-class strengthens rather than weakening or destabilizing gendered social relationships.

22 However, in the discourse of some women, manual work remains associated with expectations of emancipation. That is the case for female refugees who did work of this kind during their journey into exile but who today, once they have arrived, are forbidden by their husbands to take a job. For these women without remunerated work outside the home, any job, including manual labour, is a source of autonomy and independence. In these cases, a minority in our study, their new situation is not associated with a loss of status.

23 This article set out to open up a field of research concerning the gendered nature of blue-collar or low-paid service work among men and women who were recognized refugees. These people generally perceive such work as a loss of social and professional status, putting their identity in question in a way that amplifies the experience of exile, making it a dramatic “break with the world to which they had been accustomed”.20 This break can be accompanied by various kinds of changes in gendered identification (destabilizing or reinforcing masculine or feminine stereotypes), and gendered norms offer different resources and make possible different strategies for coming to terms with a new situation generally considered unenviable.

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24 While for the majority of refugees we met who had become working-class, their new situation was a source of loss of status and of shame, this was not the case for all refugees. The nature of their biographies and professional histories was the determining factor. Some refugees, such as men originally from Bosnia or Kosovo now living in France, or Somalian refugees living in Bulgaria, generally with little education, young, and unattached, said that they “knew how to” “wanted to” and “could” do everything. Being hired as a manual laborer for them meant that becoming a worker; and being able to work raises self-esteem and allows refugees to find in their work a basis for dealing with the reworking of identity provoked by exile, a situation in which the break with the past and everything they were used to is, at least to some extent, irreversible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BILLION, Pierre. 2001. Où sont passés les “travailleurs réfugiés” ? Trajectoires professionnelles des populations du Sud-Est asiatique. Hommes & Migrations 123: 38-49.

COSSÉE, Claire, Adelina MIRANDA, Nouria OUALI, and Djaouida SEHILI (eds). 2012. Le Genre au cœur des migrations. Paris: Éditions Petra. Coll. « IntersectionS ».

DEJOURS, Christophe. 1998. Souffrance en France. La banalisation de l’injustice sociale. Paris: Seuil.

DEJOURS, Christophe. 2000. Le masculin entre sexualité et société. In Nouvelles approches des hommes et du masculin, ed. Daniel WELZER-LANG, 263-289. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. Coll. « Féminin & Masculin ».

DEJOURS, Christophe (ed.). 2010. Observations cliniques en psychopathologie du travail. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Coll. « Souffrance et théorie ».

GUIONNET, Christine. 2012. Introduction. Pourquoi réfléchir Aux coûts de la domination masculine ? In Boys Don’t Cry! Les coûts de la domination masculine, 7-38. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Coll. « Le Sens social ».

GOFFMAN, Erving. 1989. Calmer le jobard : quelques aspects de l’adaptation à l’échec. In Le Parler frais d’Erving Goffman, ed. Robert CASTEL, 277-300. Paris: Minuit. Coll. « Arguments ».

HIRATA, Helena, and Danièle KERGOAT. 1988. Rapports sociaux de sexe et psychopathologie du travail. In Plaisir et souffrance au travail, vol. II, ed. Christophe DEJOURS, 131-176. Orsay: Éditions de l’Association pour l’ouverture du champ d’investigation.

HONNETH, Axel. 2000. La Lutte pour la reconnaissance. Paris: Cerf.

INSEE Références. 2012. Immigrés et descendants d’immigrés en France.

MESLIN, Karine. 2011. Les réfugiés cambodgiens, des ouvriers dociles ? Genèse et modes de pérennisation d’un stéréotype en migration. Revue européenne des migrations internationales 27(3): 83-101.

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MOLINIER, Pascale. 2004. Psychodynamique du travail et rapports sociaux de sexe. Travail et Emploi 97: 79-91.

MOLINIER, Pascale. 2013. Le Travail du care. Paris: La Dispute. Coll. « Le genre du monde ».

OCDE. 2012, Trouver ses marques. Les indicateurs de l’OCDE sur l’intégration des immigrés. Publications of the OECD. English version on line: http://www.oecd.org/els/mig/ progressmadeonimmigrantintegrationbutmoreeffortsneededoneducationandjobsfindsoecd.htm

POLLAK, Michael. 2000. L’Expérience concentrationnaire. Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale. Paris: Métailié.

RÉGNARD, Corinne, and Florent DOMERGUE. 2011. Les nouveaux migrants en 2009. Infos migrations 19, Département des statistiques, des études et de la documentation de l’INSEE : http:// www.immigration.interieur.gouv.fr/content/download/38847/296207/file/IM_19_ELIPA_2.pdf

RIEMANN, Gerhard, and Fritz SCHÜTZE. 1991. “Trajectory” as a Basic Theoretical Concept for Analyzing Suffering and Disorderly Social Processes. In Social Organization and Social Process. Essays in Honour of Anselm Strauss, ed. David R. MAINES, 333-357. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

SAYAD, Abdelmalek. 1991. L’Immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité. Brussels: De Boeck-Wesmael.

SAYAD, Abdelmalek. 1999. La Double absence. Des Illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré. Paris: Seuil.

SPIRE, Alexi. 2004. Les réfugiés, une main-d'œuvre à part ? Conditions de séjour et d’emploi, France, 1945-1975. Revue européenne des migrations internationales 20(2): 13-38.

TCHOLAKOVA, Albena. 2012. En quête de travail, enjeux de reconnaissance et remaniement identitaire : approche comparée France-Bulgarie de carrières professionnelles de réfugiés. Doctoral diss., Université Lumière Lyon 2, New Bulgarian University, under the direction of Laurence Roulleau-Berger and Anna Krasteva.

UNHCR. 2010. Global Trends 2009: refugees, asylum-seekers, returnees, internally displaced and stateless persons.

WIHTOL DE WENDEN, Catherine. 2010. La Question migratoire au XXIe siècle : migrants, réfugiés et relations internationales. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

NOTES

1. The term recognized refugees here means those persons having been accorded refugee status in keeping with the Geneva Convention of 28 July, 1951 or covered by what is called a protection subsidiaire in France, and humanitarian protection in Bulgaria. 2. The few investigations concerning refugees who are blue collar workers/laborers conducted in France focus on refugees from South-East Asia between 1970-1980 or on Chilean refugees in France. See Billion 2001, Meslin 2011, Spire 2004. Statistics can be found in the French government’s Longitudinal Study of the Integration of Foreigners Arriving in France (ELIPA) studying the progress of integration from their initial arrival in France, those who signed the Contrat d'accueil et d'intégration [Reception and Integration Contract, which refugees are asked by the French government to sign, intended to facilitate their integration into French society] among whom are refugees and their families. See Régnard & Domergue 2011. For a review of the literature, see Tcholakova 2012.

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3. See Sayad 1991 and 1999. On the evolution of these categories and migration statistics see Wihtol de Wenden 2010, and on the gendered nature of migration processes and experiences Cossée et al. 2012. 4. On the concept of “trajectoire de souffrance” [path of suffering], see Riemann & Schütze 1991. 5. Honneth 2000. 6. Pollak 2000. 7. Billion 2001; Meslin 2011. 8. Billion 2001: 41. 9. Meslin 2011: 89. 10. For a detailed discussion of these questions, see Tcholakova 2012. 11. UNHCR 2010. 12. OECD 2012. 13. http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=nomenclatures/pcs2003/n3_68.htm 14. Dejours 1998 and 2010; Molinier 2004; Hirata and Kergoat 1988. 15. Molinier 2004: 84, and 2012. 16. Guionnet 2012. 17. Dejours 1998, 2000 and 2010. 18. Goffman 1989. 19. Dejours 1998 and 2010 (especially chap. 1). 20. Pollak 2000.

ABSTRACTS

Drawing on a sociological study concerning “recognized” refugees in France and Bulgaria and their search for work, this article aims at opening a research field about the gender dimension of their relationship to work. The refugees who become workers generally experience this transformation as a loss of social and professional status that destabilizes their identity and amplifies the rupture with their habitual world that exile entails. The paper shows that these experiences of loss coincide with transformation in gender identifications (either destabilization or strengthening of “virile” or “feminine” stereotypes). At the same time gender norms can offer resources and enable strategies that allow individuals to adjust to a new condition generally considered unenviable.

À partir d’une recherche sociologique portant sur la quête de travail des réfugiés dits « reconnus » en France et en Bulgarie, cet article se propose d’ouvrir le chantier de l’étude de la dimension genrée de leur rapport au travail. Les femmes et les hommes réfugiés devenus ouvriers vivent généralement cette nouvelle condition comme un déclassement social et professionnel, sous le mode de la perte de statut et de la fragilisation identitaire, ce qui amplifie l’expérience, propre à l’exil, des ruptures avec le monde habituel. Nous examinons comment ces ruptures peuvent s’accompagner de différents types de transformation de l’identification genrée (de la déstabilisation au renforcement des stéréotypes « virils » ou « féminins »), et comment les normes de genre peuvent offrir différentes ressources, et rendre possibles différentes stratégies, pour faire avec une nouvelle condition généralement considérée comme peu enviable.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: réfugiés, expérience de déclassement, identité genrée Keywords: refugees, loss in professional status, gender identity

AUTHORS

ALBENA TCHOLAKOVA Albena Tcholakova has doctorates in sociology from the University of Lyon 2 Lumière and in political science from the New Bulgarian University. She is currently a post-doc with the CRESPPA laboratory-GTM UMR 721, attached to the Ile-de-France region. Recent publications include “Professional careers of refugees in Bulgaria and France” [in Bulgarian] in Problèmes sociologiques 1-2 (2012); and “Rendre compte du sensible” in L. Roulleau-Berger ed. Sociologies et cosmopolitisme méthodologique (2012). [email protected]

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Current research

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Gender history and labour history: intersections

Xavier Vigna and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel Translation : Siân Reynolds

1 This survey of current research takes as its inspiration and point of departure two historians, Michelle Perrot and Joan Scott, who admirably represent the coming together of gender history and labour history, and who combined these fields very early.1 Both authors had begun by research into workers’ mobilization, Michelle Perrot with her comprehensive study of strikes, Joan Scott with her case-study of a male trade, the glass-makers of Carmaux. In Number 3 of Clio FGH, entitled Métiers, corporations syndicalismes [= Trades, guilds and unionism], published in 1996, Laura Frader’s article on current research focused on the link between women, gender and the labour movement from the perspective of class formation, relations between public and private, and social protection. In this issue, rather than pursue those lines of enquiry, we have chosen to emphasize some of the fresh perspectives for interaction between gender history and labour history that have opened up in the fifteen years or so since that publication, and to outline some new fields of research.

Women workers: a complicated identification

2 It may be useful to begin by recalling how complicated it has been to identify “women workers” [the French term is ouvrières, which often has the connotation of factory or industrial work], since statistical studies regularly come up against the fluid definition of what counts as women’s work, and thus, as labour historians of both sexes well know, women’s employment is regularly underestimated.2 Women historians, particularly in Spain and Italy, but also in Latin America,3 have uncovered massive examples of under-declaration and/or under-recording, often explained by the coexistence of domestic and/or agricultural labour, performed alongside the practice of a trade or (proto)-industrial outworking within the home. While this phenomenon is quite well attested in rural areas, it is also true of cities in the process of industrialization, such as late nineteenth-century Milan: because of the often

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discontinuous nature of women’s work on the one hand, and on the other the existence of sub-contracting and piecework, especially in the garment, toy-making or jewellery sectors, the women workers of Milan were considered as a marginal or reserve army of labour, and often registered as casalinghe (housewives) rather than as employed workers.4 This under-registration has prompted historians to revisit national census material by cross-checking with local sources. Large-scale research of this kind, such as has been carried out in Spain for Catalonia, the Basque region, Castille and Galicia, has led to significant re-evaluations, substantially bolstering estimates of women’s overall economic activity, and by the same token that of women in industrial work. In Catalonia, where textile firms, especially cotton mills, recruited women workers on a massive scale, historical surveys have shown that in the 1920s in particular, women’s employment did not decline after marriage, or after the births of their first children, but only when their children were old enough to bring in a wage themselves. Such data throws into question the entire economic and social reality of the “male breadwinner” model.5 The phenomenon of under-registration has persisted into our own times. In the garment trade in Istanbul for example, women are often employed in family workshops or at home in the manufacture of sweatshirts and T-shirts, without always earning a money wage which could be recorded in an accounting system. Because of the substantial size of this informal sector, such practices have led to a large-scale underestimate of the reality of women’s industrial work, not only in Istanbul but throughout Turkey.6

3 It is already possible, without waiting for further statistics, to draw on published research to underline both the large proportion of women in the overall labour force, and the complexity of their itineraries. In the nineteenth century, the size of the textile and garment labour force made it a significant industry in France (28.6% in 1911, the high point)7 while in the first census in Italy in 1861, it accounted for a majority of all industrial workers (58.6%).8 Similarly, in countries where industrialization came later, and bearing in mind the deficiencies of statistics, women industrial workers, all sectors combined, played a significant role. Thus in inter-war Russia, they increased from 613,000 to 2,627,000 by 1935, in state-run industries, i.e. 38.3% of the labour force.9 In Shanghai between the wars, the size of the women’s labour force corresponded to the dominance of textiles within the economy, but also to employers’ preference for recruiting women, who were considered more docile and less likely to rebel.10 As a consequence, wars, in particular the First World War, while by no means marking women’s first appearance in the industrial workforce, did encourage their redeployment, thereby promoting greater competition between male and female workers.11

4 Secondly, women’s working careers are characterized by complexity and discontinuity. 12 In Paris between the wars, a certain proportion of women alternated between factory work and the service sector, leaving off work, temporarily or permanently, when they married and/or had children. 40% of these women factory workers had no children, and were often those who had the longest careers.13 The circumstances of employment in certain industrial centres, in some cases strongly marked by cultural traditions, might offer different types of opportunity to women, and thus account for considerable geographical variations. In the Northumberland coalfield in Northern England for example, at the same period, there was less work for women, whereas the rise of the automobile industry in Coventry created work for them in textiles (car upholstery etc.),

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and the same was true in Blackburn, Lancashire.14 Thus it was possible for these women to take pride in their work, and not simply in the fact of being employed, as a current of French labour sociology in the late 1970s tended to argue. In the Rhineland and Westphalia for example, women textile workers, whose numbers rose there between 1882 and 1925, developed both pride in their work and attachment to their activity, as evidenced by their frequent change of employer (Stellenwechsel), in which the reformer Alfred Weber saw an indication of professional interest and identity (Berufsinteresse and Berufsidentität) with a view to promotion in their jobs, an attitude also reflected in the strikes, often unofficial, in which they took part.15

5 It is therefore permissible to suggest a few specificities about women’s industrial work as compared with their male equivalents, despite the wide range in time-scales and geographical distribution.16 In the first place, women factory workers seem to be characterized by their comparative youth, since they started work young, and often had discontinuous careers, as can be seen from studies of Italy in the nineteenth century, and again during the economic miracle;17 of Britain between the wars;18 or of migrant Chinese workers (dagongmei) in the 1990s;19 (although a counter-example can be found in the longer working careers of women factory workers in France after 1968).20 The youth of women workers is also explained by the phenomenon of denial about their work: it is often considered temporary, as in the case of today’s Indonesian women workers in shoe manufacturing,21 or regarded as “pin money” by men who are still locked into the male breadwinner model. (In that respect, the paradigm is the crass remark by Alcide de Gasperi, the Italian Christian Democrat leader, that the wages of women factory workers served primarily to help them buy silk stockings.)22 In the years after the Second World War, the new countries of the socialist bloc encouraged women’s work for ideological reasons and because of a shortage of male labour. But in East Germany, women were confined to lower status sectors, notable for poor working conditions (chemicals in particular) and did not receive equal pay,23 whereas in Poland, the partial de-Stalinization after 1956 was a pretext for the regime to expel women from a certain number of jobs (as miners underground for example) and to reassert a patriarchal regime in factories.24 Thirdly, the situation of women factory workers seems to be characterized by particularly strict forms of supervision. This specificity may be linked to accommodation: there are some similarities between the convent-factories in Lyon in the late nineteenth-century and the dormitories that operated in Taiwan in the 1970s,25 or in Chinese coastal towns twenty years later.26 Women also seem to have been subject to a particularly harsh form of discipline, sometimes actually accompanied by sexual harassment and/or violence: witness the case of the foreman at Siemens in Milan in the 1950s, who struck a woman worker who had complained about the speed of the assembly line.27 As a result, women factory workers found themselves being looked down on: apart from their hypothetically greater docility, they have regularly have been accused of loose sexual morality, whether in Europe or in sub-Saharan Africa today.28 Certain sectors, tobacco for example, were the focus of particular prejudice, whereas the reality is far more complex.29 But with this topic, we are approaching gender relations within the factory and questions of masculinity.

6 In 1998, Françoise Thébaud noted in a historiographical survey that women’s history had moved from “the labour history approach to women’s work” to “the gender of specific trades”.30 Whether applied to men or women workers, the concept of gender was employed in two French doctoral dissertations in 1988, one on the women hosiery workers of Troyes and another on men and women in trimming manufacture

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(passementerie) in Saint-Étienne.31 These detailed studies demonstrated how skills were constructed according to gender: deconstructing the idea that skills were “natural”, they analysed supposed, real or evaluated skills, to show, job by job, sector by sector, how skills were acquired and labelled.

The significance of training, skills and classifications

7 This point of view was explored by Laura Lee Downs in her book Manufacturing Inequality,32 which compares the historical sexual division of labour in two different contexts, France and Britain, during the Great War. She underlines the convergence between the rationalization of the work process [Taylorization] and the discourse of sex difference in the manufacturing order – an unequal and hierarchized order, justified by the so-called “natural” differences between men and women. In France, as in Britain, this system of organizing the work process and the definition of skills lasted beyond the end of the war. So-called feminine qualities – deftness, precision, regularity – were the attributes attached to certain mechanized and assembly-line jobs handled by women, and not entrusted to men, even if they were unskilled.

8 In her 1966 study of women industrial workers, the sociologist Madeleine Guilbert had stressed that so-called “feminine qualities” were exploited by employers, but without any market value being attached to them. The issue of skills has been studied more recently, with reference to the classifications established during the collective bargaining process of the Great War, and the further negotiations during the Popular Front and after the Liberation.33 Catherine Omnès has also looked at the question of female skills, though not always agreeing with Laura Lee Downs. In 1917, she argues, the French state defended female skills by creating the special category of ouvrière professionnelle, ranked somewhere between unskilled/semi-skilled and skilled work. In the Parisian metalworking trades until about 1925, a certain number of women were classed as ouvrières professionnelles. This did not apply in the provinces, where no women were thus classified. In June 1936, the classifications inside companies, agreed by talks between representatives of unions and employers, contributed to the institutionalization of “gendered” tasks, classified as “skilled” for men but often as semi-skilled or unskilled for women, who were labelled manœuvres/ ouvrières spécialisées.

9 A second series of questions centres on the importance of technical training or apprenticeships for girls and boys. Linked to skills acquisition, the question of training, as investigated by Downs, was different in the two countries. While in Britain, training centres for women workers were opened in 1915, thus allowing them to reach at least the level of semi-skill, the French state and employers preferred training women on the job, which confined them to assembly-line production, and which made skill and technological knowhow masculine characteristics. The earliest kind of training offered to girls was in sewing, in workshops supervised by nuns, for example the schools run by the Béates in the Haute-Loire, specializing in lacemaking.34 The first publicly-provided apprenticeships, closely related to this definition of the “natural” qualities of girls entering industrial employment, were created by the Astier law of 1919,35 and led to the CAP [certificat d’aptitude professionnelle = certificate of professional competence] in the garment-making industry.36 In 1965, these apprenticeships still represented 25% of the kinds of occupational training available to girls, despite the decline of the clothing

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sector. This shows how important training and qualifications were in employment and collective bargaining, and enables us to explore the link between training, jobs, and the labour market. Jean Castet’s study of “the gender of paper qualifications” in the case of Lyon between the wars, demonstrates however the scale and variety of male and female skills,. It was concern for the importance of training that led Marguerite Thibert, after her retirement [from the International Labour Office] in 1947 to become a roving ambassador promoting skills training for girls in Asian and South American countries, and later in the newly independent African states. “A figure of international history”, she travelled the world to make ILO norms widely known.37

Working-class masculinities

10 In the same way that labour history helped pioneer women’s history, it was labour history too which, in the 1990s, provided the paradigm for exploring ideas about masculinity. In France, an innovative thesis in sociology devoted to the home life of male industrial workers suggested that masculinity was in crisis, being seriously undermined by the experience of unemployment, which threatened the factory worker both in the workplace and at home.38 The theme of a crisis of masculinity has persisted, notably as a means of explaining the behaviour of young workers when they find themselves competing with young women, in motor manufacture for instance,39 leading to forms of aggressive misogyny,40 but also to a reluctance to settle into marriage, and complicated relations with older generations.41

11 Among historians, following a collective publication about the United States edited by Ava Baron,42 while the question of masculinities has also been considered in relation to wars or economic depression, studies have tended to deconstruct them using four principal approaches. The historicization of masculinity could be approached through analysis of its representations, as Eric Hobsbawm suggested in a pioneering article. In this respect, the standard iconography of the labour movement, concentrating on the muscular proletarian hero, later intensified under Stalinism by the promotion of Stakhanovism, provided an early set of examples.43 Since then, analysis of working class virility has been taken further, leading to some overall syntheses, on twentieth-century France for example, often drawing heavily on works of autobiography.44 Workers’ own accounts of their lives give an insight into masculine experience, private and public, about which sources from the state or from within the labour movement are usually extremely discreet.

12 This deconstruction has also been applied to branches of industry where an all-male workforce, or almost so, predominated: dockers,45 seamen,46 the building trade,47 etc. As might be suspected, concentrating on the most homogenous and masculinized kinds of labour has led to a stress on a macho form of masculinity,48 characterized by the ability to carry out exhausting types of labour49 and by the importance of drink, but also marked by practices on the edge of legality, where the dissociation between workplace and home was greatest, and gendered behaviour the most stereotypical, as in inter-war Liverpool.50 And the male industrial workforce remained the standard norm for a virility which remains to be explored, including forms of male sociability.51

13 But these kinds of masculinity can coexist with less aggressive versions, in particular among political activists, in a certain labour aristocracy, or in sectors where there is a mixed workforce.52 Moreover, reconfigurations of working-class gender norms, as in

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1950s Britain, characterized by changed sexual habits, more frequent mixing of the sexes in the workplace, and the decline of the male breadwinner model, were imperceptibly modifying working-class masculinities, despite the survival of certain misogynist reflexes.53 In Japan, the masculine ideal shaped by the post-war social compromise, the foundations of which were that men should have jobs for life, receive pay by seniority, and be compulsorily enrolled in the workplace union, while the norm for women was staying at home as “good wives and mothers”, was challenged after 1994 by state policies encouraging participation by both men and women.54

14 At the same time, ethnicized representations of particular groups may sometimes block such developments by reinforcing a “virilist” cliché of the working-class world, or on the contrary help to precipitate them. They may certainly lead to distinctions within the working class. In inter-war Canada for instance, Chinese immigrants, who were blocked by miners from entering the mining sector, moved progressively into previously all-women trades such as the shoe, tobacco and garment industry, making it seem as if the men were feminized, or having in some sense diminished masculinity.55 And there is room for research into the way such working-class masculinities are constructed. In this context, an all-male sociability may correspond to employers’ desire to develop an esprit de corps or factory solidarity, strengthened by a social policy coloured by paternalism.56 It is more often the case though, as in Hamilton in Canada, that masculinity conforming to traditional gender norms is constructed starting in school, and furthered by street culture, long before young men enter the world of work, then prolonged by either playing or spectating sports.57 Such approaches may derive, explicitly or not, from the pioneering work of Paul Willis, who studied the socialization of children in England in the 1970s, and found that working- class schoolboys were already constructing oppositional forms of behaviour corresponding to working-class culture, notably by scorning intellectual effort and placing greater store on standing up to their teachers.58

The gender of working-class protest

15 Protest – in the form of labour disputes and demonstrations – is a classic theme in labour studies. Women’s role in protest movements has continued to be a subject of research. On one hand, following Michelle Perrot’s pioneering and exhaustive thesis,59 women’s participation in industrial strikes has been stressed within sectors where women were in the majority, such as textiles in 1890s Britain,60 or in various strike waves in France: during and after the First World War, in the Paris region,61 in the hosiery factories of Troyes,62 and again in the years after 1968. 63 On the other hand, women have also been present in protest movements about the cost of living,64 and as the support system for male strikers, whether in street demonstrations, or by organizing food supplies, as they did in Wales during the great miners’ strike of 1926.65 These forms of female mobilization constitute a double challenge, both to the factory order and to the patriarchal order, as can be seen in the case of women tobacco workers in Lebanon in the later postwar period.66 By mobilizing, women workers were contesting their economic subjection and acting as subjects in their own right, even if they had not yet acquired their formal civil and political rights. At the same time, they were breaking out of their confinement within the domestic sphere and their supposed docility, and challenging gendered norms, being prepared to resort to violence. One

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example is the 1890s strike wave in Australia and New Zealand.67 The hypothesis that strikes may be gendered prompts us to envisage the specificities of a repertoire of actions (the gender of strikers’ songs for example) but also to examine the nature of strikers’ demands. A particularly suggestive example is the case of women workers in Zyrardow in Poland in 1951, in the middle of the Stalinist years: these women mobilized and went on strike to obtain better food and supplies of coal. They thus conformed to a certain gendered image of women as providers for their household, which was one way of limiting repression. But while not hesitating to manhandle strike-breakers, they also held meetings in the factory cloakrooms, a specifically feminine space which the police could not enter.68 Similarly, the trajectory of the old demand of the labour movement “equal pay for equal work”, which was still the watchword in a strike by women workers in the National Armaments Factory in Herstal, Belgium as late as 1966, needs to be probed.69 But we should also, in the interests of symmetry, put the masculinity of strikes on the agenda for social science research, so as to deconstruct what might seem obvious about labour disputes: the use of violence, forms of occupation, the organization of support systems and canteens, the handling of budgets, etc.

A transdisciplinary history

Dialogues between sociologists and historians

16 French historiography on women’s work has been characterized by a constant series of exchanges with sociology. Since the studies carried out by Marguerite Thibert for the ILO during the interwar years,70 many of the theoretical approaches to the history of women workers have been influenced by sociological research, whether Madeleine Guilbert’s studies in the 1960s on women’s feminine attributes and skills,71 Christine Delphy’s work in the 1970s on the value of housework,72 or more recently publications by Margaret Maruani, the editor of the journal Travail, genre et société, and thus a distinction has been established between work and employment.73 Danièle Kergoat, in a pioneering study in 1978, raised the question Ouvriers = Ouvrières [i.e. can the same analysis be applied to male and female workers?] By taking a stance contradictory to the prevailing labour sociology in France, which was centred on the archetypal male factory worker in a industrial firm, she was, with Delphy, one of the first sociologists in France to articulate the theoretical relationship between class and gender, and to consider the condition of women workers alongside that of men.74

17 Beyond these general remarks, a few recent elements have helped promote fresh thinking. Miriam Glucksmann’s book Women on the Line, written in 1978, published in 1982 under a pseudonym, and re-edited since, gave an account of her own experience in autobiographical form.75 This was a survey carried out by an intellectual, who went to work (for political reasons) in a car factory, where piecework and the authoritarian and macho style of discipline enforced there provoked strikes and disputes.76 The author was deeply impressed by the physical exhaustion resulting from assembly-line work and the continuous rhythm of production on an eight-hour shift, doing repetitive tasks in a hot and noisy atmosphere. Her participant-observer position made this sociologist more sensitive than others to the physical conditions of factory labour and its impact on the body. Moreover the women workers earned very low wages (about one-third less than the men) for work considered relatively unskilled and without any

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prospect of promotion or advancement of any kind. As a result, unmarried women were virtually obliged to take on extra work in evenings or weekends.77 Nigel Cole’s film Made in Dagenham depicted other women workers in this London suburb and in particular the women behind the successful strike of sewing machinists at the Ford factory, who fought for better conditions and a more equal wage packet. The re- publication of Women on the Line in 2009 and the distribution of Made in Dagenham in 2010 were symbolic both of the presence of the past in the present, and of a renewed interest in women’s industrial struggles in Britain, the equivalent in French cinema78 being the 1996 film on a similar theme by Hervé Le Roux entitled Reprise [“Back to Work”].

18 In their comments on the studies carried out for INSEE and DARES in France in 1997, two sociologists have reminded us of some of the basic data about women’s factory work:79 while women represent about 20% of industrial workers, almost half of them (43%) are working on an assembly line. The majority of women (60%) are not considered to be skilled, whereas three-quarters of male workers are. And over 100,000 women workers surveyed were forbidden to talk at work, which is in complete contradiction to the legislation introduced in 1982 (the Auroux laws). This figure indicates the constraints on industrial work and the difficulty women workers have had to assert their rights. Moreover, the repetitive and strictly controlled movements required of them, the very prototype of alienating work, makes them vulnerable, as trade unionists long ago pointed out, to many muscular and joint problems, which have been investigated by researchers.80 Male workers, when faced with painful or risky tasks, generally try to overcome their fear. And resistance to pain and fear is accorded high value in the social construction of virility: encouraging gender stereotypes, men do not want to be “softies like girls”. The bringing together of contemporary surveys, notably though participant observers, and the long-term approach has long been a characteristic of Nicolas Hatzfeld’s work: witness his outstanding study covering fifty years history of the bodywork department of the Peugeot-Sochaux automobile factory, 81 an example of the positive effects of inter-disciplinarity.

Contributions by ethnologists and anthropologists

19 Ethnologists and anthropologists have also invited us to explore “the world of blue- collar work”, by tackling a subject which had not until recently attracted much attention from social scientists. Studying the clothes people wear at work was one way of seeing how people view themselves socially in terms of class and gender.

Working clothes

20 Two ethnologist/anthropologists have studied working clothes. Anne Montjaret took as her subject the distinctive French worker’s overalls, the bleu de travail,82 while Dominique Le Tirant looked at the clothes worn by women workers at the pithead in the mining industry.83 For men, a kind of “uniform” had appeared with industrialization: blue canvas overalls (known as bleu(s) de travail) usually worn over their other clothes, in the form of dungarees, overalls, or jacket and trousers. This definition, which looks simple, is complicated by the historicization of the subject. In the first half of the nineteenth century, both peasants and industrial workers in France wore a loose overgarment (blouse) made of coarse cotton or linen, grey or black, and the

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term was used to characterize the group of men who wore it as manual workers. Adolphe Lafont of Lyon is credited with the invention in the late nineteenth century of special blue overalls adapted to each occupation. The bleu de travail helped protect the workers’ body from dirt. The wooden clogs which appear on early photographs of factories, an indication of the workers’ peasant origins, were replaced in the twentieth century by special footwear, for safety reasons. Blue was the colour worn all week, on the street or in work, sometimes replaced by a dark suit on Sundays. Then gradually, blue became the specific colour of factory clothing, and was left in the cloakroom on the way out. The bleu de travail came to represent the condition of industrial workers in general, and was worn as a badge of pride, combined with the cloth cap visible in all workers’ demonstrations from the 1930s to the 1960s. Until the 1960s, the bleu du travail went on being a symbol of working-class virility. It was then gradually abandoned in favour of denim (also blue, but different quality fabric).84 Women too began wearing denim for heavy or dirty work, and it then became a fashion fabric as well. While firms were abandoning the word “worker” or “workman”, and speaking instead of operatives or “production agents”, they might also replace blue with other colours, red and green. 85 “Green which was supposed to encourage our love of work […] had above all to draw a line under the past, wiping blue out of our working-class memory”, wrote Marcel Durand in his autobiographical account of his years working at Peugeot.86 This symbolic clothing, which reflected a specifically masculine culture, is rejected these days by younger workers. But in the imagery surrounding the worker, the bleu de travail remains, according to Anne Monjaret, “the symbol par excellence of the working man”. 87

21 The ethnologist Dominique Le Tirant collected evidence about women who had worked at the pithead from the 1930s to the 1960s. They were often the wives and daughters of miners, and occupied jobs considered inferior, low-paid and undervalued. They were described in pejorative terms, indicating their low status and poor reputation. Their working garments were designed to protect them from coal dust: usually old clothes, with a kerchief or scarf over their hair, or a turban which kept off the dust but was also a symbol of femininity, and heavy shoes, or in summer, espadrilles. Trousers started to be worn in the 1930s, above all to protect the women from harassment by their male workmates.

22 As the wives of miners, they also had to take care of the household and maintain their husband’s bleu de travail, which would be washed and ironed at regular intervals, a task checked by the neighbours’ watchful eyes. In these communities, where gender norms were particularly strictly observed, unpaid housework by married women was the background and condition for their husbands being able to work.

Statues of working women88

23 Anne Monjaret, in another article with an evocative title: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en pierre [“In the shade of girls made of stone: working women in Paris parks”: the title echoes the second volume of Proust’s novel], went in search of three statues representing the midinettes – Parisian seamstresses.89 The ethnologist enquired into the history of these statues and the representations of gender which they embodied over time. The three statues, erected in working-class districts of Paris, illustrated the construction of a bourgeois feminine ideal, fixed in stone. The myth was gradually

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transformed as society changed: workers in fashion houses are no longer the way they were, especially since their numbers have fallen considerably. And if some of them still carry an image of Parisian chic, it is not so much through their own femininity as because of the work they do and their celebrated skills, displayed at haute couture fashion shows. “In the shadow of girls of stone” weaves a socio-cultural history of the women who worked in the fashion trade, as shaped by the bourgeois imagination of the Belle Époque, of which only a few discreet traces remain as examples of “heritage”. These anthropological studies have had an influence on historians, who are rediscovering, by applying it to new subjects on the borderline between the individual and the collective (such as “the works canteen”, the subject of some planned conferences and a journal issue), the kind of historical anthropology which was fashionable in the 1980s. In these exchanges between the different social sciences, we can see being developed gradually if not a shared epistemology, at least some shared fields of research, indicating the possibility of working together. The editorial of the March 2013 number of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, entitled “Usines, ouvriers, militants, intellectuels” [Factories, workers, activists, intellectuals] invited its readers to consider the historical specificities of the subject, such as the “privileged moments” of May-June 1968 in France, or the trade union movement in Brazil which brought Lula to power.90 This issue also stressed that the working class world has changed less than some people have imagined: despite its undeniable numerical decline, the same working conditions persist. Alongside de-industrialization, change has come through the raising of the school-leaving age and longer training periods, and the reduced capacity of this social group to be represented by the various legitimating authorities (parties, unions, the media). It is also among sociologists that studies are being undertaken on the role of women in immigration and migration, French historians having lagged behind somewhat in this respect.91

Gender and migration: a global history

24 In 2004, Rebecca Rogers remarked that French historians were reluctant to use the ethnic categories which would make it possible to write “a European history more alert to its imperial dimension”.92 Ten years later, we can perhaps give a slightly more positive report, with the emergence of some studies of gender and migration within a global history perspective.93 Whereas the history of women migrants has been studied for over thirty years across the Atlantic, French-language research on women’s immigration, through the study of the struggles of migrant women (of which there is often no record)94 has tended to be explored by feminists, rather than emerging from colonial or post-colonial history. The Belgian journal Sextant was one of the earliest to look at migration within Europe.95 In a special number, Monika Mattes considered the immigrant women workers in West Germany between 1955 and 1973: they made up almost a third of all foreign workers (Gastarbeiter) in the FGR at the time. But received ideas linger on, and it is still often claimed that male immigrants came to work in factories in France in the 1970s, while their wives only rejoined them under regulations permitting family reconstitution.96 This is to fly in the face of the history of immigration, of women’s work, and of the respective roles of male and female factory workers. Nevertheless domestic issues and prostitution remain the most studied aspects of women’s migration, whether in the late

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nineteenth century or today. The coming of the consumer society in France in the 1950s and 1960s resulted however in the creation of jobs in industry for women workers, largely from other European countries (Italy, Spain, Portugual and Yugoslavia).97 But most existing descriptions of “immigrant workers” in French industry tend to concentrate on the world of the male worker. The predominant focus on the automobile industry – the Renault factory in Billancourt in south-west Paris for example98 – has tended to obscure other sectors which were not major industrial bastions. This is shown for instance in Sylviane Rosière’s study of a metal-working factory in the Arve valley,99 and in the firms of more modest dimensions where women, particularly immigrant women, were most likely to be found: the food, textile, electronic or chemical industries, where their wide geographical dispersal in smaller units has rendered these jobs far less visible. In the 1970s, within these sectors, the nationalities of the workers were changing, as African and Turkish women arrived on the labour market. But overall industrial employment declined during the same years, and the censuses of the late twentieth century record the predominance of the service sector in the employment of immigrant women.

25 Women migrants are today indeed more numerous among the “new” workers in the tertiary sector, for instance in cleaning firms, as exemplified by the itinerary of a leading union official in Sud-Nettoyage, Faty Mayant, who is a Senegalese mother of a family.100 Most of the leaders of protests against the precarious pay in this sector are young migrants of both sexes.101 The presence of women migrants in these movements indicates the critical nature of the social question in France today, which differs strongly from traditional industrial strike movements, in that it does not appear either as re-run of the class struggle, or as the (utopian) perspective of an international workers movement facing the globalization of trade and migration.102

26 But research into the categories of ethnicity or racialization (even more than on gender) remains very under-developed in French historiography. As early as 2002, Nancy Green invited us to “rethink migration”, providing an example with her comparative history of the garment trade in Paris and New York, which employed Jewish workers of both sexes.103 While we have certainly seen more recent works on gender and migration,104 there was a great deal of leeway to make up, so the move has yet to make a large impact on labour history. We hope that this number of Clio, Femmes, Genre, Histoire, will be able to make a contribution in this respect.

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WILLIS, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labour. Farnborough: Ashgate [Translated into French in 2011 by Bernard Hoepffner as L’École des ouvriers. Comment les enfants d’ouvriers obtiennent des ouvriers. Marseille: Agone.]

ZYLBERBERG-HOCQUART, Marie-Hélène. 2002. L’aiguille, outil du féminin. In L’Engendrement des choses. Des hommes, des femmes et des techniques, ed. Danièle CHABAUD-RICHTER and Delphine GARDEY, 173-190. Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines.

NOTES

1. Perrot 1974 and 1998 (the latter is a collection of previous articles, see esp. the second part); Scott 1974, 1986 and 1991. 2. MacIvor 2001: 178; see also Maruani & Meron 2012. 3. See the article by Mirta Zaida Lobato in this issue. 4. Ortaggi Cammorosano 1999: 141-147. 5. Borderias 2012 and 2013. 6. Dedeoglu 2008: esp. 45-50. 7. Marchand & Thélot 1997: 233-237; Schweitzer 2002. 8. Ortaggi Cammorosano 1999: 112-113. 9. Ilic 1999: 40, 183-185. 10. Roux 1993: 18, 35. 11. Thébaud 1992; Curli 1998; Omnès 2004. 12. Devrieze & Vanhaute 2001. 13. Omnès 1997. 14. Todd 2005b. 15. Canning 2002: esp. 219-237. 16. Vigna 2012. 17. Ortaggo Cammorosano 1999: 125-131. 18. Todd 2005a. 19. Pun 2012. 20. Gallot 2101. 21. Warouw 2008. 22. Di Gianantonio 2006: 208. 23. Kott 2001: 247-250. 24. Fidelis 2010: 203 ff. 25. Kung 1994: 69-75. 26. Pun 2009 and 2012, reviewed in the French edition of this number. 27. Di Gianantonio 2006: 217. 28. Coquery-Vidrovitch 2013: 204-215. 29. Nemec 2006: 170; Cartier & Retière 2008. 30. Thébaud 1998 and 2007 [1998]; Rogers 2004. 31. Both dissertations have been published in abridged form: Chenut 2005 [2010]; Dubesset & Zancarini-Fournel 1993.

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32. Downs 1995 [2002]. 33. Machu 2011 and see her article in this issue. 34. Dubesset & Zancarini-Fournel 1993, part I. 35. Castets 2003: 143-153; Brucy, Maillard & Moreau 2013. 36. Divert 2013: 121-133. 37. Thébaud 2012. 38. Schwartz 1990. 39. Beaud & Pialoux 2002. 40. Eckert 2006: 149-157. 41. Rénahy 2005. 42. Baron 1991. 43. Hobsbawm 1984. 44. Pillon 2001 and 2012. 45. Pigenet 2002. 46. Burton 1999. 47. Hayes 2002. 48. See the article by Xavier Vigna in this issue. 49. Johnston & MacIvor 2004. 50. Ayers 1999. 51. Baron 2006. For an account midway between reportage and fiction describing a factory in Rome in the 1980s, see Pennachi 2013: 70-74. 52. Pigenet 2011. 53. Brooke 2001 and 2006. See also Andrea San Giovanni’s article on Italian masculinity in this issue. 54. Thomann 2005. 55. Frager & Patrias 2005: 44. 56. Fine 1993. 57. Heron 2006. 58. Willis 1977 [2011]. Although the book was not translated into French until much later, its hypotheses were outlined for French readers in an article in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales in 1978. 59. Perrot 1974: 318-330. 60. Blewett 2006. 61. Robert 1995: 128-137. 62. Chenut 2005: 259-274 63. Vigna 2007: 116-122. 64. Stovall 2012. 65. Bruley 2012: esp. 49-52, reviewed in the French edition of this number of Clio. 66. They took part in three strikes in particular, in 1946, 1963 and 1965. See Abisaab 2010, reviewed in the French edition of this number of Clio. 67. Scates 1997. 68. Fidelis 2010: 82-98. 69. Coenen 1991. 70. Thébaud 2012. 71. Guilbert & Isambert-Jamati 1956; Guilbert 1966. 72. Delphy 1970, 1978 and 1998. 73. Maruani & Nicole-Drancourt 1989; Maruani 1998, 2000, and 2001: 43-56. 74. Kergoat 1978, reprinted 2012: reviewed in the French edition of this number of Clio. 75. See the article by Pochic 2013. 76. Glucksmann 1997.

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77. See also the case cited by Pochic 2013: the survey of Indian women workers in a knitwear factory in Leicester, Westwood 1984. 78. See Nicolas Hatzfeld’s article in this number of Clio. 79. Gollac & Volkoff 2002. [INSEE is the French National Institute of Statistics, and DARES the section which produces labour and employment statistics.] 80. Hatzfeld 2009; Bruno et al. 2011. 81. Hatzfeld 2002. 82. Monjaret 2012a. 83. Le Tirant 2001 and 2011. 84. On denim as a fabric for working clothes, see Friedmann 1987. 85. See the review of the book by Fulvia D’Aloisio on Fiat in the French edition of this number of Clio. 86. Durand 2006: 348. 87. Monjaret 2012a: 61. 88. Monjaret 2012b. 89. Zylberberg-Hocquart 2002. 90. Lomba & Mischi 2013. 91. Guerry 2009. 92. Crowston 1998; Rogers 2004: 118-119. 93. Douki & Minard 2007. 94. Lesselier 2006. 95. Morelli & Gubin 2004. 96. Schweitzer 2008. 97. Chaib 2008. See Hervé Le Roux’s film Reprise, 1996, which describes the arrival of these migrant women workers at the Wonder battery factory in Saint-Ouen in the northern suburbs of Paris. 98. Pitti 2006 and 2007. 99. Rosière 2010. 100. Puech 2005. 101. Béroud 2011. 102. Van der Linden 2012. 103. Green 1998 and 2002. 104. Lillo & Rygiel 2007; Rygiel & Lilo 2007; Martini & Rygiel 2009; Guerry 2013.

AUTHORS

XAVIER VIGNA Xavier Vigna teaches contemporary history at the University of Bourgogne (Centre Georges Chevrier) and is a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France. His research on the 1968 period and factory workers sets the French case in a West-European context. Publications include L’Insubordination ouvrière en France dans les années 1968 (2007) and Histoire des ouvriers en France au XXe siècle (2012). [email protected]

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MICHELLE ZANCARINI-FOURNEL Michelle Zancarini-Fournel is emerita professor of contemporary history at the University of Lyon I, and a member of the Rhône-Alpes historical research laboratory. Recent publications include Luttes de femmes: un siècle d’affiches féministes [with Bibia Pavard) (2013); Les Lois Veil: contraception 1974, IVG 1975 [with B. Pavard and Florence Rochefort] (2012); Engagements, rebellions et genre dans les quartiers populaires en Europe (1968-2005) [co-ed. with Sophie Béroud et al.] (2011); La France du temps présent (1945-2005) [with Christian Delacroix] (2010); and Le Moment 1968: une histoire contestée (2008). [email protected]

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Women workers in South America (nineteenth-twentieth centuries)

Mirta Zaida Lobato Translation : Ethan Rundell

EDITOR'S NOTE

Article originally in Spanish, translated from the French by Ethan RUNDELL

I would like to thank Andrea Andujar, Silvana Palermo, Valeria Pita and Cristiana Schettini for their comments.

1 By the end of the nineteenth century, most Latin American nations had been integrated into the international trade system through agricultural, mining or livestock exports and the import of manufactured goods. Urbanization and the expansion of transport (mainly rail) had accelerated. Many new towns sprung up and cities were transformed and beautified by the construction of new buildings, parks and gardens. The demand for labor stimulated significant population movement – from rural zones to urban centers, between the various countries of the region and from the more distant countries of Europe and Asia.

2 The world of work became more complex and specialized. The notion of freedom of contract was extended, even though today it would be a matter of debate. Freedom of movement and the modernization of transportation allowed a vast labor market to develop. Wage labor prevailed, even if situations of constraint and forms of non-wage remuneration persisted up till the early twentieth-century. Many activities were developed to satisfy consumer demands. In the factories and workshops of the largest Latin American cities, workers (men and women, children and adults, the native-born and foreigners, aboriginals, mestizos, black and white) produced goods for domestic consumption and export. In addition to gender issues, ethnic and racial conflicts accompanied the transition from slave labor to free labor and the migration phenomena.

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3 This article centers on the experience of female workers in factories and workshops between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. These social and professional spaces were characterized by their heterogeneity and the instability provoked by cycles in importation and production, and by the demand fluctuations characteristic of periods marked by economic and political crisis. My aim here is to consider various situations and problems under certain issues, such as the industrial labor force participation rate for women, some prominent aspects of factory discipline and the tense relationship between work and virtue. At the same time, I locate my discussion in the context of a historiography that has developed in South America over the last quarter of the twentieth century: despite some points of divergence, there are numerous points of agreement.

The female proletariat

4 In 1906, the Chilean anarchist journal, El Alba, noted: 1 The proletariat is not only made up of the mason, the blacksmith, the mechanic, the carpenter, etc., who are the only ones we acknowledge; it is necessary to speak and act on behalf of women workers - the mothers, partners, sisters and daughters of those masons, blacksmiths, mechanics and carpenters - who are forced by their “comfortable living conditions”2 to invade factories and workshops and to comb the streets of OUR CITY heading for the job-registry and shop that wants to rent their labour at the price fixed by the fief. Hunger demands adaptation!

5 Women’s labor, stimulated by the insufficiency of male salaries, was a typical and recurrent subject of the workers’ press, whether anarchist, socialist, trade unionist or communist, depending on the period.3 The above quotation above shows that the proletariat did not only consist of men and that it was necessary to act (organize) and speak out (protest) on behalf of women. Yet the notion of an exclusively male proletariat long persisted, even in the historiography of the world of work.

6 In nearly all countries, including those of Europe, labor history, whether written by labor movement activists or professional historians, has primarily sought to respond to the following questions: who were the workers? What kind of work where they doing? And, above all: what kind of organizations did they create? Which were their dominant ideologies and which were the means of protest taken by them? The answers to these questions have focused on male industrial workers, with women being absorbed into the masculine experience of work. As I have noted elsewhere, this way of writing history was part of a broader, worldwide movement tied to the emergence and appeal of a structure of thought (Marxism) in which industry and its workers were assigned a central role.4 While the research that renewed social history in the 1960s stimulated many discussions, it did not succeed in integrating women workers into history. It was only in the late 1980s that, despite their differences, feminist historians were able to make progress in the discussions that crystalized into what became known as women’s history and gender studies. Whatever the starting point (feminists, women, gender), it was a genuine challenge to seek new sources, re-read old ones and reformulate questions and theories in social history.

7 It is no easy task to briefly review the complex, heterogenous and heterodox transformations of labor history. It is clear, however, that when women finally made their appearance there, it was in the context of a literature long characterized by

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androcentrism. For Latin American scholars, the Marxist-inspired notion of social class appeared as ethno and Eurocentric well before more recent debates on women workers. Research on South America showed that labor histories often omitted national, racial, ethnic and gender differences and particularities.

8 Moreover, studying the world of work was not a central preoccupation of academic history. In Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, it was only in the aftermath of the dictatorships of the second half of the twentieth-century that labor history was developed in the academic world. At the same time, a number of historians, most of whom were women, began to rethink historical processes in order to incorporate women, to re-read the sources in the light of the questions raised by feminist debates as well as by the problems, themes and methodologies of social history, and to reconsider several historical periods through the light of changing and enduring configurations of gender relations.

9 Several sources favored by economists and sociologists, such as censuses, have been revisited under this perspective. As the above quotation from the anarchist journal El Alba clearly shows, women had invaded the streets, factories and workshops in search for work. But it was difficult to quantify this phenomenon. Sociologists, demographers and women historians questioned the criteria of measurement used by censuses, which minimized women’s participation in paid employment outside home. The systematic elaboration of what are considered modern statistics appeared along with the development of nation states. The need for knowledge regarding the nation’s territory and population – its rate of economic activity, production, education and institutions – encouraged the centralized development of statistical tools characterized by universality, simultaneity and the individualization of social, economic and cultural actors. Statistics – in particular, national censuses – consolidated the national imaginary in Europe and America alike. In Argentina, several authors have claimed that statistics helped establish the notions of people and nation via two mechanisms: each country’s collective self-identification, and differentiation and comparison with other states.5 But the statistical apparatus had other consequences as well: it identified concrete individuals, the bearers of certain distinct characteristics based, not only on the usual criteria (age, urban/rural residence, national/foreign origin), but also on differences of sex.

10 Diego de la Fuente, director of Argentina’s first national census (1869), believed that statesmen should take decisions on the basis of reliable information: “For those who know how to interpret them, statistics reveal organic conditions – physical, moral, social and political – that are rich in lessons for the government of peoples.”6 From this mass of data which he believed to be important for any statesman’s action, the chapter “Women’s occupations” stands out. It shows not only that women carried out many tasks, but also that the “female working class” was a voice that had been excluded from the construction of citizenship – a fundamental theme of recent studies of political history.

11 The introduction to that census mentions that woman had “neither the vote nor any place for making known her needs and sufferings”: it would have been difficult to more clearly describe the marginalization of women relative to political decision-making or the impediments they faced in publicly expressing their problems. The text also underscores the moral character attributed to women’s labor: when women found themselves in need, work served to protect their “innocence”.7 Working outside home

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was not yet being denounced for standing in the way of the reproductive function, as it would be the case in the early twentieth century. All of these themes – exclusion, the need to work, the tension between work and virtue – were at the time seen as the keys to explaining the characteristics of female labor.

12 In the mid-nineteenth century, statistical reporting and the press in general justified the large scale employment of women by making reference to the lack of “regular means of subsistence” and “effective assistance”, themselves the consequences of political conflict and internal war.

13 Argentina’s 1895 census introduced the theme of women’s fertility, above all in marriage, since it characterized women who looked after their “home” as being “of no occupation”. However, by excluding from the census reproductive or paid female labor in the home [i.e. outworking] and privileging moral arguments concerning the primacy of married life, the statistics reinforced the idea that the main function of women was to look after their husbands and families, while husbands were to provide for the needs of the family and participate in political and labor union structures. These criteria were not again discussed until the mid-1960s, and it would take many more years of feminist debate before the tools of statistical measurement were finally modified at the end of the twentieth century. The introduction to the 1895 census noted that the woman has been deprived of her “own means of subsistence” because she had to “place herself under the protection of man”. This fact found statistical expression in a falling rate of female participation in the economy. Elsewhere, as in Chile, two factors explain this drop: economic crisis and statistical under-representation.8 The issue of under- estimation complicates analysis and obliges scholars to seek out additional sources. But even biased data show that women played an important role in industry, that they were concentrated in certain sectors of manufacturing and services (food, textiles, clothing), especially in large firms, and that they dominated the market for outworking done at home. Statistics also demonstrate the significant place they occupied in the domains of health care and education. Argentine, Uruguayan and Chilean censuses between 1854 and 1960 show that women made up over 20 per cent of the industrial workforce, even in periods when women’s work was less than assiduously recorded. If we add to this outworking and housework, female labor begins to assume major quantitative proportions.

14 What’s more, even when one takes the bias of under-representation into account, a careful analysis of the censuses shows that in 1895, the Argentine garment, hair product and beauty industry employed the most women (34 per cent), followed by the chemical products field (21.6 per cent). In the food and printing industries, meanwhile, respectively 12.6 and 11.1 per cent of employees were women. In 1914, the majority of those hired by the textile and garment industries were women (61 per cent of contracts). Many women also worked in the food industry (14.6 per cent). In 1935, the situation was more diversified, with women working, not only in textiles, but also in paper, cardboard, rubber, food and leather. And the 1947 census presents a really complex picture, subdividing certain activities and distinguishing between manual workers and white collar employees, men and women.

15 One might carry out similar analyses for other South American countries. In the Colombian city of Medellin, women worked in cigarette and cigar, textile, food and drink factories, while in the factories of the Colombian town of Antioquia, 68 per cent of employees were women. In Ecuador, the workshops of Guayaquil and the textile

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factories of Atuntaqui, Riobamba and Quito also employed many women. In Mexico, large numbers of women were already employed in the textile and clothing industries from the early decades of the twentieth century, even if the best-known example there is the intensive manual labor performed by women in the 1960s and 70s, manufacturing electronic and electric devices, clothing and so on for General Electric, RCA, NCR, Texas Instruments and General Motors, etc. In Brazil, 33.7 per cent of the industrial labor force consisted of women in 1920, with the figure at 51 per cent in textiles, 40 per cent in clothing and 31 per cent in the chemical sector.9 At the beginning of the twentieth century, 50 per cent of workers in São Paulo’s textile industry were women. As Ferraz Petersen has further pointed out, a careful examination of the Brazilian world of work beyond the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis would reveal a more complex picture.10

16 The world of female factory labor in South America thus reflects several convergent processes. On the one hand, the integration of raw materials economies into the global market and the expansion of the import-export trade gave rise to a growing demand for goods produced in urban workshops and factories by a male and female labor force. On the other hand, internal and international migration created a flexible labor pool that included women, as recent examinations of the phenomenon have shown. While women were significantly represented in urban, rural, homeworking and household labor, many were also employed in factories and workshops. As María del Carmen Feijoo long ago underscored, merely locating the places where women worked is not enough; one must also account for the particularities of their professional experience.11

The factory: a “substitute for the abandoned home”

17 The construction of “factory towns”, worker towns and lodgings, or “company towns” offers a common thread for the analysis of women’s employment in many Latin American countries. In Uruguay and Argentina, several businesses established their companies on both sides of the Rio de la Plata. The entrepreneurs Salvo and Campomar numbered many women among their employees. After forming Campomar and Soulas Ltd. in 1929, they established manufacturing operations in both Juan Lacaze and Buenos Aires. The Argentina-based Steverlynk group had subsidiaries in Uruguay and the Belgian Congo.12 In 1932, the group set up a factory in a neighborhood of Montevideo as well as the Flandria mill in the Argentine town of Jáuregui. Both of them employed many women. In Brazil, 33 per cent of the workers in the Cruzeiro factory were women.13 This figure was not much different from that for New England’s Lowell and Amoskeag factories or companies in Europe.

18 “Social paternalism” governed the work of men and women alike. It consisted in the establishment of programs to promote employee well-being, such as the construction of houses, schools, clubs and churches. Most women working in companies practicing this form of social paternalism were young and had been educated according to a model that placed family and children at the center of their lives. While it is true that this social model was widespread, paternalist bosses insisted on motherhood and the family as moral forces for individual improvement. In the factories of the Steverlynk group, for example, speeches and publications extolled motherhood, religious education and sacrifice as fundamental aspects of women’s lives.14

19 In many companies, social Catholicism, based on a search for harmony and balance in business and society, was embodied in the daily practices of executives, deputies and

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directors (though with some nuances). This is why, though tensions are apparent at various historical moments, sometimes as a result of national political events, conflict was generally defused. In the textile factories of Medellin, efforts to control the working-class family by controlling women found particular expression in employer surveillance of workers.15 Companies made chastity a condition of employment, and each year a “factory queen” was elected. In Argentina and Brazil, beauty queens were also elected but the meaning assigned to them was different. For many entrepreneurs, like those of Medellin, the election helped enforce moral principles while also showing that work did not threaten the natural order of the patriarchal family: women were to be chaste and feminine, and the queens were expected to be virgins. Farnsworth Alvear has shown the complexity of female labor and the ways in which women could negotiate (or not) with the rigid discipline of the factory. Cases of unchaste queens and dismissal as a result of concealed pregnancies show that women did violate the norms, thus limiting the control exercised by employers. These offenses were related not only to excessively long working hours, employer abuses and wage discrepancies, but also to the tensions and contradictions between the sexual ideology of the workplace and the daily practices of workers and employers.

20 Sometimes this paternalism was limited to factories and hardly extended to the community, as in the case of the Patent Knitting Company’s textile factory in the Argentine town of Berisso. The factory manufactured fabric and thread for the hosiery trade as well as the cloth in which exported meat was wrapped. The mill maintained a direct relationship with its employees, most of whom were single, unmarried women. While there was a personal and direct relationship with the management, with some attention given to the problems raised by women workers, and cooperation in resolving personal difficulties, there was no construction of houses, schools, clubs or churches, as in some other companies.

21 Most often, female labor in workshops and factories was not governed by company paternalism. The food industry is an interesting case in this respect. Cake, pasta, candy and drinks factories and, above all, large meat-exporting companies (particularly in Argentina and Uruguay) employed a large female labor force. From the point of view of the women workers employed in the Swift and Armour refrigeration plants in Berisso, the beef industry perfectly embodied the relationship between the concentration of capital and the concentration of women.16 Between 1870 and 1930, the production and export of meat along the banks of the Rio de la Plata had grown so much that it had become the leading export industry. Thousands of workers of all ages – male and female, Argentine and foreign – were employed at the Berisso factories. The majority were Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian or Spanish. Cycles of employment and unemployment converted these businesses into great revolving doors through which workers entered and exited in time with the rhythm of production. This fact affected the labor union organization as well as the life of workers’ families. A woman could take on or quit a factory job depending on the needs of her family. Often, she could combine domestic outworking with factory labor or even keep a shop while working shifts in the refrigeration industry.

22 In the early twentieth century, male and female factory labor had much in common: long working hours, a lack of protection or social benefits and the slow and gradual establishment of protective legislation for all workers. But there were also major differences. On the one hand, laws seeking to preserve the “health of the race”

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protected working mothers, well before labor law became a reality for all workers. On the other hand, women found themselves in the predetermined tasks and occupations considered appropriate to their sex. Often, these were unskilled in nature, though the criteria upon which the notions of skilled and unskilled labor are based are subject to debate. Depending on the activity, moreover, certain specificities must be underscored. In the meat and food industry, women were incorporated into the more general population of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, whereas, in the printing industry, their employment in the workshops was the result of a process of mechanization.17 No matter the job, women were paid less than men. An examination of the trajectories of women workers as recorded by some businesses shows that women rarely reached the most highly skilled positions. The apparently neutral terms “operator”, “practical operator”, “semi-skilled” and “skilled” in fact possessed a gendered content, for differentials were maintained at all levels.18 In this sense, it can be claimed that, although the dates and forms varied on the Latin American scene, the consolidation of trade unions strengthened gender inequality by writing it into collective agreements.

23 Nevertheless, gender-based economic inequality is not specific to Latin America; it is also to be found in the United States, Canada and European countries. Certain prejudices have also affected pay levels. The most significant and lasting of these presents maternity as a woman’s vocation; her labor is seen as fundamentally temporary and, as such, subordinate and complimentary to that of men. The idea of women’s labor as a “substitute for the abandoned home” was advanced by labor union organizations as well as by doctors, lawyers and politicians.

24 As I have already noted, some factories and workshops established rigid moral codes, which were sometimes contested or used in personal interests. In the 1920s and 1930s, factory work was expanded in many countries and new cultural practices emerged, such as spread of practices associated with the promotion of health and the body. In keeping with the ideal of the harmonious body, several companies created women’s teams (basketball and swimming). The image of the beautiful and harmonious body entered into competition with that of the poor working woman, skinny and unattractive.19 Indeed, a 1948 Argentine labor conflict turned precisely on the idea of feminine grace and beauty. A court case brought on behalf of a female worker sought compensation on the grounds that “a magnificent young single woman suddenly found herself aesthetically uglified, her social success abruptly turning to failure”. A workplace accident had destroyed her beautiful figure (she had previously been seen as desirable to men) and thus, it was claimed, had blocked her chances of marriage and motherhood.”20

25 In the same period, “Queens of Labor” began to be elected on the First of May under the presidencies of Juan Domingo Perón. Among other things, it should be noted that these elections, which regularly took place from 1948 to 1955, challenged the traditional opposition between work and beauty. Since Peronism was an Argentine phenomenon, it cannot be said whether this practice was extended to other Latin American countries or not. The literature only mentions one Chilean Queen of Labor being present in a procession in Buenos Aires in 1951. Like the factory queens studied by Farnsworth, the phenomenon of labor queens provides evidence that, as with the factitious opposition between work and virtue, work and beauty were not necessarily opposed.

*

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26 Since the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, many Latin American women have engaged in factory work. In the present article, I have examined some situations that may help supply a general framework for studying the population of female factory workers. In the end, my analysis has revealed a situation that is very similar to that found in many European countries: the difficulty of measuring the extent of female labor, spatial segregation, pay disparity vis-à-vis male workers, reinforcement of the notions of subordination and complementarity, and tensions between virtue and work, as also between beauty and work. Here, too, we encounter rigid moral codes that are at once accepted and contested.

27 If female labor in Latin America is now recognized as an object of historical study, it is due to the research by many women historians. By lifting the veil covering female labor and examining its social and political implications, classic studies in labor history have been profoundly transformed. Despite significant and innovative research, however, much remains unknown: a number of historical periods have yet to be explored and many questions remain to be answered.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALTERMAN BLAY, Eva. 1978. Trabalho domesticado: A mulher na indústria paulista. Sâo Paulo: Editora Atica.

ARANGO GAVIRIA, Gabriela. 2006. Trabajadoras en campos y ciudades: Colombia y Ecuador. In Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina, vol. IV, Del siglo XX a los umbrales del siglo XXI, ed. Isabel MORANT, Guadalupe GOMEZ-FERRER, Gabriela CANO, Dora BARRANCOS, and Asunción LAVRIN, 819-844. Madrid: Cátedra.

BADOZA, Silvia. 1994. El ingreso de la mano de obra femenina y los trabajadores calificados en la industria gráfica. In La Mitad del país. La mujer en la sociedad argentina, ed. Lidia KNECHER and Marta PANAIA, 31-49. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina.

CEVA, Mariela. 2010. Los immigrantes y la construcción del espacio laboral en Argentina. Dos estudios de caso (Fabrica Argentina de Alpargatas y Algodonera Flandria, 1884-1960). Mimeograph.

COOPER, Jennifer, Teresita DE BARBIERI, Teresa RENDON, Estela y TUÑON SUAREZ , and Esperanza COMPILADORAS.1989. Fuerza de trabajo femenina urbana en México. Mexico City: UNAM-Grupo editorial Porrua.

FARNSWORTH ALVEAR, Ann. 1995. Virginidad ortodoxa/recuersos heterodoxos: hacia una historia oral de la disciplina industrial y de la sexualidad en Medellín, Colombia. Entrepsados V: 63-84.

FARNSWORTH ALVEAR, Ann. 2000. Dulcinea in the factory; myths, moral, men and women in Colombia´s industrial experiment, 1905-1960. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

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FEIJOO, María del Carmen. 1990. Las trabajadoras porteñas a comienzo del siglo. In Mundo urbano y cultura popular. Estudios de Historia social Argentina, ed. Diego ARMUS, 281-312. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana.

FERNANDEZ ACEVES, María Teresa. 2006. El trabajo femenino en México. In Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina, vol. IV, Del siglo XX a los umbrales del siglo XXI, ed. Isabel MORANT, Guadalupe GOMEZ-FERRER, Gabriela CANO, Dora BARRANCOS and Asunción LAVRIN, 845-860. Madrid: Cátedra.

FERRAZ PETERSEN, Silvia Regina. 2009. Levantamento de producâo bibliográfica e de outros resultados de investigaçao sobre a histórica operária e o trabalho urbano fora do eixo Rio-Sao Paulo. Cadernos Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth 14(26): 258-263.

GONZALEZ BOLLO, Hernán. 2004. La cuestión obrera en números: la estadística socio-laboral argentina y su impacto en la política y la sociedad, 1895-1943. In El Mosaico argentino. Modelos y representaciones del espacio y de la población siglo XIX-XX, ed. Hernan OTERO, 29-31. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno de Argentina Editores.

HAREVEN, Tamara, and Randolph LANGENBACH. 1978. Amoskeag: life and work in an American factory- city. New York: Pantheon Books.

HUTCHISON, Elizabeth. 2001. Labors appropriate to their sex: gender, labor and politics in urban Chile 1900-1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press [Translated into Spanish in 2006 as Labores propias de su sexo. Género, políticas y trabajo en Chile urbano 1900-1930. Chile: Lom.]

HUTCHISON, Elizabeth. 2009. La historia detrás de las cifras: la evolución del censo chileno y la representación del trabajo femenino, 1895-1930. Historia 33. Santiago [http://www.scielo.cl/ scielo.php?pid=S0717-71942000003300009&script=sci_arttext]

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 1990. Mujeres en la fábrica. El caso de las obreras del frigorífico Armour, 1915-1969. Anuario Instituto de Estudios Histórico-Sociales 5: 95-116. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 1995. La mujer trabajadora en el siglo XX: un estudio de las industrias de la carne y textil en Berisso, Argentina. In Mujer, trabajo y ciudadanía, 13-71. Buenos Aires: Consejo latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2000. Lenguaje laboral y de género en el trabajo industrial. In Historia de las mujeres en la Argentina. Siglo XX, ed. Fernanda GIL LOZANO, Valeria Silvina PITA and Maria Gabriela INI, 95-116. Argentina: Taurus.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2001. La Vida en las fábricas. Trabajo, protesta y política en una comunidad obrera, Berisso, 1904-1970. Buenos Aires: Prometeo libros / Entrepasados.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2005. Esto no era una competencia de belleza. Las voces de las reinas del trabajo bajo el peronismo. Voces Recabradas 7(20).

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2006. El trabajo de las mujeres en Argentina y Uruguay. In Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina, vol. IV, Del siglo XX a los umbrales del siglo XXI, ed. Isabel MORANT, Guadalupe GOMEZ-FERRER, Gabriela CANO, Dora BARRANCOS and Asunción LAVRIN, 801-818. Madrid: Cátedra.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2007. Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina (1869-1960). Buenos Aires: Edhasa.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2008. Trabajo, cultura y poder: dilemas historiográficos y estudios de género en la Argentina. Estudios de Filosofía Práctica e Historia de las Ideas, Revista anual de la Unidad de

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Historiografía e Historia de las Ideas 9(10): 29-46. Mendoza: Instituto de Ciensas humanas, Sociales y Ambientales.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida. 2009. La Prensa obrera. Buenos Aires y Montevideo, 1890-1958. Buenos Aires: Edhasa.

LOBATO, Mirta Zaida, and Juan SURIANO. 1993. Trabajadores y movimiento obrero: entre la crisis de los paradigmas y la profesionalización del historiador. Entrepasados, Revista de Historia 4/5: 41-64.

OTERO, Hernán, and Guillermo VELAZQUEZ. 1997. Poblaciones argentinas. Estudios de demografía diferencial. PROPIEP: Instituto de estudios histórico-sociales-CIG.

PENA MARIAN, Valéria Junho. 1981. Mulheres trabalhadoras. Presença feminina na constituçcao do sistema fabril. Río de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.

RAGO, Margareth. 1997. Trabalho feminino e sexualidade. In História das mulheres no Brasil, ed. Mary DEL PRIORE, 578-606. Brazil: Editora contexto-UNESP.

RECCHINI DE LATTES, Zulma, and Catalina WAINERMAN. 1979. Empleo femenino y desarrollo económico: algunas evidencias. Cuadernos del Centre de Estudios de Población 6: 1-45.

ROCCHI, Fernando. 2000. Concentración de capital, concentración de mujeres. Industria y trabajo femenino en Buenos Aires, 1890-1930. In Historia de las mujeres en la Argentina. Siglo XX, ed. Fernanda GIL LOZANO, Valeria Silvina PITA and Maria Gabriela INI, 223-244. Argentina: Taurus.

SAPRIZA, Gabriela. 1993. Los Caminos de la ilusión. 1913. Huelga de mujeres en Juan Lacaze. Uruguay: Editorial Fin de Siglo.

SAPRIZA, Gabriela. 2004. Apuntes para un estudio del paternalismo industrial. Modelo de vida para la construcción de la familia “obrero-burguesa”. In Historia y memoria del mundo del trabajo, ed. Rodolfo PORRINI, 43-64. Uruguay: Universidad de la República, Facultad de Humanides y Ciencias de la Educación.

VON DER WEID, Elisabeth, and Ana María RODRIGUES BASTOS. 1986. O Fio da meada. Estratégia de expansâo de uma industria textil. Río de Janeiro: FCRB-CNI.

WEINSTEIN, Barbara. 1996. For Social Peace in Brazil: industrialists and the remaking of the working class in Sâo Paulo, 1920-1964. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.

NOTES

1. Cited in Hutchison 2001: 36 (italics in the text). 2. In the original text the term “holgura” is used, ironically, to refer to the lack of adequate living conditions of this sector. 3. Lobato 2009. 4. Lobato 2008. 5. Otero & Velázquez 1997: 125; González Bollo 2004. 6. Censo Nacional, vol. 1, 1895: CXLIL. 7. Ibid.: XLVIL. 8. Hutchison 2006. 9. Pena 1981. 10. Ferraz Petersen 2009. 11. Feijoo 1990. 12. Ceva 2010.

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13. Von der Weid & Rodrigues Bastos 1986: 231. 14. Ceva 2010. 15. Farnsworth Alvear 2000. 16. Lobato 1995 and 2000; Rocchi 2000. 17. Badoza 1994. 18. Lobato 2000. 19. Lobato 2005 and 2007. 20. Lobato 2000.

AUTHORS

MIRTA ZAIDA LOBATO Mirta Zaida Lobato is professor of contemporary history in the Faulty of Philosophy and Literature in the University of Buenos Aires. Recent publications include La Vida en las fabricas: trabajo, protesta y politica en una comunidad, Berisso (1904-1970) (2001, re-ed. 2004); Historia de las trabajadoras en la Argentina 1869-1960 (2007); La Prensa Obrera (2009), and she co-authored Atlas Historica de la Argentina (2002) and La Protesta social en la Argentina (2003). [email protected]

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Documents

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Women as “wool-workers” and “sex-workers” in Athens (fourth century BCE)

Des « ouvrières » de la laine et du sexe à Athènes (IVe siècle avant J.-C.)

Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet Translation : John Dillon

1 The building of which the plan is given below, is located at the northwestern end of the urban area of Athens, in a corner of the city walls first built in 478 BCE. Situated near the Dipylon Gate and the Sacred Gate, just within the internal boundaries of the city, it lies in what ancient authors call the Kerameikos district, a neighborhood on the periphery where pottery workshops grew up on both sides of the walls (the classical necropolis being situated outside them). Excavations conducted by Greek archeologists beginning in the 1870s, and since 1975 by a German team led by Ursula Knigge, allow us to retrace the history of the building, today identified as Building Z, and interpreted simultaneously as a textile factory and a brothel.1

2 The first building (Z1), dating from the years 440-430, was destroyed in an earthquake about ten years after it was built. It was succeeded by a second building (Z2) which, this time, did not survive the destruction of the city walls by the Spartans, after their victory over the Athenians in 404 BCE. In the aftermath of that defeat, workshops and shops very gradually revived their business, especially from the middle of the fourth century, south of the Sacred Way, the principal axis of Athens that passes through the walls at precisely the spot that interests us here. This was the context in which the building (Z3) was rebuilt and would remain in use down to the end of the fourth century when an earthquake completely destroyed it.

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Figure 1. Map of the location of Building Z3 at the edge of the city walls of Athens (from Ursula Knigge, The Athenian Kerameikos [1991], 9).

Figure 2. Plan of Building Z3 (based on the maps prepared by Ursula Knigge, The Athenian Kerameikos [1991], 89, fig. 80c).

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3 According to Ursula Knigge, Building Z3 covered a vast surface area of 500 m2 and consisted of a single storey. The sloping tiled roof channeled rainwater into three large, subterranean cisterns that were connected to one another by an underground network. The main entrance was from the northeast and opened onto a large courtyard furnished with a well. Most of the rooms were arranged along the western side of the large courtyard, and coated with red stucco – the floor of the largest one (to the north) being decorated with colored mosaics. A second entrance, at the southeast, opened onto a smaller courtyard and group of smaller sized rooms – one of which had a decorated floor.

4 Several hundred drinking and eating vessels were found in situ. A considerable number of loom weights (Fig. 4) was also discovered in every room. Lastly, goddess statuettes and depictions on amulets suggest a predominantly erotic and feminine register. The medal illustrated here, a little over 8 cm in diameter, is the most beautiful and famous example: we see a female figure, generally identified as Aphrodite, seated sidesaddle on a goat crossing the starry night sky. Phosphoros, the morning star, holds a light and precedes the mounted figure, while a vertical ladder separates them. An Eros and a dove (?) follow the movement of the goat toward the left of the medal (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Medal discovered in room K (from Ursula Knigge, The Athenian Kerameikos [1991]: pl. 127, no. 794).

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Figure 4. Loom weights discovered in room P (from Ursula Knigge, The Athenian Kerameikos [1991]: pl. 130, no. 815-816).

5 The archeological finds made it possible to determine the building’s function. The high number of loom weights, often in pyramidal shape (as illustrated here) essentially demonstrates the existence of a weaving workshop in each room. This fact, taken into consideration with the presence of cisterns and close proximity to a waterway, the Eridanos, is sufficient evidence for the archeologists to assert that it was a textile factory. In light of its size and the importance of wool-working, the building appears to have been much more than a simple dwelling. The Attic orators of the same period inform us of the existence of shield, knife, and furniture factories that employed between 20 and 120 workers each. Yet not a single textile factory is documented in the texts. We should thus stress the importance of the supplemental information furnished by archeology: the workshops for producing ceramics, very prevalent throughout this zone, are similarly attested primarily by the excavations conducted on site.2

6 Who worked in these workshops? Although the literary tradition stresses the virtues of the citizen’s wife, quietly working at her loom like Penelope, other sources indicate that textile production was not undertaken exclusively in the domestic setting of citizens’ homes: comic authors and inscriptions from the fourth century mention female dyers, weavers, linen workers and even seamstresses, the majority of whom are today interpreted as having been slaves.

7 The number of slaves in Athens, a much discussed question, greatly exceeded that of free persons and particularly citizens, on a scale of four to eight slaves to every citizen. In everyday life, an individual’s freedom, transmitted by legitimate descent, was expressed in their individual autonomy, in the fact that they did not depend on anyone, even if ties of personal interdependence were considered normal in the context of kinship networks. Many free individuals, men and women, thus could have occupations

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that could be described as professional: selling products from their estate or trade, hiring out their labor for a day or month on a construction site, or even renting their bodies for a limited time (as in the case of hetairoi/ai, banquet companions). Such work indicates the economic dependence of those who had to make a living in this way, but insofar as the tie to their employer took the form of a “fixed-term contract”, it respected the ideal of individual freedom and did not undermine a free person’s status. Slave labor, in contrast, was characterized by service for only one employer (the master or boss to whom the master rented out his slave), by the monotony of repetitive work performed at one location, and by the lack of any future prospects. Only manumission could release a slave from this work imposed “indefinitely.”3 In the case of the Kerameikos building, the systematic character of the textile work found in each of the rooms, which probably functioned both as dwellings and workshops, is a factor that scholars believe argues for slave labor.

8 Wool-working was generally considered women’s work in Antiquity. That does not necessarily mean that only women were obliged to perform it. The term for wool- workers, talasiourgoi, could grammatically be applied to either sex. That said, though, the term appears frequently in inscriptions documenting the dedication of bowls, phialai exeleutherikai, which attest to about 375 slave manumissions in Athens in the last twenty years of the fourth century, and is always used to designate women. These inscriptions mention the price paid for manumission – a silver cup worth 100 drachmas – and sometimes give the name and occupation of the person manumitted. Of the 63 women mentioned with their occupation, 51, or 81% per cent, are designated as talasiourgoi. A man is never associated with this activity.4 It is therefore probable that the workforce of a textile-making business consisted primarily of female workers, and in light of what has been outlined above, female slaves.

9 The banquet terracottas discovered in situ and the decorated floors suggest communal meals, which leads Ursula Knigge to infer that the building also functioned as a tavern – or inn. The building was probably open to all who, in this quarter of diverse activities (shops, dwellings, necropolis) located at the intersection of important thoroughfares, had some money to spend on entertainment where social interaction mattered.

10 Moreover, the female statuettes found at the site, especially the medal described above, led the same archeologist to propose a hypothesis that is often repeated by historians today, that the building also functioned as a place of prostitution, a porneion.5 In fourth- century Athens, without going so far as to imagine a cult specifically for prostitutes, the goddess Aphrodite is frequently invoked in the dedicatory offerings of sex-workers. According to an ancient, albeit doubtful, tradition, a sanctuary to Aphrodite Pandemos was built at the foot of the Acropolis from income derived from public prostitution established in the city by one of Solon’s reforms (see the ancient references quoted by Athanaeus in his Deipnosophistae 13.569d-e). Fragments of fourth-century comic authors, moreover, also cited by Athenaeus, mention these public brothels, where the girls were shown half-naked to clients. The term porneion, the place of the activity of pornai (pornē in the singular, from the verb pernēmi, to sell) occupies the same semantic field as ergastērion, which means “factory, workshop”, thus showing that prostitution was regarded primarily as a form of work.6 While of course not all female slaves were engaged in sex work, all pornai were slaves. Placed under the authority of a brothel- keeper, the pornoboskos, who could be male or female, they were made available to their clients on site or rented out.

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11 Epigrams from the Hellenistic period betray a desire on the part of many female wool- workers – slaves or otherwise – to become prostitutes. Such work would enable them, they claim, to make enough money – or relationships – to escape their miserable state: Bitto dedicated to Athena her industrious loom shuttle, the tool of her paltry trade, a woman disgusted with the toils of spinners and the wretched cares of weavers; she said to the goddess, “I will take up the works of Cypris (Aphrodite), having cast Paris’ vote against you.”7

12 If wool work brought nothing but misery, did sex work enable one to combine the profit and pleasure? That is what one worker, Nikarete, argues, if we believe an epigram attributed to a certain Nikarchos: Nikarete, who once served Athena’s shuttles and worked many a warp on the loom, has thrown her basket, bobbins, and all her tools on the fire for Cypris before the temple. “Farewell,” she said, “to the paltry work of wretched women that withers the fresh bloom of youth.” The girl then took up garlands and the lyre and a delightful life of banquets and revels. She said, “I will give you a tenth of my profits, Cypris: take your share of the business and give me mine!”8

13 Among the many wool-workers (talasiourgoi) mentioned in the manumission inscriptions, a certain number of them have significant names: Glykera (Sweet), Malthakē (Tender), or are simply called paides, a term that generally means “child” but also one who submits sexually to another. Put differently, wool work and sex work are occupations that are associated explicitly in the votive dedications and implicitly in the records of manumission. In the latter documents, the words pornē and hetaira are definitely insufficient descriptions of a situation that has been left behind (slave) or not (yet) obtained (free courtesan).

14 The medal presented above has been read by Ursula Knigge as a metaphor for the trade of the workwomen in the Kerameikos workshop: just as Aphrodite rises in the evening and goes to bed in the morning, riding an animal beneath the stars, the wool-working slaves, once their day is done, might solicit the client who has come to drink in the tavern or sleep in the inn. Driven by their desire to escape their servile condition, or forced to undertake this nocturnal business by their master’s will, they hope that, by meeting and befriending rich or influential men, they might find the help they need to obtain their freedom. Unfortunately, the isolated nature of the medal and the polysemy of its iconography prevent us from proposing any one unequivocal interpretation. The motif of women riding a mount – often a goat, billy or nanny – in a field of stars, and accompanied by a ladder or doves, suggests several webs of meaning. Is it an invocation of Heavenly Aphrodite (Urania), whose cult is attested in Athens? Does the ladder signify the desire for communication between that divinity and the earthly world of mortals? Or should it be understood as symbolic of a wall that must be scaled for secret, prenuptial, or illicit meetings, for instance on festivals in honor of Aphrodite and Adonis? Or is it rather a symbol of the transition to adult sexuality, especially for young males? Nothing can be said for certain.9 On the other hand, the Kerameikos building proves that the link between weaving and the erotic, even if it admits of multiple interpretations, was sometimes rooted in the brutality of certain economic and social practices, namely the twofold occupation – wool and sex – of female slave laborers. For them, prostitution, even under duress, could have represented the hope of winning their freedom.

15 Some of these women may have been able to escape slavery and join the families of citizens by marrying a citizen, such as the famous Neaira from Corinth, protected by

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her lovers, and whose alleged machinations are described by Apollodoros (Demosthenes 59); but many did not get that chance.

16 The tragic event of the building’s collapse following an earthquake at the end of the fourth century has preserved the very objects which, some two thousand years later, permit us to know of the existence of wool and sex workers in classical Athens. Today on the site of the ancient factory, visitors can see the foundations of the exterior and interior walls of Building Z, as well as the remains of a peristyle house built in the first century BCE – the only trace that remains of the women who worked there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COHEN, Edward E. 2009. Free and unfree sexual work: an economic analysis of Athenian prostitution. In Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, ed. Christopher A. FARAONE and Laura K. MCCLURE, 95-121. Chicago: University of Wisconsin Press.

DAVIDSON, James N. 1997. Courtesans and Fishcakes: the consuming passions of Classical Athens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

KNIGGE, Ursula. 1991. The Athenian Kerameikos: history, monuments, excavations. Athens: The German Archaeological Institute in Athens.

KNIGGE, Ursula. 2005. Der Bau Z. 2 vols. Munich: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Kerameikos: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen 17.

LEDUC, Claudine, and Pauline SCHMITT PANTEL. 2003. Prostitution et sexualité à Athènes à l’époque classique. Autour des ouvrages de James Davidson (Courtesans and Fishcakes. The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, 1997) et d’Elke Hartmann (Heirat, Hetärentum und Konkubinat im klassischen Athen, 2002). Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 17: 137-161.

MONACO, Maria Chiara. 2012. Dix ans après. Nouvelles données et considérations à propos du Céramique d'Athènes. In “Quartiers” artisanaux en Grèce ancienne. Une perspective méditerranéenne, ed. Arianna ESPOSITO and Giorgos M. SANIDAS, 155-174. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.

PIRENNE-DELFORGE, Vinciane. 1994. L’Aphrodite grecque. Contribution à l’étude de ses cultes et de sa personnalité dans le panthéon archaïque et classique. Athens / Liège: Centre international d’étude de la religion grecque antique. Kernos Supplément 4.

TODD, Stephen C. 1997. Status and Gender in Athenian Public Records. In Symposion 1995: Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Gerhard THÜR and Julie VÉLISSAROPOULOS, 113-124. Cologne: Böhlau.

WRENHAVEN, Kelly L. 2009. The identity of the ‘wool-workers’ in the Attic manumissions. Hesperia 78: 367-386.

NOTES

1. Knigge 2005.

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2. Monaco 2012. 3. Cohen 2009. 4. Todd 1997; Wrenhaven 2009. 5. Davidson 1997. 6. Leduc & Schmitt Pantel 2003. 7. Anonymous votive epigram, Anthologia Palatina 6.48. 8. Anthologia Palatina 6.285, attributed to Nikarchos. 9. Pirenne-Delforge 1994.

ABSTRACTS

The building Z3 of the Kerameikos in Athens offers a very good example of the questions arising when studying women at work in the IVth century BC (and outside the private context of the household). The disposition of the rooms and the material excavated lead to the identification of building Z3 as a textile fabric and, perhaps, a place for prostitution. Without offering answers to all questions about the organization of labor in the well-known Athenian workshops area, the document highlights some important features: the systematic use of slave-labor, the confusion between housing and working place, the versatility of activities, including sexual tasks.

Le bâtiment Z3 du quartier du Céramique à Athènes offre un bon exemple des questions que se posent aujourd’hui les spécialistes concernant le travail des femmes au IVe siècle avant J.-C. (hors du domaine privé de la maison). L’agencement des pièces et le mobilier trouvé sur place attestent la fonction du bâtiment : une fabrique de textile qui pourrait, en plus, avoir tenu lieu de lieu de prostitution. Le document, sans apporter de réponse certaine sur l’organisation du travail dans le quartier des artisans d’Athènes, permet de souligner des traits spécifiques : le caractère systématique du travail imposé aux esclaves, l’absence de distinction entre habitat et lieu de travail, la polyvalence des tâches imposées, y compris les services sexuels.

INDEX

Keywords: Athens, classical period, archaeology, economy, worker, textiles, prostitution Mots-clés: Athènes, époque classique, archéologie, économie, travailleur, textile, prostitution

AUTHORS

VIOLAINE SEBILLOTTE CUCHET Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet is professor of ancient history at the University of Paris I Pantheon- Sorbonne (UMR Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques). A specialist on Greece in the archaic and classical periods (eighth-fourth centuries BCE) she directs a research programme which has published several collective works, including Problèmes de genre en Grèce ancienne (2007); Les Femmes, le féminin et le politique après Nicole Loraux, [online] Classics@, 7 (2011). With Sandra Boehringer she has published Hommes et femmes dans l’Antiquité grecque et

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romaine: le genre, méthode et documents (2011) and “Des femmes en action : l’individu et la fonction en Grèce antique”, Métis hors-série, EHESS-Daedalus (2013). [email protected]

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The Worst of Adventures: the Knight Yvain and the silk weavers (late twelfth century) La Pire des Aventures : le chevalier Yvain et les tisseuses de soie

Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet Translation : Michèle R. Greer

1 In the twelfth century, the word ovrer and then ovrier (“worker”) appeared in the langue d'oïl as a derivation of the Latin word operarius or one who works with his hands. Yvain, the Knight of the Lion [Yvain, le chevalier au lion], a romance written by Chrétien de Troyes between 1176 and 1181, provides one of the first descriptions of employed female workers in the Middle Ages. Here, the brutal confrontation between the valiant knight and the reality of female labour gives rise to one of the most striking episodes of medieval literature. It testifies to a new reality – that of work, money and working conditions – at the heart of Arthurian fantasy.

2 Yvain, the Knight of the Lion is part of the Matter of Britain, a body of literature glorifying the exploits of the Knights of the Round Table.1 This novel in octosyllabic verse draws its inspiration from the Matter of Wales, such as the tale of Owain or the Lady of the Fountain.2 The story begins in King Arthur’s court with Calogrenant, a Round Table Knight, telling how he discovered a magnificent fountain in the Brocéliande forest only to be attacked by a black knight who unseated him and stole his horse. Deciding to avenge him, his cousin Yvain enters the forest and discovers a castle. He falls in love with and marries the Lady Laudine, who resides there. Quickly, the valiant Yvain grows nostalgic and wants to leave in search of adventure. His wife accepts, provided that he returns within a year. During his quest, Yvain forgets his promise and Laudine lets him know that she never wants to see him again. Mad with grief, Yvain loses his mind, goes into the forest and returns to the wild. Nursed by a damsel, he comes to his senses and sets out again. Along the way, he sees a lion fighting a dragon, comes to the lion’s aid, and together they conquer the diabolical animal. From that moment on, the lion follows him everywhere and together they accomplish multiple feats of arms. At this

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point, a damsel asks him to help her recover her inheritance. They come to the castle of Pesme Aventure, the so-called Worst Adventure because all the knights who have tried to overcome the two demons ruling over it have failed. With the help of his lion, Yvain is victorious, returns to King Arthur’s court, and is forgiven by his wife Laudine.

The Pesme Adventure

3 The Knight of the Lion’s encounter with the world of labour takes place in the cursed castle of Pesme Aventure. Upon Yvain’s arrival, the inhabitants, defying all the duties of hospitality, tell him he is not welcome and warn him that shame and humiliation await him there.3 A lady comes to explain that it is the custom to prohibit foreign knights from receiving accommodation there. Outraged by this lack of courtesy, Yvain insists, so she declines any responsibility as the porter opens the door. The porter, after addressing him with this very ungracious welcome, hurried upstairs. But my lord Yvain, without making reply, passed straight on, and found a new and lofty hall; in front of it there was a yard enclosed with large, round, pointed stakes, and seated inside the stakes he saw as many as three hundred maidens, working at different kinds of embroidery. Each one was sewing with golden thread and silk, as best she could. But such was their poverty, that many of them wore no girdle, and looked slovenly, because so poor; and their garments were torn about their breasts and at the elbows, and their shifts were soiled about their necks. Their necks were thin, and their faces pale with hunger and privation. They see him, as he looks at them, and they weep, and are unable for some time to do anything or to raise their eyes from the ground, so bowed down they are with woe...4

4 Yvain wants to turn back, but the porter dissuades him. When the Knight of the Lion asks the porter who these poor girls are, he refuses to answer, so Yvain goes back to see them. They tell him that they are from the Isle of Damsels, the kingdom of Celtic fairies such as Morgan le Fay.5 Its prince, wishing to travel the world in search of adventure, came to this cursed place resided in by two demons. These demons, born of a woman and a netun,6 beat him and forced him to pay an annual tribute of thirty maidens for as long as the two maufès [evil spirits] should live. This terrible arrangement having gone on for ten years, there are now three hundred maidens held captive and condemned to work day and night. We shall spend our days weaving cloths of silk, without ever being better clad. We shall always be poor and naked, and shall always suffer from hunger and thirst, for we shall never be able to earn enough to procure for ourselves any better food. Our bread supply is very scarce – a little in the morning and less at night, for none of us can gain by her handiwork more than four pence […] for her daily bread. And with this we cannot provide ourselves with sufficient food and clothes. For though there is not one of us who does not [do enough work to] earn as much as twenty sous a week, yet we cannot live without hardship. Now you must know that there is not a single one of us who does not [perform] twenty sous worth of work or more, and with such a sum even a duke would be considered rich. So while we are reduced to such poverty, he, for whom we work, is rich with the product of our toil. We sit up many nights, as well as every day, to earn the more, for they threaten to do us injury, when we seek some rest, so we do not dare to rest ourselves. But why should I tell you more? We are so shamefully treated and insulted that I cannot tell you the fifth part of it all.7

5 After these purely material considerations, the chivalric narrative quickly takes over, as the young maidens speak of the knights who have sought to release them but failed,

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and plead with Yvain to deliver them, Yvain goes deeper into the castle, carrying all their hopes. Inside, he discovers its sumptuous rooms where the noble family lives in luxury, especially their only – and very coddled – daughter who is as richly dressed as the weavers are miserable.

Chivalry and new urban realities

6 This episode of the Three Hundred Damsels is one of the best known and most controversial of twelfth-century chivalric literature. This irruption of “social realism” into the world of Arthurian magic has been written about extensively. Many commentators have seen it as a reflection of historical reality, while others have spoken out against the historical implausibility of this workshop of three hundred women weaving silk.8 As Jean Frappier has pointed out, this was the first time Chrétien de Troyes looked beyond an aristocratic setting.9

7 The very precise description given of the women weavers’ condition, miserable and burdened with work, is actually not very far from those laid out in the earliest documents describing such activity in the following century. However, it is also not difficult to see its inconsistencies: first, the size of the workshop – three hundred women – is an absurd figure for the emerging textile industry; second, the occupation of silk weaving really only developed in the Italian city of Lucca, which held a quasi- monopoly in the West; and finally, the workshop’s location within a castle instead of in an industrial city.10 While these objections are quite appropriate, it is also certain that Chrétien de Troyes could not have invented such accurate details about the workers’ wages. He was inspired by some kind of reality, albeit exaggerated (number of workers) and embellished (silk and gold thread instead of wool or linen; an enchanted castle instead of an urban workshop). In spite of these reservations, it is not impossible to see in the terrible treatment imposed on these three hundred weavers – suffering from hunger, half-naked, humiliated and exploited – some echo of the economic growth and development of the textile crafts witnessed in Champagne, a region famous for its fairs, the economic centre of western Europe.11

8 But perhaps what is the most important here is the appearance of money and waged labour as opposed to the idleness and wanderings of the knight of Arthurian romance. Realism is not only present, but brutally so, as the weavers’ complaints are about money and cold, hard cash.12 Their “spokeswoman” complains about earning only four deniers a day, just enough not to starve, while their work brings their tormentors at least 20 sous, i.e. one livre.13 Their work therefore brings the demons 240 deniers – 60 times more than they make!14 Here again, Chrétien de Troyes seems to have painted a darker picture. While there are not many accounting records available for the period, the fourteenth century gives us more information, with sources citing, for example, a woman mattress-maker earning a salary of 6 deniers per day in Artois in 1314.15

9 In any case, this is no example of “working-class protest” as Jean Frappier thought.16 Chrétien de Troyes’s women weavers do not wish to earn more and work less. They simply want the knight to liberate them from this unworthy task, and not to have to work at all, by going back to the Isle of Damsels.17 Compared to Yvain – himself and his time being his own – these women are condemned to work all day inside a locked enclosure from which they cannot escape. Yvain and the lion’s victory over the two demons allows them to return to the world of Arthurian magic from which they had

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been brutally snatched.18 The Arthurian Utopia thereby comes into its own again over the terrible “new world” of the cities.19

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BAUMGARTNER, Emmanuele. 2003. Romans de la Table Ronde de Chrétien de Troyes. Paris: Gallimard.

CONTAMINE, Philippe, Marc BOMPAIRE, Stéphane LEBECQ, and Jean-Luc SARRAZIN. 2001. L’Économie médiévale. Paris: Armand Colin.

CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES. 2009. Four Arthurian Romances. Translated by W.W. COMFORT. E-book: The Floating Press [Also available via Project Gutenberg].

DANCOISNE, M. 1847. Recherches historiques sur Hénin-Liétard. Douai.

FRAPPIER, Jean. 1969. Étude sur Yvain ou le chevalier au lion de Chrétien de Troyes. Paris: SEDES.

HERLIHY, David. 1990. Women and Work in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

JONIN, Pierre. 1964. Aspects de la vie sociale au XIIe siècle dans Yvain. L’information littéraire 2: 47-54.

KÖHLER, Erich. 1974. L’Aventure chevaleresque. Idéal et réalité dans le roman courtois. Paris: Gallimard.

LAMBERT, Pierre-Yves (ed.). 1993. Les Quatre branches du Mabinogi et autres contes gallois du Moyen Âge. Paris: Gallimard.

LEPAGE, Yvan G. 1991. Encore les trois cents pucelles (Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, v. 5298-5324). Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 134: 159-166.

WOLEDGE, Brian. 1988. Commentaires sur Yvain (Le Chevalier au lion) de Chrétien de Troyes. Geneva: Droz.

NOTES

1. Frappier 1969. 2. Lambert 1993. 3. Poirion 1994: 337-503, 462-463. 4. Ca 5187-5213 [463-464 in the Comfort edition]. 5. Frappier 1969: 11. 6. The term “netun”, from the Latin neptunius, means an evil villain. The manuscripts refer to “luiton” and then “luton”. Woledge 1988: 90. 7. Ca 5300-5326 [446-447 in the Comfort edition] 8. Lepage 1991: 160-161. 9. Frappier 1969: 122. 10. Herlihy 1990: 80. He notes this passage of Yvain to liken it to the gynaecea in castles or the textile workshops in women’s convents. 11. Baumgartner 2003: 109; Jonin 1964: 52-53; Contamine et al. 2001: 184 and 249-251.

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12. Frappier 1969: 127. 13. In the medieval monetary system: 1 sou = 12 deniers, 1 livre = 20 sous, 1 livre = 240 deniers. The livre is a unit of account; the money in circulation in Champagne during Chrétien de Troyes’s lifetime was the Provins denier. 14. Lepage 1991: 164. 15. Dancoisne 1847: 82; Jonin 1964: 52. 16. Frappier 1969: 128. 17. Lepage 1969: 165. 18. Baumgartner 2003: 110. 19. Köhler 1974.

ABSTRACTS

The term « worker » appears for the first time in France in the middle of the XIIth century to designate the person, man or woman, who worked manually for a salary. The chivalric novel written by Chrétien de Troyes between 1176 and 1181, Yvain, le chevalier au lion, offers one of the earliest descriptions of salaried workers of the Middle Ages. The valiant knight’s brutal encounter with the realities of a female workshop constitutes among the most powerful pages of medieval literature. His descriptions testify to a new reality where work, money and poverty appeared at the heart of the arthurian legend.

Le mot ouvrier apparaît pour la première fois au milieu du XIIe siècle pour désigner celui qui travaille de ses mains moyennant salaire. C’est dans un roman de chevalerie, écrit par Chrétien de Troyes entre 1176 et 1181, Yvain, le chevalier au lion, qu’est offerte l’une des premières descriptions d’ouvrières salariées du Moyen Âge. La brutale confrontation entre le preux chevalier et la réalité du travail féminin y donne naissance à l’une des pages les plus fortes de la littérature médiévale. Elle témoigne d’une nouvelle réalité, celle du travail, de l’argent et de la condition ouvrière au cœur de la féérie arthurienne.

INDEX

Mots-clés: ouvrières, Moyen Âge, argent, roman arthurien Keywords: female workers, Middle Ages, money, arthurian novel

AUTHORS

SOPHIE CASSAGNES-BROUQUET Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet is professor of medieval history at the University of Toulouse II-le Mirail. As a former member of the editorial board of Clio histoire, femmes et sociétés, she edited issues no. 30 (Héroïnes) and 36 (Costumes). She is also a member of the UMR Framespa (Acteurs, Sociétés et Economies). Her current research is on women, violence, gender and warfare in the

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Middle Ages. [email protected]

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Wives, mothers, and property owners: women artisans in early modern Turin Épouses, mères et propriétaires : artisanes à Turin à l’époque moderne

Beatrice Zucca Micheletto Translation : Anne Epstein

“Angela Maria Negro, wife of Giuseppe Cora, affirms that she has always, for the past twenty-two years up to this day, exercised the craft of making silk and gold buttons, enabling her to support herself and her family, composed of eight children, a responsibility that the Father is unable to assume because he is too poor, earning his living as a servant, which is why the Supplicant was obliged to invest her dowry of 250 lire in the aforementioned button business. However, as she is not permitted to keep shop because she has not produced a masterwork, she must exercise the said craft using the name of a certified worker, whom she must pay exorbitantly for his products, making it impossible for the poor supplicant to provide for her large family when calamity strikes; and so, day after day, the aforementioned dowry has been shrinking; moreover, if she had to produce the masterwork, it would be at great expense, a hundred lire or more. Under such circumstances, therefore, the Supplicant has no other means to prevent the imminent depletion of her assets and to continue to make her living but to turn, as she has in fact done, to Your Majesty, and she was told to provide evidence to justify her claims, and to this effect such justification has been presented, as indicated in the certified documents dated the 16 and 21 March of last year signed by Franco and Pautriero, and upon whose honor and past appeal she prostrates herself again before Your Sacred and Royal Majesty, humbly pleading that His Majesty will, by exercising his special grace, after considering with benevolence the aforementioned circumstances and the unfortunate condition of the poor Supplicant, and her sincere will to earn her living through her labor, deign to exempt her from producing the masterwork required by the Memoriale a capi [statute] of the button manufacturers’ University and if necessary, to make an exception to it as required in this case (…).” “His Majesty, by an act of grace, in view of the circumstances described and the supplicant’s long experience in the art of making gold, silver, and silk buttons, authorizes the Magistrate of the Consulate to permit her to exercise said craft, after

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confirming her skill through an oral examination or other test that he deems necessary for her to take, His Majesty having exempted her from the obligation to produce the masterwork and having made to that effect a special exception to §§ 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the Memoriale a capi [statute] of the button manufacturers’ University with responses approved by the Letters Patent of 16 March 1737. Turin, 16 July 1769.”1

1 The document cited above is a plea drawn from a larger corpus held in the archives of the Consolato di Commercio of Turin. This plea, drafted in 1769 by a female button-maker, Angela Maria Negro, wife of Giuseppe Cora, was first sent to the King and then to the judges of the Consolato, in an effort to negotiate her admission to the urban guild. The Consolato was a judicial authority of both first instance and appeals, that oversaw economic activities, notably those connected with trade and the crafts regulated by the guilds. The judges were merchants and shopkeepers from the city and they were responsible for resolving conflicts among the artisan communities, in commerce, and in bankruptcy cases. The court also considered applications from aspiring masters. Relations with the King often led to conflict, and although the Consolato was supposed to follow royal instructions in economic matters, it nonetheless claimed a certain measure of autonomy.2 The archives of this magistracy, held in the Turin National Archives, contain all records of its activities (ordinances, sentences, guild registers). Here I will use Angela Maria Negro’s plea as a starting point for understanding the multiple factors that shaped the identity of most women workers in Turin during the eighteenth century. Fewer women artisans were accepted or applied by petition for admission as guild members than exercised a trade outside of the guilds. Nonetheless, as we will see, Angela Negro’s arguments convey via the written word a common sensibility and specific choices concerning the economic role of women in Turin society.

2 Recalling the importance of women’s guilds in Paris and their struggles to stay independent, Cynthia Truant has affirmed that the members of female corporations acquired an “authentic social standing” which, although hardly free of ambivalence and ambiguity, still gave them “an identity and a legal status different from that of other women workers.”3 The guild mistresses whom Truant studied clearly occupied a privileged position not seen in other socio-economic and cultural contexts. Indeed, throughout the early modern period, contemporaries considered women’s work not as a component of their identity, but simply as a duty. In Ancien Régime societies, everyone, man or woman, had to earn a living and contribute to the family’s upkeep. Thus even if women worked, their occupation rarely contributed to the development of a specific identity: instead, their place in the family as daughters, wives or mothers defined their status. In Turin, women remained almost completely absent from the guilds (except for widows who had the right to continue the activity of their deceased husbands, as long as they employed a registered worker). The taffeta-weavers’, button- makers’, tailors’ and ribbon-makers’ guilds did admit mistress-artisans, but they remained marginal; significantly, guild membership gave them neither the right to participate in assemblies nor the right to be nominated for positions of political responsibility. Nonetheless, women constituted a real and numerically significant presence in the local labor market. In eighteenth-century Turin, artisanal industry, and textile production in particular (from silk fabrics to accessories such as stockings, gloves, buttons, trimmings, ribbons and embroidered clothing), constituted one of the city’s most crucial economic sectors, employing approximately 33% of the female labor

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force.4 Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, inspired by the principles of Colbertism, the King’s ministers invested heavily in silk. High quality silk thread was exported to international markets, while silk fabrics and other items were produced mainly for domestic consumption.5 At this time Turin was also a political center, as the seat of the royal court, the state bureaucracies, and chief religious institutions. These segments of society – together with the merchant-bankers who had made their fortunes in the silk thread export business – fed the demand for luxury textile products.6 The document discussed here offers insight into the identity of the women workers of Turin, at least those engaged in artisanal production. At the same time, it alludes to the complexity and ambiguity of this identity, resulting from cultural and economic factors rooted in the local context.

3 The purpose of the plea was explicit: Angela Maria Negro sought membership in the button-makers’ guild (perhaps even at the request of guild representatives?), with a reduction of the expense required to produce a masterwork. This plea must also be understood in the context of the reorganization of the Turin guilds (the “Università”) that took place in the first half of the eighteenth century, at which time these corporations drafted official membership lists and asked the King to reinforce their privileges.7 At the time, a political conflict had divided the public authorities, notably the crown and the city government. Around the urban guilds, a significant portion of Turin society was consolidating its professional and social identity, and in particular was creating a new political identity from which women remained excluded. In March 1737, the gold, silver and silk button manufacturers had obtained an initial renewal of their statutes, which forbade “any person from working on their own, or with the help of laborers or apprentices, on any sort of gold or silver buttons (…) if the person has not made his masterwork and passed the test, on pain of a fine of a 24 gold ecus” (except widows)8. Nonetheless, after 1737 many female button-makers continued working without having taken the test. They had no interest in joining guilds that imposed fees and regulations on them while excluding them from political activities. Guild representatives denounced certain craftswomen, threatening to close down their operations and seize their assets. The craftswomen protested that their work allowed them to ensure “their own survival and that of their families.”9 The status of the button-makers was then clarified by a royal decree of 1740 that suspended all judicial proceedings against the women who had been denounced, granting them the right to work and to operate shops, as long as they declared their activity and paid the fees for the masterwork as soon as possible: in other words, if they accepted the guild rules. In practice, cases of women operating “unregulated” shops continued for decades to come, and the licensed manufacturers went on denouncing them. The women could not escape the corporation but had no intention of paying the sums demanded. So they decided to appeal to the King, using the plea to bring their cases to the attention of the Consolato di Commercio, in order to negotiate access to the guild under advantageous conditions. To strengthen her arguments, Angela decided to draw attention to certain specific aspects of her professional trajectory and life history.

4 Recent research has drawn attention to the “plea” as a particular form of legal document: historians concur on the complex nature of this source and the need to approach it with care.10 In a plea, the wish to present one’s case as unique must be reconciled with the need to meet the expectations of the recipients, particularly as regards one’s perceived social role. Consequently, by bringing together elements of self-representation, gender stereotypes reflecting contemporary perceptions of

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women’s social role, and real biographical details, these texts give us a composite picture of the woman artisan of Turin. Angela Negro’s petition demonstrates firstly that the identity of the woman worker remained associated with that of the mother and wife concerned for the well-being of her family. At the same time, this kind of reasoning is for Angela – as for other women artisans submitting pleas – a means of negotiating membership in the corporation. Secondly, this document suggests that dowries played a crucial role in the dynamics of the domestic economy and the workplace.

5 Let us now consider the text itself. Contrary to what we might imagine, Angela’s petition gives no indication of her professional skill or experience. Only once, at the beginning of the text, does she recall that she has “always” worked at manufacturing buttons, “for 22 years”. Nor does the King refer to Angela’s competence in his response, but rather explains that she is to be exempted from producing a masterwork because of “the circumstances described and the supplicant’s long practice of the craft of making gold, silver, and silk buttons”. Yet even if her “long practice” needs no further explanation, the other “circumstances described” bear clarifying.

6 Angela’s petition is rich in biographical details that evoke collective gender stereotypes. From the first lines, she explains that her work has “enabl[ed] her to support herself and her family, composed of eight children”. The same theme recurs throughout the text: Angela must “provide for her large family” and “earn her living”. This responsibility is all the more compelling as her husband cannot take care of the household “because he is too poor, earning his living as a servant”. Suggesting that women’s work played a central role in household survival strategies, Angela’s words also hint at men’s lack of job security. In Turin, domestic service was the most important employment sector for both men and women. As in other Italian cities, a large portion of the adult population held service jobs:11 although some men and women made real careers of domestic service, most moved from one employer to another, from one job to another. Angela’s husband seemed to be no exception, for an earlier notarial document described him as a “cook”, with no possessions and a salary of 5 lire per month. 12 The precariousness of his situation thus made Angela’s work indispensable. She doesn’t hesitate to describe herself as “poor” several times. This poverty (along with that of her husband) refers to an overall situation of material and social instability that gives her the right to appeal to the King – who is here acting in the capacity of a benevolent father figure – and to benefit from his favors. All of these arguments are certainly founded, and are justified by the difficult situation of the Cora family and by the serious economic and social crisis the city was experiencing in the second half of the century. At the same time, they are put forward as an excuse by Angela who thus reframes the meaning of her trade and her identity as a worker within the “cage of the family economy”.13 Her work and her professional profile are thus presented as subordinate to the social role society expects her to fill: to earn her living and support her family as a wife and mother. The conclusion of the petition returns to these arguments. Angela begs the King to exempt her from the masterwork on the grounds of “the wretched condition of the poor Supplicant and her sincere will to earn her living through her labor”. It is interesting to note that Angela’s words (and those of other women artisans in similar situations) are virtually the same as those women artisans had used over twenty years earlier in claims to the King about their bad

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treatment at the hands of the button-manufacturers (the complaint that resulted in the royal edict of 1740).

7 Angela also introduces another interesting element. By explaining that she had been “obliged to invest her dowry of 250 lire in the aforementioned button business”, this woman artisan is also affirming that property forms an essential component of her identity. The women of Turin in fact possessed dowries that, while in theory inalienable, could be invested in an economic activity. This argument was not invented. In the second half of the eighteenth century, in the midst of an economic and social crisis, the alienation of dowries was widespread in Turin. This juridical procedure allowed spouses to convert a dowry into cash that could then be used to start up a commercial activity, to obtain supplies for a business or a shop, or to pay off debts.14 Angela Negro presented “certified documents” from Franco and Pautriero, the notaries in charge of registering alienation of dowries at the civil court of the Giudicatura. Searching by name at the city’s notarial archives, I was able to locate the acts drafted at the conclusion of this procedure. These documents show that the alienation took place in two stages, well before the plea analyzed here was presented. The first half of the dowry (125 lire) was alienated in October 1756, that is, one month after the endowment act (dated September 1756); whereas the second part was requested in March 1758 and finally paid out in September 1760 (the plea itself was dated July 1769).15 Angela’s reference to her dowry and its investment confirms her crucial economic role in sustaining the household, and above all enables her to justify her request by alluding to the risk of losing the capital derived from her dowry. Indeed, “as she is not permitted to keep a shop because she has not produced a masterwork, she must exercise the said craft using the name of a certified worker, whom she must pay exorbitantly for his products”. Not only does this expense prevent her from “provid[ing] for” her family “when calamity strikes;” but it also presents the risk that “day after day, the aforementioned dowry [may] shrink”. Moreover, she would incur the same loss of capital if she had to produce the masterwork, which “would be [a] great expense, a hundred lire or more” (thus causing the loss of at least half of her dowry). Here, Angela clearly evokes the risk for a woman of being left “indotata,” that is, without a dowry. In this sense, the poverty she refers to – her “misfortune” – derives from the imminent possibility of losing the capital from her dowry. The reasoning is well conceived, as women were considered as “minors” in terms of property ownership, with Ancien Régime institutions as their ostensible guarantors. In Turin, as in other regions where Roman law prevailed, the endowment system was based on a matrimonial regime of separate property ownership. Upon marriage, a woman’s property formally came under her husband’s control, with the exception of items not part of the dowry that remained in her possession, including property inherited from her own family or assets acquired through her own labor.16 Thus to eliminate the risk of any misuse by the husband, alienation of the dowry had to take place before a judge, with explicit consent of the woman and a commitment by the couple that the dowry would be used to sustain the household. Often notarial deeds contained creditors’ receipts attesting to the appropriate use of the capital from the dowry.17

8 Two conclusions emerge from this analysis of the source. First, Angela’s plea demonstrates that women could (and knew how to) negotiate a place for themselves in the working world by using arguments that explicitly evoked their role in the family economy, and alluded to the risk of being left without a dowry. Using precisely this kind of reasoning – on the one hand drawing on stereotypes about women and on the

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other hand referring to the threat of downward social and economic mobility (more feared than real) – Angela was able to negotiate her way into the guild under favorable conditions.18 Thus the king exempted her from the requirement to produce a masterwork, by overriding certain sections of the statutes of the button-makers’ guild; but she was to be admitted to the guild (that is, she would have the right to practice her trade and to keep a shop) only after an oral examination (or an abbreviated practical test, at the discretion of the Consolato). In conclusion, Angela must accept membership in the community of button-makers in order to pursue her work; but her multiple identities of wife and mother, worker, and property owner helped her to negotiate admission to the guild.

9 Second, the plea suggests that property ownership was even more essential to the identity of women workers of Turin than was their membership in a trade corporation. The dowry, an indispensable requirement for marriage, played a key role in the economy and in labor market participation, because it could be invested in a commercial activity that would ensure the sustenance of both the woman and her family. We may then ask if and how women’s property ownership affected power relations between the sexes (particularly between husbands and wives). In other words, it is very likely that the potential uses of dowries within households gave women a certain power of expression and negotiation to counter husbands’ authority within marriage. The story of Angela Negro also suggests that if we are to ask new questions and renew our approaches to women’s work, we must explore more fully the relation between work and property. Where did women find the means to engage in economic activities? How did they set themselves up? What were the consequences? These questions, still underexplored in the historiography,19 are crucial, because they allow us to conceive of frontiers and hierarchies in the world of women’s work beyond the dichotomy mistress/worker. Understanding the relationship between work and property is also crucial for our comprehension of certain dynamics of today’s society. The spread of micro-credit is a good example. As we know, micro-credit is a system of financing aimed at individuals too poor or too weak to have access to banking networks. Very significantly, women wishing to set up or improve a business enterprise are the most frequent beneficiaries of these circuits, both in Europe and in the poorer countries of the planet.20 This suggests that even today, the relationship between work and property remains problematic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AGO, Renata. 1996. Oltre la dote. I beni femminili. In Il lavoro delle donne, ed. Angela GROPPI, 164-182. Rome-Bari: Laterza.

ARRU, Angiolina. 1992. Servi e serve: le particolarità del caso italiano. In Storia della famiglia italiana 1750-1950, ed. David KERTZER and Richard SALLER, 273-306. Bologna: Il Mulino.

CERUTTI, Simona. 1990. La Ville et les métiers: naissance d’un langage corporatif. Turin 17e-18e siècle. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.

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CERUTTI, Simona. 2003. Giustizia sommaria: pratiche e ideali di giustizia in una società di Ancien Régime (Torino XVIII secolo). Milan: Feltrinelli.

CERUTTI, Simona. 2010. Travail, mobilité et légitimité. Suppliques au roi dans une société d’Ancien Régime(Turin, XVIIIe siècle). Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 65(3): 571-611.

CHICCO, Giuseppe. 1995. La Seta in Piemonte 1650-1800. Milan: F. Angeli.

DUBOIN, Felice Amato. 1818-1896. Raccolta per ordine di materie delle leggi, cioè patenti, manifesti ecc. pubblicate sino all’8 dicembre 1789 sotto il felicissimo dominio della Real Casa di Savoia (…) compilata dall’avvocato Felice Amato Duboin. Turin: Marcio Tip.

GROPPI, Angela. 1996. Lavoro e proprietà delle donne in età moderna. In Il Lavoro delle donne, ed. Angela GROPPI, 119-163. Rome-Bari: Laterza.

GROPPI, Angela. 2002a. Une ressource légale pour une pratique illégale. Les juifs et les femmes contre la corporation des tailleurs dans la Rome pontificale (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle). In The Value of the Norm, ed. Renata AGO, 137-161. Rome: Biblink.

GROPPI, Angela. 2002b. A matter of fact rather than principle: women, work and property in papal Rome (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries). Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7(1): 37-55.

LAMBERTI, Maria Carla. 2002. Una fonte “vecchia” per nuovi problemi: i censimenti per lo studio della mobilità in età preindustriale. Quaderni Storici XXXVII: 545-552.

MILLET, Hélène (ed.). 2003. Suppliques et requêtes. Le gouvernement par la grâce en Occident (XIIe-XVe siècle). Rome: Éditions de l’École Française de Rome.

NUBOLA, Cecilia, and Andreas WÜRGLER (ed.). 2002. Suppliche e “gravamina”. Politica, amministrazione, giustizia in Europa (secoli XIV-XVIII). Bologna: Il Mulino.

SEN, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

TRUANT, Cynthia. 1996. La maitrise d’une identité? Corporations féminines à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. CLIO. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 3: 55-69.

VAN VOSS, Lex Heerma (ed.). 2001. Petitions in Social History. International Review of Social History, supplement no. 9.

ZUCCA MICHELETTO, Beatrice. 2011a. À quoi sert la dot ? Aliénations dotales, économie familiale et stratégies des couples à Turin au XVIIIe siècle. Annales de Démographie Historique: 161-186.

ZUCCA MICHELETTO, Beatrice. 2011b. Reconsidering the southern Europe model: dowry, women’s work and marriage patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the 18th century). The History of the Family 16(4): 354-370.

ZUCCA MICHELETTO, Beatrice. 2014. Travail et propriété des femmes en temps de crise (Turin, XVIIIe siècle). Mont-Saint-Aignan: Presses universitaires Rouen-Le Havre.

NOTES

1. Archivio di Stato di Torino, sezioni riunite (henceforth AST, sez. riun.), Consolato di Commercio, Bottonaj, vol. 6. Text originally in Italian, here translated from the author’s French version. 2. The history of the Consolato di Commercio and the conflicts in which it was involved during the eighteenth century have been reconstructed by Simona Cerutti 2003. 3. Truant 1996: 61.

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4. Figure calculated by the author on the basis of Turin census data from 1802 concerning the total number of women aged over fifteen exercising a trade. The data was compiled into a database by a team of students led by M.C. Lamberti. I thank Signora Lamberti for allowing me to consult the database, which is maintained by the Department of Economic History of the University of Turin. See Lamberti 2002. 5. Chicco 1995. 6. These same social groups also stimulated strong demand for domestic servants, making service occupations the second pillar of the city’s economy. 7. Cerutti 1990. 8. « sia proibito a qualunque persona di travagliare o far travagliare per mezzo di lavoranti o apprendisti, alcuna sorta di detti bottoni d’oro o d’argento (…) se non avrà la persona fatto il capo d’opera e subito il dovuto esame sotto pena di scudi 25 d’oro », Duboin, vol. 17, 1818-1869: 149-154. 9. Duboin, vol. 17, 1818-1869: 154. 10. Van Voss 2001; Nubola & Wu◌̈rgler 2002; Millet 2003; Cerutti 2010: 571. 11. Arru 1992. 12. AST, sez. riun., Insinuazione di Torino, a. 1760, l. 10, ff. 7r-10v. 13. To borrow an apt term coined by Groppi 1996: 119-163. 14. On the alienation of dowries see Zucca 2011a: 161-186; also Zucca 2011b and 2014. 15. AST, sez. riun., Insinuazione di Torino, a. 1760, l. 10, ff. 7r-10v, Quittanza delli Giuseppe ed Angela Maria giugali Cora a favore di Bartolomeo Uscello per lire 112 soldi 10. 16. That is, when the woman is “industriosa” (industrious). See Ago 1996: 172. 17. Zucca 2011a: 169-171. 18. These same dynamics appeared in eighteenth-century Rome in struggles between the tailors’ guild on the one hand, women and Jews on the other. See Groppi 2002a: 137-161. 19. See for example Groppi 1996 and 2002b. 20. Sen 1999: chapter 8.

ABSTRACTS

This article focuses on a petition presented by a Turinese artisan to the king asking to be admitted to the guild of button-makers and to take advantage of reduced fees for the mastership. The text shows that the identity of female artisans was entangled and ambiguous and was the result of a stratification of cultural and economic factors. Women were able to negotiate their place in the labor market. On the one hand, the petitioner supported her requests with arguments that explicitly evoked her economic role in the household and made use of typical stereotypes of her sex (namely her role as wife and mother concerned about the well-being of her family). On the other hand, she explained that she invested her dowry in her workshop; therefore she alluded to the risk of wasting her dowry and of becoming “indotata” with the consequent social and economic loss.

Cet article analyse une supplique adressée par une artisane turinoise au roi dans le but d’être admise dans la corporation des fabricants de boutons en bénéficiant d’une importante réduction des frais pour le chef d’œuvre. Le texte suggère la complexité et l’ambiguïté de l’identité des travailleuses de l’artisanat ; celle-ci est le résultat d’une stratification de facteurs culturels et

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économiques. La supplique montre que les femmes peuvent (et savent) négocier leur place dans le monde du travail. D’un côté, la suppliante s’appuie sur des argumentations qui évoquent explicitement sa place dans l’économie familiale et font appel aux stéréotypes sur son sexe (et notamment à son rôle d’épouse et mère soucieuse d’assurer le bien-être de sa famille). De l’autre côté, en rappelant qu’elle a investi sa dot dans l’activité artisanale, elle évoque le risque d’en rester dépourvue (et devenant ainsi “indotata”) et la chute sociale et économique conséquente.

INDEX

Mots-clés: travail des femmes, dot, économie familiale, suppliques, Italie Keywords: women work, dowry, household economy, petitions, Italy

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Testimony

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Paper-making in Scotland in the twentieth century Texts introduced by Siân REYNOLDS

Siân Reynolds

1 The following extracts are taken from a series of interviews carried out by the historian Ian MacDougall in 1996, and published in 2009 under the title Through the Mill, by the Scottish Working People’s History Trust, an independent association which recovers the traces in written, oral or material form of working peope’s lives.1 MacDougall interviewed 33 retired workers, men and women, who had been employed at three paper mills: Dalmore, Esk and Valleyfield, operating for many years on the banks of the river North Esk, near the town of Penicuik, a few miles from the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. Papermaking had been going on there since the eighteenth century, using water from the river. All three mills have now closed, the last in 2004, and almost all the witnesses whose accounts were recorded have now died. We have reproduced here some of the testimony of one man, born in 1913, who worked at the mill most of his life, and of three women, born between 1916 and 1919, who worked there for spells, but mostly during the 1930s.

2 The three mills had been employing workers of both sexes since the nineteenth century: in 1883, Dalmore employed 83 men and boys and 86 women and girls. A hundred years later, with increased automation, there were 133 men and boys but only 47 women and girls. Papermaking was (and is) a complex process, requiring huge machines to treat the raw material, followed by various finishing processes, depending on the order book. In these mills, the liquid pulp passed through a series of workshops: “potching” [crushing], adding chemicals, beating, drying, calendering etc. Reels of paper were wound on to giant cylinders, and moved to the cutting machines, to be cut into sheets which had to be inspected, counted and packed. There was a very rigid sexual division of labour: the men minded the large machines, beaters, calenders, etc. The women mostly did finishing: receiving cut sheets and especially checking the finished paper for faults – a process known as “overhauling”.

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3 The materials used to make paper have changed over time: rags in the early days, followed by esparto grass, and finally, in the twentieth century, almost always wood pulp. One of the older workers remembered seeing rags, which went on being used to make bank notes: There was about a dozen women, I think, in the rag house when I started at the mill [in 1927], weedin’ through the rags and sortin’ them out. They were makin’ sure there was nae buttons on it and eyes and hooks, and that kind of thing, bones. The rags were already disinfected when they came to the mill, they weren’t filthy […] the women in the rag house cut them up into smaller bits, maybe six inches square. [p. 5]

4 A woman worker noted, as a picturesque detail, that during the Second World War, “Everybody in Penicuik in those days would have a box of buttons off the rags.”

5 Through their accounts, we can see that the sexes had very different trajectories: most of the men spent almost all their working lives (30 or 40 years) in papermaking, either in the Peniciuk area or in other Scottish mills. Most of the women, by contrast, had much shorter working careers (nine years on average) since they were virtually obliged to leave work when they married. There was no formal rule, but it was a near-universal practice until the 1950s, with the exception of the war years [see Helen W.’s account below] Ye never worked after ye got married. I was never back in Dalmore after I got married. [Agnes T., p. 4] When I got married, I gave up working at the mill … All the women had to stop work when they got married, unless like there was anybody that had lost their husband or that… I think they [the bosses] could aye get plenty others tae fill in just and that. That’s how it was then, that was the way of it. [Peg M., p. 109] Women were expected to stop working when they married and this was still the practice later on when I got married. (Jean H, born 1931, p. 504)

6 Women were less likely to be in the trade union. Men more readily mentioned the union: Most of the workers were members of the union, there was no question of that. It wasn’t a closed shop, it didn’t act as a closed shop as far as I know. But most of them were members. [Henry H., p. 480] The women weren’t involved in the union quite so much in these days. It was mostly the men… I would say three-quarters of the men were in the union before the war and maybe half of the women. [George M., p. 315]

7 But that said, the family-based nature of the employment in the mills where brothers and sisters could be hired to work in the same factory created a network of solidarity: You were out at friends in the evening, you weren’t so frightened to go home, because you’d say: “Oh it’s all right. There’ll be somebody on the street, I’ll get along with the men coming off the back shift or the men going on the night shift.” There was always a kent [=well-known] face on the road, always people coming from or going to work, and you weren’t so frightened. [Mary B., p. 2]

⁂

8 As with all oral history, these first-person accounts are subject to the normal reservations: memories fade, are embellished or become confused over time. But the descriptions of the work process from all the witnesses tend to confirm and support each other in the full collection of testimonies, which runs to 600 pages. Taken together (with details about everyday life and working-class culture) these accounts offer the

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traces of a vanished community, where “everyone knew each other” and where Penicuik, “the paper town” was dominated by the presence, the noise, and the smell of its three mills. The twentieth century witnessed the disappearance of many such, all over Europe. Life was hard, and working conditions almost unimaginable by present standards, but it was not so long ago, and some of the witnesses are still alive today.

9 [A note on the transcription: the witnesses mostly spoke in Scottish vernacular English, which was preserved in the published book: some of the spelling has been standarized to make it easier for readers from outside Scotland, but NB: ye = you, nae = no, tae = to, didnae = didn’t, ken = know, etc.]

1. Robert W., born 1913

10 Well, I was employed first on what ye call runnin’ the cutter – fillin’ the cutter. They had the cutter where two women sat catchin’ and the man drove the machine. They put the paper in maybe five reel at a time and cut them. I would go away round, and I would [heft = lift] a web – a roll of paper… There was a shell in the middle o’ the web where a spindle went through. It was fitted on and away it went. I was in what ye called the coatin’ department in the mill my whole life - that was paper, art paper, for glossy magazines and things like that in the printing and publishing industry… [Later] I worked [on a different machine] loadin’ three cutters. That was quite heavy work for a boy o’ fourteen. My feet, I could hardly wear shoes, they were that sore wi’ the cement floors. […] then when I was sixteen, they said tae me: “We’re goin’ tae shift ye on tae the calenders” That was the rolls. It’s a cotton roll, steel roll, cotton roll, steel roll, cotton roll, steel roll. They put a coatin’ on it - brushes that went backward and forward all the time […].they brushed the coat on. And it went away and hung in folds […]. It was taken round slowly, right round. It’s a slow job, till it came when it was dried out. […] And then it came from there tae the calenders, and you led it over these calenders and down, watching ye didnae mark the roll, because the least wee mark on the rolls showed up on the sheet. Ye put your weight on the rolls and started it up and ye took a strip out tae have a look. And ye had a sample, ye ken, for finish, eye finish. If ye saw it was all right, ye let your boss see and and: “Carry on”. That was quite a skilled job, because ye needed judgement on the quality o’ the paper.

11 [Robert W. was called up during the Second World War, served in the Far East in traumatic conditions, and eventually returned to work in Valleyfield. He ended his career, working in “the offices”, i.e. in a white-collar job.]

12 All this new papers and all that happened after the war. When I was on the staff, I was getting’ samples sent frae Germany on the quiet, with different magazines, all these big books that all these superstores send ye out. Well, we’d do it at Valleyfield in the old- fashioned way, where the Germans had new ways o’ doing it. It was a German paper – beautiful and I don’t know how many times cheaper than we could turn out. They commandeered the whole market. And then with bad management and bad foresight, that’s why Scotland went down – not just in paper, in everything, I think […] I went down tae see a mill at Aylesbury near London. They had six or seven paper-makin’ machines. We had only two or three at Valleyfield and they were all over the mill, where they should have been together like the six o’ them in that mill in England. And the six there were goin’ like bombs – and I couldnae see no men there at them! Ye

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couldnae see a soul – it was all done electronically. Well at Valleyfield ye seen laddies [= boys] pulling barrows and men all over the place.

2. Helen W., born 1916

13 When I started in the mill in 1930-31, it was fortnightly wages and it was £1 for the fortnight and your insurance and that off it. That was your wage. So ye were makin’ about ten shillings a week, with your insurance off that. I handed all my wages to my mother and she gave me pocket money. I think it was about half a crown (2/6) pocket money. […] In the mill we started early enough, because we started at six in the mornin’. And then we got stopped for breakfast. I went home for my breakfast because I was [close to the mill]. And then you went out for the forenoon [= morning] and then back home for your dinner and then out again till teatime. […] You finished at five o’clock. It was a long day, from six in the morning tae five at night for a girl of 14. But that’s what it was… Ye finished at dinnertime [= midday] on Saturday. So ye were working about 60 hours a week.

14 […] The work I liked most was the salle, the overhaulin’ and making your own wage. When ye were overhaulin’ ye were lookin’ for marks on the sheet, any flaws on it, and ye put the tae the side. Sometimes there were a good lot of sheets with flaws on them. Ye had to pay attention and look out for them. Then there were an overseer used tae come in.

15 All the overhaulers were women, all women. Some jobs in the mill only women did them. It was the jobs I did, except the cutters, ye got some men there and some women. The men were runnin’ the cutter and had an assistant. And the girls, we were either takin’ the paper away or carting it round or keeping it, catching it at the bottom, where the sheets was gettin’ cut through.

16 […] Well I was 23 when I got married in 1940. I’d been working in Esk Mill nine year. Ye had tae give up the job when ye got married. Ye had no choice, that was the normal. As soon as a girl got married, she gave up her job. There were no jobs in the mill then for married women. Practically all the women in the mill were single, unless they were widows maybe. The manager didnae just come and say tae ye, “Ye’ll have tae give up your job.’ Just that ye knew. And if ye asked for a job after ye were married, they would just say “Well, ye’ll need tae wait and see.”

17 [In fact during the war, Helen W. was taken back almost immediately, as were many women, originally to bleach rags. After having been requisitioned into metalworking for the war effort, she returned to Valleyfield at the end of the war, and stayed at work there until the birth of her first child in 1948. (p. 208-209)]

3. Frances P., born 1919

18 Ye just went down yourself tae the mill and ye just put your name in. My sister worked in the mill then, but I don’t know if she spoke for me. But everybody knew one another then, and they all sort of spoke for one another. Ye went down to the pidge [pigeon- hole] – a check-out place at the mill where ye checked your name in and ye just asked there to have your name put down. So I started in Valleyfield more or less as soon as I left school in 1933.

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19 When I began first I was in what they called the SO department [Sorting Office] where the paper was cut into parcels. And we rolled the parcels up. Where the guillotine used tae cut it intae squares, we had tae parcel them up and send them off. Ye just had tae wrap up the papers, ye sealed them with sealing wax. Some ye got tied with string and some with brown sticky paper. […] They had different kinds of paper, ye know. […] It was quite an interesting job in the SO department. I worked there two years anyway. Then I went up to what we called the overhauling.

20 [And there] ye were on your own, making your own wage. You were on piece, whereas down below, ye were on hourly rates. […] It was heavy lifting though. I mean, they brought in the big barrows, full o’ paper and ye had to lift as much as ye could and sometimes it was really heavy, back-breakin’.

21 […] I worked about four or five years in the overhaulin’. If you made £3-odd a week it was a big wage. Some o’ them worked like anything and maybe made more. But it all depends how hard ye had worked or what your luck was wi’ the bundle of paper you got up. I mean, they made them into reams o’ 500 sheets. And then the girls came and counted them, you see. And then ye got so much maybe tuppence halfpenny [2½ pence] or something for a ream. It all depends what kind o’ paper it was. […]

22 It was quite an interestin’ job when ye think of it now, and if ye went right through the mill it was interestin’ to see it all. …If you went messages or anything ye went through to where the paper was made… I mean ye just kept your eyes and ears open. But there was no training about the rest o’ the mill. Ye were never taken round the mill and things explained to you. There was nothing like that. Unless ye went down yourself and had a look, ye would never have known how paper was produced or anything. They were quite content there. [p. 280-282]

23 But oh, we got a lot o’ cuts on our fingers. That was common. When ye were bringing the paper, ye had a rubber on your finger and you brought the paper and it used tae cut the palms of your hands, ye were all cuts in there […] they were wee, wee fine cuts, ye know. People don’t realize that paper cuts you. We didnae have gloves or protective clothing […] ye got cut at the base of your thumb and the palm of your hand rather than the fingers. [p. 284]

4. Joanna G., born in 1918

24 Joanna G. came from a large family where resources were scarce. She would have liked to train as a pharmacist, but that was impossible. She started at Esk Mill at 14, but left in disgust at the working conditions in what were by then dilapidated premises. A few months later, she signed on at Valleyfield, and stayed there for nine years until her marriage. She was not someone who put up with poor working conditions, see below.

25 My first job at Valleyfield was on the cutters. I sat down at the cutters. There was three different kinds of cutters in the place. […] They used to tae come and ask me tae go special tae this great big yin [=one], because it was heavy, heavy work on it. There was three o’ us girls: Annie Groves, Isa Withnell, a great big tall girl, and myself. Isa was a rare worker. She was big and she could get the paper up. We threw the paper up high, ye see, tae get it piled up afore it went tae be counted. I loved the cutters, because I kent [knew] how they were worked. I was an awful person tae get intae the guts o’ everything just tae see how they worked. The boss, Mr L., he cried [= called] me Johnny

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and he used tae say: “Johnny dae this, Johnny dae that.’ I says tae him: “I’d like tae ken how the cutters work.” He says: “Ye’re no needin’ tae ken how they work, just as long as ye can work them.’ “Ah but,” I says, “if ye ken about it, it makes all the difference.” So of course, I got this bloke tae come and tell me how it all worked. And Mr L. used tae say tae me: “I never kent anybody like you that had tae get into the guts o’ everythin’”. “I just feel,” I says, “that a little learnin’ sometimes it’s a bad thing.” […] Then I was shifted from place to place. If ye were any good at your job, ye wernae long or ye were shifted I went on tae the overhaulin’ after the cutters. […] It was a routine: as the lassies left one part and they needed somebody else, the other girls were moved up intae that job. Some o’ the older women would retire, and the young girls got married. When girls got married, ye had tae leave the mill and re-apply for your job if ye wanted it back. You could go back, but ye had to re-apply. [p. 244-245]

26 When I started work at Valleyfield, they asked me tae join the union. Ye werenae forced into it. They just said tae me “I think it’s a guid idea.” Well I worked in Valleyfield just for a very short time when they came tae me one day and asked me if I would go on the committee [..] There was not a drinkin’ water thing in the place! There was an old broken down tub thing, and they filled it every morning wi’ water. It stood there all day till it was almost boiling wi’ the heat in the place. And there was never a tap. But the old committee were feared tae ask for decent water, just a glass of water! I says “I’ll get you water, supposin’ it’s the last thing I do.” And when I went in, it was this guy an awfully nice man that came from Edinburgh that was there. I kent what I was talking about and so did he. I says tae him: “Now that is not right. There’s no water for anybody tae drink […] There should be a tap in all the departments so everybody can go and get a drink”. Paper makin’ was a hot atmosphere, ye see. And he says: ’”Well there isnae any [running] water in the place.” I says: “Well, ye’ll just have to get it put in, won’t you.” He says: “You’re right there”. So they got taps in all the departments. And they came and asked me what kind o’ tap I wanted. I says: “I want one that ye press down wi’ your thumb like that and it scoots up. That’s what I want.” And that’s what they got. [p. 247]

NOTES

1. Through the Mill: Personal recollections by veteran men and women Penicuik paper mill workers, collected and edited by Ian MacDougall, © Scottish Working People’s History Trust, Falkirk & Edinburgh 2009.

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Appreciation

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Gerda Lerner (1920–2013). Pioneering Historian and Feminist

Linda Gordon, Linda K. Kerber and Alice Kessler-Harris

1 Gerda Lerner was a historian of remarkable eloquence, insight, and courage, an advocate of the importance of history to the pursuit of social justice. She devoted her academic lifetime to showing that women had a history, and that knowing it could alter human consciousness. “Writing history and thinking about women,” she wrote in her collected essays, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998) , “could lead to transformative politics rooted in both thought and experience.”(xv) She was the single most influential figure in the development of women’s and gender history since the 1960s. During her lifetime, a field that once encompassed a mere handful of brave and marginalized historians became one with thousands. The field expanded from Lerner’s development of an MA program at Sarah Lawrence College to the establishment of a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin/Madison to the presence of women’s- history faculty in the great majority of American colleges and universities.

2 All historians are in her debt. She was part of the intellectual movement once called “history from the bottom up,” a movement sparked by the African American civil- rights struggle that saw a vast transformation of the whole discipline. Social history of all kinds was a low-status practice in the 1950s, and political history confined itself mainly to kings, presidents, courts, and congresses. Lerner’s death on January 2, 2013, in Madison, Wisconsin, at age 92, makes this a moment not merely to honor and appreciate her but also to discuss the meaning of her life’s work for all historians.

3 She was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein to a wealthy, secular Jewish family in Vienna in 1920. Her family was typical of the Jewish bourgeoisie in central Europe but also unconventional, as their class status allowed. (Her autobiography, Fireweed, offers a vivid picture of her family and household.) Her father Robert, an ambitious young army officer, married a woman with a substantial dowry, which he used to establish a profitable pharmacy and pharmaceutical factory. That wife – Ilona, mother of Gerda and her younger sister Nora –soon came out as a bohemian who practiced sexual freedom, vegetarianism and yoga. These things scandalized Robert’s mother who decided she had to “save” her granddaughters from their mother’s influence. Since

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they lived in separate apartments in the same large house, the two women were often in unsuppressed conflict and the girls saw frequent fireworks between the two women. Ilona won one fight, naming Gerda’s younger sister Nora, after Ibsen’s play. But she was miserable, furious with her mother-in-law and bored with her husband. Ilona wanted a divorce but under Austrian law would have lost her children to her husband (who would of course have turned them over to his mother) if she had insisted. So instead she negotiated a legal contract: she and Robert would present the public appearance of a marriage necessary to bourgeois respectability but would lead separate lives; Ilona was granted several months vacation away from home each year, and she lived thereafter in a room marked off from the rest of the apartment. The girls were, of course, raised by a string of nannies and governesses. Ilona, meanwhile, bought a separate studio where she entertained boyfriends, while Robert kept a mistress in a separate apartment where he spent most of his evenings.

4 Thus Gerda both witnessed her mother’s striking female independence and was forced into her own independence as a child often without a parent, and as an older sister. Meanwhile she partook in the entitlements and tastes that the Kronstein class position allowed. She became a naughty girl, misbehaving both at home and at school, even flirting with Catholicism. At age ten she was enrolled in an elite gymnasium for girls, where she thrived on the academically demanding environment. As a teenager she moved from resenting and defying her mother toward seeing her as a victim of social restrictions. Meanwhile she was reading Tolstoy and Gorky and listening to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith.

5 From the 1920s Austrian Nazis, encouraged by their German brothers, had been attacking workingmen, Social Democrats and Communists with increasing violence. Anti-Jewish propaganda and discrimination intensified. In 1934 open, armed, civil warfare broke out, so close that Gerda could hear the machine gun fire from her home. Schoolmates organized her into participating marginally in left student activism – she read and passed on left newspapers and contributed to the “Red Aid” charity which helped the families of arrestees and exiles. In 1939 her worried father sent her to England to study English for the summer; hating her placement there, she managed to join a youth camp run by the eminent scientist and Communist J.B.S. Haldane, where she absorbed further Marxist ideas.

6 Many Jews began fleeing after Hitler’s seizure of Austria in March 1938, and her father joined them after being warned that he would be arrested. He had previously established a business in Lichtenstein, which enabled him later to bring his family there. The sturmabteilung (stormtroopers) arrived soon after he left, searching first for subversive books, and then with a warrant for his arrest. In his absence they arrested Gerda and her mother, seeking to use them as hostages to force her father to return. Ilona and Gerda were imprisoned for six weeks and released only after Robert agreed to sell his Austrian assets to Gentiles for a pittance. In prison the two were separated. (Fireweed details the horrors of the incarceration.) Gerda survived with the help of some Communist cellmates who shared their meager portion of food with her.

7 When Gerda arrived in the US in 1939, stateless and alone, she was a teenager shaped by several somewhat contrasting influences: her upper-class sense of confidence and entitlement; her mother’s assertion of female and sexual independence; and the terror of Nazism and imprisonment. These forces, ultimately, set her on her life’s path.

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8 She managed to get in to the US through a former Viennese left-wing boyfriend who had immigrated earlier and then sponsored her as his fiancée. They married and promptly divorced, quite amicably. Moving into a circle of German-speaking anti- fascist refugees, she met Carl Lerner, a Communist theater director, fell in love, and married him in 1941. They moved to Los Angeles, where they joined the Hollywood left. Carl became a successful film editor, best known for his work on Twelve Angry Men, and Gerda began to write. First it was short stories, one of which was published in a left- wing California literary journal, The Clipper. She wrote a novel, No Farewell (1955), based on her Austrian experiences, and collaborated with Carl on some screenplays, notably Black Like Me (1964) which he then directed. She collaborated with her good friend Eve Merriam on a musical, The Singing of Women, produced off-Broadway in 1951. Their daughter Stephanie was born in 1946, Dan in 1947. She and Carl were both Communist Party members and she proved a persuasive organizer; soon she became a national leader in the CP-identified Congress of American Women, attached to the Soviet- dominated Women’s International Democratic Federation. In the CP she met for the first time organized opposition to “male chauvinism,” as it was called at the time, and to racism. She read the work of Marxist feminist Mary Inman and began to learn about America’s deeply entrenched racism.

9 When Carl Lerner’s career was destroyed by the Hollywood McCarthyist blacklists, they returned to New York with their two children. They left the CP. The McCarthyist persecutions were frightening to all those victimized and Gerda, unsurprisingly, would deny her Communist past for fully four decades. But she remained loyal to her friends and furious at the “friendly” witnesses who denounced others to the Un-American Activities committees. Carl found film-editing work through friends, and Gerda turned her organizing skills to women’s groups, such as the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), and she became an early member of the National Organization of Women-NOW (where she was far from the only ex-Communist).

10 At age 38 Gerda enrolled in college at the New School for Social Research where, despite her undergraduate status, she taught one of the first courses in US women’s history in 1962, a point of which she was always very proud. She then moved on to graduate school at Columbia University. Driven by her developing concern with race and women, and defying warnings and belittlement from those who argued for a more conventional and “high status” topic, Gerda wrote a PhD dissertation about the abolitionist Grimke sisters. (At the time, the only other historian working on the nineteenth-century women’s-rights movement was Eleanor Flexner, also, not incidentally, a Communist). With characteristic confidence, she took her dissertation to a high-status trade publisher, Houghton Mifflin, and it was in print only a year after earning a PhD. This was a smart as well as ambitious move, because at the time, academic presses would have been more scornful of women’s history. But her ability to get a trade publisher also reflected her fine writing style – an extraordinary achievement for a woman writing in her second language.

11 Carl became ill and a malignant brain tumor was found. After nursing him through an early and miserable death, Gerda wrote a powerful and painfully honest memoir, A Death of One’s Own (1978). It spoke of their relationship, of his right to know the full facts of his illness, of the violence and mystery of death. She never remarried. She connected her loss of Carl with the deaths of others in her extended family at the hands of the Nazis. Always thinking historically, she observed that “the past must be retraced

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in order to survive the present. The pieces must be joined together…out of the memories, the ashes of destruction, the suddenly revealed meanings.” That could be the epigraph for her autobiography, Fireweed (2002), perhaps the most beautifully written and moving of her many publications. But it too is a history: one that she researched meticulously, often finding that the documentary record proved her memory wrong (a lesson all historians should take in) and that required revisiting the horrors of Nazism and her childhood loneliness.1

12 In 1968 Lerner began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College where in 1972, in partnership with Renaissance historian Joan Kelly, she developed an MA program in women’s history, the first in the US. Twelve years later, in 1980, she won a professorship at the University of Wisconsin, over significant opposition, where she developed a PhD program in women’s history. Advocating for women’s history meant convincing a reluctant generation of historians to incorporate women’s history into the profession. Her own history had prepared her for the task. Jews, she wrote, had deployed their history “as a primary tool for the survival of the people.” (Why History Matters: Life and Thought, 1997, p. 207) Women’s history had to do the same. It had already, she thought, “forced us to question not only why certain content was previously omitted, ignored, and trivialized, but also to consider who decides what is to be included.” (Why History Matters, p. 131). A generation of incipient historians of women came to know her as an architect of the Coordinating Council on Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP), which, beginning in 1969, persuaded the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians to join in improving the status of women. Because Lerner pushed herself, her colleagues, and her agenda hard, she was never a neutral figure. Loved and admired by a legion of devoted followers, she was not always welcomed by traditional historians who resisted her goals.

13 Two related intellectual and personal understandings marked Lerner’s career: a visceral grasp of how power worked and a sense of the relatedness of various forms of inequality and oppression – class, race, gender, and global imperialism. This astute sense of power characterized both her scholarship and her advocacy. Always a canny organizer, in both her faculty positions she recognized that merely teaching women’s history courses would not be enough to build respect for the field, and she strategized to build women’s history programs with visibility and autonomy. At Wisconsin she had the chutzbah to set a condition on accepting the job offer – the university and department had to promise to hire a second faculty member in the field. (That position went to me, and I came to Madison in 1984. For 17 years I was Gerda’s closest colleague). The visibility of these programs, for which Gerda was an indefatigable saleswoman, attracted top-notch students willing to take risks, pursuing graduate work not merely as job training but also out of a commitment to movements for social justice. At Wisconsin, for example, the women’s history program required outreach work by Ph.D. students. They organized regular women’s history lectures aimed at a broad public and developed a project for bringing women’s history into the public schools: producing several slide shows with scripts – this was well before the days of Powerpoint – at both high-school and elementary-school levels on women’s work, women in sports, and women’s activism which they then presented in public school classes. These projects contributed to the building of a tight community among graduate students, many of whom are leading historians today.

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14 Meanwhile Gerda remained an active and influential scholar, although she probably would not have predicted what parts of her work would have the greatest impact and where that impact would be most felt. After the Grimke book, Lerner’s teaching and scholarship never again focused on the relatively few elite or successful women who were already historically known. Her 1969 article, “The Lady and the Mill Girl,” examined class differences among women in the Jacksonian US, probably the first such piece within the second wave of women’s historians to do so.

15 It was her second book, the 1972 Black Women in White America, a collection of primary sources, that had the broadest impact at the time. African American history was a rapidly growing field by then, but neither books nor articles focused on black women were available. Doubters thought, as they had done about women in general, that a lack of sources doomed such projects to failure. So Lerner’s book was a political act, an eye- opener, a treasure trove of sources, and a set of clues in the hunt for further sources. It proved that African American women’s history could be written. A generation of black women historians felt empowered by that book.2

16 Lerner was already a feminist in the 1940s, but in the following decades her political and intellectual orientation grew and changed. Like many of her generation and political background, she was at first uneasy about some of the sexual issues raised by the women's liberation movement; for example she, like Betty Friedan, worried lest the movement’s provocative style and the coming-out of lesbians stigmatize the cause of women’s equality and women’s history in particular, an anxiety she shared into the early 1980s. That changed radically through her master research and writing project of the 1980s, published in the two volumes Creation of Patriarchy and Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1986 and 1993). These volumes share something of the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe – a commitment to understanding the relationship between women and men as a dynamic set of power relations that developed over time, that has psychological dimensions, and that can be changed.

17 Behind this book lay a new conviction that patriarchy was the first and ultimate source of all oppression. To do this massive study she left modern US history for anthropology, archeology, mythology and early modern Europe, and returned to reading widely in German as well as English-language scholarship. This global study of western civilization was part encylopedism and part Germanic grand theory – returning to her Germanic education, she was using the nineteenth-century scholars of patriarchy, such as Bachofen, Marx and Engels, against themselves. Through this study she came to argue that control over women’s sexuality and reproductive power was the root of all forms of domination, a radical-feminist rather than Marxist position. In volume one she cited evidence for pre-patriarchal societies in which women were co-equal or even superior to men, using arguments that resembled those made for “primitive matriarchy,” and relied on the worship of female goddesses for support. Not surprisingly, the work was criticized sharply by ancient historians and anthropologists.

18 In volume two, which covered the middle ages and early-modern Europe, she had greater historical expertise to rely on and provided a sweeping indictment of the effects of patriarchy in suppressing women’s possibilities. But as reviewer Lynn Hunt pointed out, in doing so she diminished the achievements that women had made during these centuries. Still, even in this work some of Lerner’s modern historical understanding appeared. She refused to accept patriarchy as a biological given, but followed the Marxist tradition in considering the rise of agriculture as producing

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patriarchy; she clearly noted the varieties of patriarchy that arose in different socio- economic milieus; she presented men’s appropriation of women’s labor as evidence that women’s subordination is an economic, not just a cultural matter; and she always reminded the reader of class divisions among women.

19 In these two volumes she introduced the scaffolding for a claim that she had been making for some time in her frequent lectures: that depriving women of education and knowledge of their own history was the root of their subordination. Women’s history, she would frequently tell audiences, is the key to women’s freedom. This is of course a distinctly non-materialist claim, for it minimizes the importance of women’s economic subordination and resultant dependence on men. Moreover, many historians would be reluctant to name a single factor as the root of domination. But in making this claim, Lerner the organizer was speaking. She was making the case for the necessity of her life’s greatest work, women’s history, and for it not to be pigeon-holed as a separate “field,” left to specialists. She wanted a holistic history and she wanted a history that served to advance understanding of all forms of injustice. No one has put this better than Natalie Zemon Davis, who has commented on “her unflagging struggle for gender and racial equality, and her courageous effort to think big about patriarchal turns in human history. Her life was a model of triumph over persecution and loss, of continuing hope and connection. Her reach is long and stays with us – lingers like the memory of her laugh.” These qualities earned her recognition as a celebrated historian who garnered dozens of honors, including the presidency of the Organization of American Historians, 17 honorary degrees, and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.

20 Hard-won understanding of the importance of the documentary record led her to preserve her own papers carefully, and to give them to the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. A calendar of the first sections of the papers is available online, and more will be added as her remaining gift is processed. A German-language collection of papers from her family of origin is available on line at the Leo Baeck Institute Archives in New York City.

21 There was disappointment in her later years: indeed, she had misgivings about the turn to gender history which displaced, she thought, the focus from women and from an activist collective subject; and about the continued neglect of women in historical scholarship about the largest questions of our past. Gerda’s disappointments were as global as her ambition: growing inequality, religious fundamentalism, the rise of xenophobia and racism throughout the world, American military and security policy. But Gerda was by nature an enthusiast and any uptick in progressive social movements lifted her spirits. She crowed with delight about the “Arab spring” and Occupy. When the massive demonstrations in defense of labor unions erupted in Madison, Wisconsin, in the fall of 2011, she was ecstatic, and had her son Dan take her there, only regretting that she was too frail to be there everyday.

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NOTES

1. “In the Footsteps of the Cathars,” an essay published in Why History Matters, Lerner reflected on her shock in discovering remnants of internment camps in southern France (p. 20-22). 2. NdT: This book is the only one to have been translated into French, as early as 1975: De l’Esclavage à la ségrégation : les femmes noires dans l’Amérique des Blancs. Textes choisis et présentés par Gerda Lerner ; traduit de l’anglais par Henriette Étienne et Hélène Francès, Paris, Denoël et Gonthier, 1975.

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Varia

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Gender and written culture in England in the Late Middle Ages Genre et culture de l’écrit en Angleterre à la fin du Moyen Âge

Aude Mairey

Experience, though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynough for me...1

1 For more than a decade now, the concept of gender2 has been slowly making its way in medieval studies in France, whereas in English-speaking countries it has been receiving some criticism for being over-used. Similarly, the history of writing, or more generally, of communication, is attracting increased attention in France, primarily through works aiming to construct a textual archaeology – recently charted by Pierre Chastang.3 It should be noted that the research and ideas of English-speaking scholars (as well as of the Scandinavians and Dutch, who frequently collaborate closely with them) on both these issues – and to an even greater extent, on the interaction between gender and written culture – are extremely rich. These works cannot be reduced to the more extreme aspects of the debates surrounding post-modernism and the linguistic turn,4 but deserve to be acknowledged in all their complexity and confronted with the recent questioning from French medieval historians. This is the more relevant since, beyond the often misleading labels, the concerns and issues of both groups frequently coincide.

2 My comments on the history and issues of cultural studies have been published elsewhere, and I will not return to them here.5 Neither is it my intention to rewrite the historiography of gender studies – an area prominent since the end of the 1980s6 within American and British academic landscapes and one which in fact constitutes a multi- faceted entity, embracing numerous, sometimes clearly opposed currents of thought. That particular historiography has been the subject of careful syntheses, most notably in impressive works by Françoise Thébaud and Laura Lee Downs, and also in numerous articles.7 It will nonetheless be helpful here to recapitulate the three important areas of debate which have emerged in recent years, given the significant impact they have had on medieval studies. The first deals with the place of feminism in women’s studies, and particularly in gender studies. A number of researchers have indeed been recently

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troubled by the seeming retreat from a specific vision of feminism at the heart of gender studies. Elizabeth Robertson, for example, has expressed some fear that strictly feminist issues have been displaced by a politically correct vision which sweeps aside the reality of masculine domination and its mechanisms.8 Robertson feels, as do some other researchers, that the notion of gender can only ultimately lead to a watering- down of the specificity of women and their history. Such criticism is equally present in France, and is one of the reasons why the idea of gender has for a long time remained on the peripheries of French research. This criticism is in fact closely linked to the multiple definitions of the term itself.

3 The original sense of gender, which was developed by American psychiatrists and sociologists in the late 1960s-early1970s,9 “is, as it were, the ‘social aspect of sex’, or the difference between the sexes as socially constructed – a dynamic ensemble of practices and representations, with assigned activities and roles, and with psychological attributes: a belief system”.10 The use of this concept from the start allowed emphasis to be placed on various historical dynamics and on situating them in a comparatist context. But in 1986, Joan Scott proposed a new definition: “Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes; and gender is a primary way of signifying power relationships”.11 Thus Scott introduced a more political view, one marked by the questionings of post-modernism, which in turn led her to focus on the construction of gender discourse. At the time, Scott’s hypotheses and interpretations provoked objections from numerous women historians, yet it remains the case that in studies from the 1990s and above all, the 2000s, many points of convergence between the different concepts of gender can be identified.

4 Feminist criticism of gender has however become sharper in recent years, with the emergence in the 1990s of a new field: the history of masculinity, or rather, masculinities, which fell logically into the field of gender studies. Yet study of the history of masculinities does not automatically involve the elimination of the question of masculine domination: both men and women researchers working on these issues are fully aware of this. The spirited introduction to the collection Medieval Masculinities, edited by Clare A. Lees, provides an endorsement: The focus on men in Medieval Masculinities […] is not a return to traditional subjects that implies a neglect of feminist issues, but a calculated contribution to them, which can be formulated as a dialectic. The search for women in the cultural record, the breaking down of disciplinary barriers to that search, and the resultant new inquiries into cultural, social and representational forms afford medievalists a glimpse of a very different history of men. That study, in turn, will modulate the premises, methods and goals of a feminist inquiry.12

5 It is thus indeed a matter of complementing analyses which focus on gender relationships, giving full consideration to their many different dimensions. Again in the 1990s, Judith Butler’s writings, most notably her famous Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, in which she conceives gender as a regulating norm emerging out of “a specific formation of power”, and categories of identity as “the effects of institutions, practices and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin”13 – established a firm theoretical base for, and stimulated interest in queer studies. These are based on the analysis of forms of sexuality that differ from the instituted heterosexual norm, together with the mechanisms of construction of that norm. Certain medievalists have welcomed this thinking, but as far as the present article is

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concerned, the area of queer studies will be taken to fall primarily into the field of the history of sexuality, appearing only incidentally in that of written culture.14

6 There is no doubt that Anglophone medievalists – in particular historians and literary specialists – have been affected by the huge growth of gender studies in the past twenty years15. Works of synthesis and Companions concerned with recent trends in historiography invariably devote a section to gender – whichever way the concept is defined.16 However, in practice, things are a little different; indeed, an analysis of the Bibliography of British and Irish History (ex-Royal Historical Society) provides a much more nuanced perspective. A search of book titles concerning the British Isles, published between 2007 and 2011, covering the chronological period 1000-1500, and which had attached to them one or more of the following keywords: gender, women and masculinity – yielded 372 results.

Articles17 Monographs

Women 274 52

Gender 59 24

Masculinity 12 5

7 The proportion of articles and monographs to which these keywords are linked is about equal: a good quarter of monographs. As far as the keyword masculinity is concerned, it remains rare (17 cases only). What can we understand about the main subjects associated with these terms?

8 If we consider only the keywords, which clearly only allow a very simplified glimpse of the historiographical landscape, women's history is in practice far more significant than gender history proper. The most favoured areas are primarily concerned with religious and devotional history, as well as histories of the monarchy and elites, urban history, and histories of the family and private life. Two women from the English Middle Ages hold places of honour: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. “Written culture” does not appear as a keyword category, but one should stress the fact that religious literature represents the most-studied field, and that literature in the narrower sense holds a significant place (including the works of Chaucer). However, study by keyword proves limited; cultural history is more visible when publications are examined in detail.18

9 In recent years, a number of works on women and gender in the field of cultural history have been located in the context of conceptual thinking about “literacy/orality/ aurality” triptych. For medievalists working in women’s/gender studies, this particular trio is at the heart of their concerns, and for some while scholars have been rethinking the relationships between the three terms. Theories developed by some anthropologists and arising out of what English-speakers describe as “The Great Divide” between societies characterized by writing and those based on oral culture, are currently subject to criticism – as much by other anthropologists as by historians.19 Medievalists cannot help but be concerned with the question of relationships between the written and the oral, which were particularly complex in medieval society.20 “Literacy” (the ability to read and write)21 is no longer viewed as a monolithic concept,

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and this is not just due to the recognition of the importance of pragmatic writing. The definition given recently by Margaret Ferguson seems particularly apt in this respect: Literacy in my usage almost always connotes “literacies” and points to a social relation that has interpersonal, intercultural, international, and interlingual dimensions. Instead of asking “What is literacy?” we might rather ask, “What counts as literacy for whom, and under what particular circumstances?”22

10 In other words, “literacy” cannot be viewed as a static state, but one which constitutes a dynamic process, in interaction with numerous other factors, and in particular with the multiple dimensions of orality. Generally speaking, more and more works are stressing the complementarity of the written and the oral in medieval society. The emergence of the triptych’s third term, aurality, defined by Joyce Coleman as “the reading of books aloud to one or more people,”23 is a strong indication of that. Speaking even more generally, much scholarly thought lies within the framework of communication, although this term is equally problematic and requires rigorous definition with respect to the medieval period: an area investigated notably by Marco Mostert.24 Anglophone scholars do not employ the concept of a communication system, as defined with respect to the medieval period by Jean-Philippe Genet, in particular.25 Yet these different approaches do largely converge.

11 Scholarly works on culture – or rather on women’s cultures – greatly enrich such questions, in that women were for a long time virtually excluded from written culture, firstly by the medieval clerks and subsequently by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars. But in reality, this exclusion only concerns a certain type of written culture: the academic culture, by nature clerical and frequently considered as the very model of written culture. Antje Mulder-Bakker’s introduction to Seeing and Knowing: women and learning in medieval Europe, 1200-1500, proves eloquent on this point: The time has come to abandon the idea of a few learned women living as exceptions on the margin. We have to search for general patterns in their narratives. But at the same time we have to realize that the large majority of them lived in a different world from that of the textually learned; that they used different ways of acquiring and transmitting culture and knowledge. In brief, we must shift our attention from the school and universities, from scholars and scholarship... to the world in which most medieval people lived, the world of seeing and hearing.26

12 Such insistence on the complexity of the content and form of women's learning and its transmission is found at every level, and must lead towards a clarification of the overall complexity of communication systems. Orality, aurality and visual culture can no longer be considered as media or languages inferior to those of written culture. At the same time, their re-evaluation leads to a reshaping of our very conceptions of written culture, whether in the domain of education, pragmatic writing, devotional or literary culture, etc.

13 In the first place, how women were placed for learning to read, and sometimes to write, 27 has been the subject of several analyses. In 1979, Michael Clanchy stressed the essential role of the mother in such learning.28 Several studies then appeared on the same subject, such as those which focus for example on iconography representing Saint Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read. Representations of this particular theme multiplied during the closing centuries of the Middle Ages; according to Pamela Sheingorn, notably, the spread of this motif is a significant indication of the growth in women’s literacy, and a medieval culture in which women's reading – not only among women in the highest society – is recognized as a significant fact.29 This represents one

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of the points of convergence with French works on the subject.30 Beyond their basic learning, women’s competencies in the area of literacy are constantly being revised upwards, both in the context of households or monasteries, although it should be stressed that these reassessments principally concern the final centuries of the Middle Ages.31

14 The systematic study of libraries in monasteries and women’s convents has led above all to a revision of the image of nuns’ bookish culture in several areas. David Bell, in particular, has stressed that a knowledge of Latin was not totally improbable, at least among a minority of nuns.32 He points especially to the vitality of vernacular theological culture among fifteenth-century nuns, and concludes his study thus: The interest of the nuns in fifteenth-century books and literature stands in marked contrast to the unimpressive record of their male counterparts, and if almost all the books were in English and if, from a Latinate theological point of view, most [nuns] were unlearned, what of it? As a consequence [...] of what most men would have seen as their limitations, the spiritual and devotional life of the English nuns could have been richer, fuller, and, one might say, more up to date than that of their more numerous brethren, who, for the most part, were still mired in the consequences of a conservative and traditional education.33

15 Other studies, such as those by Mary Erler, have taken a similar direction, again concentrating on the process of individualized reading in women’s monasteries.34 In addition, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne notes that nuns’ book-reading culture in the thirteenth century should not be underestimated and was far more significant than has long been thought; again, this primarily concerns a culture in the vernacular language of French.35

16 On the secular side, English correspondence of the fifteenth-century has been particularly explored with reference to culture within households.36 Numerous studies have been devoted to the famous correspondence of the Paston family, a family from the English gentry for whom letters extending over several decades exist, a number of them penned by women.37 Rebecca Krug’s study of Margaret Paston’s letters is particularly enlightening, largely because Krug places the social practices of literacy in a context where writing was employed by a person unlettered in the scholarly or academic sense of the term. This situation implies that her literacy was mediated orally: Margaret Paston’s introduction to literate culture through her husband’s legal/ literate practice demonstrates how the demands of daily life led women...to work with written texts even when they possessed few literate skills themselves.38

17 Yet this does not mean that Margaret was not responsible for the content of her letters: she was – in the same way as a man who dictates to a secretary is nonetheless able to manipulate the conventions of written culture,39 and in the same way as she was energetically involved in the management of family matters and the protection of family interests. Margaret does not represent an isolated case. According to Malcolm Richardson, for example, Elizabeth Stonor’s letters (the fifteenth-century Stonors were another family of the English gentry) even prove that a woman of a certain standing could demonstrate both style and vigour: “Her letters show a woman fully capable of dealing with the five rhetorical challenges […] as a result of her personal circumstances, using and even bypassing the epistolary conventions of her time”.40

18 Even if the letters of Margaret Paston and her contemporaries reveal a conscious use of written culture in a primarily practical context, that does not mean that they were

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unconcerned with other types of reading. Generally speaking, questions to do with the reading practice and patronage of noblewomen, of women from the gentry and, to a lesser degree, from the urban elite, have now been well explored.41 Such studies have frequently placed an emphasis on women’s roles as intermediaries in two areas of life: devotion and vernacular literature, while some scholars have equally stressed that the use of books was the manifestation of a form of power.42 Some work has focussed on queens in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, whose role in the promotion of at least a vernacular literature in the Angevin and Plantagenet courts has now been well delineated.43 For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, recent research certainly continues to explore aristocratic patronage: the case of Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, for example, has been studied several times.44 But in the last few years, interest has also been directed towards the possible existence of sub-cultures, inscribed in textual communities which might unite both secular women and those in holy orders. This idea was advanced by Felicity Riddy, in part influenced by Brian Stock's work on the heretical textual communities of the eleventh to twelfth centuries;45 since then, it has been the subject of various studies. Mary Erler’s work, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England, is exemplary here; an expert in her area, Erler nicely presents the issues at stake in this type of analysis in the prologue to her study: This study’s two subjects […] are books and communication networks. Examining the circumstances under which reading took place – not merely what was read – brings these two subjects together. Likewise, the movements of books inevitably illuminate the outlines of a particular community of readers, and such a view of reading coteries can provide a rich sense of what perusing a particular text meant culturally.46

19 Erler concentrates particularly on orthodox communities, but also considers those of the Lollards.47 The study of the latter reminds us of the extent to which the idea of the male or female reader must be viewed in a broad, even metaphorical, sense: the fact that Lollard women were no better-read than their orthodox sisters did not prevent them from memorizing readings from the Bible and the unorthodox teachings heard during meetings. It is quite possible they also passed on such learning.48

20 Either way, these communities or more informally, networks, were formed initially around devotional practice – a fact which leads us directly to the question of their content. This indeed proves to be of an overwhelmingly devotional nature: while the Books of Hours and psalters have certainly prompted numerous studies (as in France) 49 fresh approaches have focused particularly on literary genres traditionally associated with women, such as hagiography, “mystical” literature, didactic literature, or novels.

21 Hagiographic literature, above all in the vernacular, has seen a significant renewal of interest in the past few years, linked as much to recent analyses of the cult of saints as to areas of interest developed by literary historians.50 As is seen to be the case with other literary genres, some of these historians increasingly emphasise the historicization and reception of texts. In addition, hagiographic literature also provides a rich exploratory terrain for gender relations, both in the context of a work’s production and in its content, especially given the survival of a rich body of work on the lives of women saints – works either composed or translated in England during the later Middle Ages, particularly in the fifteenth century. Among privileged themes, of note is the dialectic at work between an author's imagined public and the actual reception of the text. This dialectic is marked by the tensions inherent in the fact that hagiographic literature is of a prescriptive nature. At the same time, several recent

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works have shown that a number of the texts managed to construct some possibilities for negotiation.51 Indeed, the very perception of saintliness can be seen to have evolved. Fifteenth-century authors in particular, adapted their hagiographic stories to reflect their audience and foregrounded the qualities demanded of women from the gentry and nobility of their age, rather than those of virgins from early Christian times. John Capgrave, author of a life of Katherine of Alexandria – the subject of a study by Karen Winstead – provides a highly significant example in this respect: “In his saints' lives and Solace of Pilgrims, he offers models of piety emulable by professional virgins and devout laywomen alike.”52 But beyond these orthodox models embedded in the dominant hierarchy of gender relations, Capgrave (no doubt influenced by the sophisticated circles of East Anglia in which he moved)53 also develops a highly sophisticated vernacular theology, the more remarkable in a context still marked by clerical concerns over the Lollard heresy, then in its final days.

22 Women's access to complex theological problems, within this constrained context linked to the Lollard heresy, emerges even more prominently in connection with the visionary literature of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century, which has been the object of continued and growing interest. The bibliography on two English women writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, is extraordinarily extensive,54 because in their different ways they crystallize a number of problems encountered by both gender history and written culture. Two key areas are those of women authors' authority when it was mediated by a clerk, and women's relationships to written and institutional authorities. Both Julian of Norwich, on an intellectual level, and Margery Kempe, on a more emotional level, developed diverse strategies in order to make themselves heard, as had their continental homologues (Birgitta of Sweden and St Catherine of Sienna, for example), whose texts were translated into English during the same period. Yet in both cases, their strategies worked through their insistence on a mode of communication different from that of the clerks – a method based on vision and their natural position of inferiority, which made possible a more direct contact with the divine. Yet if such strategies for a long time served to bolster the firm opposition between the two ways of learning – intellectual and affective – to the detriment of the latter, recent studies stress that in reality the two paths are not so much opposed, as complementary.55 In the first place, neither Julian nor Margery was isolated, but operated within social networks and communities (whether or not textual). Next – and it is here that thinking about gender relations is relevant – putting thought into writing necessitated collaboration with male clerks who did not oppose the communication of the women’s visions, but on the contrary supported it, thus subscribing to other forms of learning.56 This did not mean that genuine tensions never arose, as testified by the problems encountered by Margery Kempe, who had to appeal to three different people in order to have her visions penned.57 Conversely, both women carefully entwined the two methods of learning, and were almost certainly conscious of doing so. Thus rather than a calling into question of clerical domination, this was an example above all of compromise and negotiation.

23 Nevertheless, in the majority of books on manners, which principally date from the fifteenth century and which may mainly concern urban milieus, an opposition between the two paths of learning clearly emerges, as Anna Dronzek has noted: [In these manuals] it was obligatory to present information in two different ways – for boys, visually, and for girls, aurally – and had different capacities for absorbing this information. Boys could handle abstract rational concepts, while girls learned

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more effectively from information presented in a tangible, physical way, through the use of examples or the experiental model of a parent […]58

24 Furthermore, these manuals point more clearly to other forms of relationships of domination, connected to women’s internalization of values that maintained the patriarchal system. This particular aspect is also found in many other types of text. The English Brut chronicles, one of the most popular in the period,59 offer a good example. Lister Matheson has meticulously studied every mention of women in the work and has demonstrated that: The female characters who appear throughout the narrative [...] suggest that the Brut could function similarly as a “Mirror for princesses” that would have been pertinent to women from the baronial, gentry, and mercantile families of mediaeval England [...]; in general [its stories] serve to buttress and, perhaps, inculcate, the genealogical principles of primogeniture, male inheritance and orderly succession. 60

25 This said, negotiating space still sometimes emerges, and analyses of different behaviour manuals have sought to cast light on the subtleties and nuances of this mechanism.

26 Moreover, it is possible to widen the field of investigation into didactic education by including those who educated women – in particular, priests. The obvious differentiation between men and women in manuals devoted to priestly learning refers to well-known concepts whereby woman bore the mark of natural inferiority; at the same time, however, many male authors were aware of the need to nuance that inferiority. In her discussion of instruction manuals for the clergy, with particular reference to Instructions for Parish Priests by John Mirk (l. 1414), Alison Barr notes: Priests reading John Mirk’s pastoral literature would have learned that women were important parishioners who needed to be addressed specifically in their sermons and not overlooked when they administrated sacraments. They also would have learned that married women had pastoral needs different from single women; that pregnant women had pastoral needs different from widows; and that, at least in some instances, female parishioners needed to be dealt with differently than their counterparts.61

27 All the same, the author does not gloss over the tension between these acknowledgements and traditional conceptions of womanhood, but this kind of analysis accompanies the growing tendency to differentiate women according to their social category, and to define different models of femininity – in the same way as different models of masculinity exist.62

28 In these studies engaging with various aspects of women’s relationships to written culture, certain themes frequently recur – sometimes implicitly; they are also found in literature, in the narrow sense of the term. We should first note the theme of the confrontation between the traditional notions of women’s inferiority and women’s real-life situations – varying greatly according to social standing and geographical origins. This confrontation is frequently connected to the question of relationships to authority. Tensions with respect to authorities (which were essentially masculine) occurred regularly, but often take the form of negotiation on both sides, rather than open resistance. We have observed this in the context of visionary women, who could in addition be made to serve political ends;63 this is similarly seen in fifteenth-century novels and poems, where political thought frequently features. Analyses of such thinking usually turn around the idea of female agency64 and a possible cooperation

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between the sexes (without going so far as to question the hierarchy) in a line of thought critical of the strict separation of private and public spheres.65 This approach does not only concern the most eminent women, such as queens or princesses, even if these last are often praised and viewed as models.66 Comments also focus on women from the gentry – and Margaret Paston is probably not an exceptional case – or on women from the urban elite who read (or listened to) the same works and might belong to the same textual communities (such as Margery Kempe, daughter of a rich member of the middle-classes from Lynn).

29 Turning to the currents of thought seen in literature, the question of counsel-giving appears to be particularly significant.67 Writing in the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, broached the subject in one of his Canterbury Tales – The Tale of Melibee, an adaptation in prose of Renaud de Louens’ Livre de Melibee et de Dame Prudence (1336).68 The character Prudence sets out – citing plentiful authorities as she goes – to convince her husband that forgiveness is better than vengeance. Amanda Welling has demonstrated the extent to which both Prudence’s interpretations and her husband’s reactions were shaped by gender relations.69 Yet it is there, in a sense, that one remains – inside the sphere of husband-wife relations, where soothing and feminine counsel is often viewed as a requirement of the wifely role. Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, goes further in his Confessio amantis – a mirror for the ideal prince, which draws greatly on exampla. Several of them focus on the question of counsel, and certain scholars have observed that Gower pays particular attention to gender matters in his writing, to the extent of proposing a feminized mode of counsel within the public sphere. As Misty Schieberle notes with reference to The Tale of Three Questions (I, 3067-3402): Not only does the Tale engage problems of advice and pride prevalent in Book I, but it also argues for a feminine persona as the solution to the difficulties of challenging a rash, wilful monarch [...]. A feminized mode of counsel relies upon “feminine” subordinate performance, as distinct from masculine aggressive techniques.70

30 Of course, Gower carefully avoids questioning the axiom of feminine obedience and women advisers are always situated in a submissive position. Yet it is that subordinate position itself (comparable to the position of advisers in general or of visionary women with respect to the clerical institution) that enables them to reveal disturbing truths to the prince without suffering an angry riposte.

31 Over and above the question of counsel and linked to matters of intercession – the prerogative of queens – some texts raise the still thornier issue of female power. Anne Bartlett, for example, has studied the significance of the commission given by Margaret of Beaufort (mother of Henry VII and powerful woman par excellence) to William Caxton, to translate the novel Blanchardyn and Eglantine. The work recounts the education of a young chevalier prince, who is taken aback at his rejection by Queen Eglantine, with whom he is in love. According to Bartlett: Blanchardyn and Eglantine constitutes a thinly veiled, highly idealized, and deeply didactic account of its patron's own exercise of governance, and highly personal propaganda for the rapidly expanding audience of English readers.71

32 In formulating this theory, Anne Bartlett means to question more universally the traditional interpretations of gender relations in novels, according to which women are largely excluded from the public sphere. Reflections on women’s power, a more problematic area, also appear in the Life of Katherine of Alexandria, by John Capgrave. The Queen, still at this stage a heathen, is effectively ordered to marry, since in the

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view of her kingdom’s lords, she cannot reign on her own. However, in the lengthy ensuing debate, Katherine manages to refute the arguments of her masculine opponents. The debate, of great complexity and including some ambivalence, carried strong contemporary resonance – it was written while the English monarchy was facing a grave crisis linked to the incompetence of the reigning king, Henry VI of Lancaster. Yet the ripples travelled even wider with respect to the question of female power. As Karen Winstead has stressed: Capgrave portrays his heroine as an almost tragic figure, whose desire for sovereignty though understandable is impractical, and whose fate conveys a stern warning to those who would challenge the conventional wisdom about women’s proper place in society [...]. Yet, in spite of this conservative message the Life of Saint Katherine lends itself to – indeed, practically invites – more radical interpretations. 72

33 If Capgrave finishes by condemning Katherine’s ambitions, the complex nature of his work suggests that the debate was, in his eyes, worthy of being aired; this is the more significant since the text was composed in English, thus aimed at a wide and mixed audience.

34 Katherine of Alexandria nonetheless represents the embodiment of a saint endowed with strong intellectual powers and fulfils the academic model of written culture. Her popularity suggests that certain contemporaries did not reject the possibility of women’s access to that type of learning; and a number of works, written by men in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century, and known to have been read by women, can certainly be seen as sophisticated intellectual models – written in the vernacular tongue. At the same time, the majority of recent publications in various fields discuss the relationships between gender and written culture, and stress the complexity of the issues involved. A certain number of analyses in the past twenty years – of which we have mentioned only a few examples – insist ever more strongly on the diversity of situations and models, depending on the social, political and religious context. These works widen and problematize the notion of women’s literacy, but also of literacy itself, in addition to relationships of power between men and women and their consequent tensions and negotiations. Thus research is shaping a densely woven cultural landscape, in which women’s voices – difficult though they may be to capture – acquire their full place.

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NOTES

1. Chaucer, “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Canterbury Tales, lines 1-2, cited by Benson 1987: 105. 2. See Jeanne 2008; Bührer-Thierry, Lett & Moulinier-Brogi 2005. 3. Chastang 2008. 4. See criticism by Noiriel 1996. 5. Mairey 2008. 6. Boxer 2001; Downs 2004b. 7. Thébaud 2007; Downs 2004b. See Lett 2008 for the Middle Ages. 8. Robertson 2007. This is not a new debate: see Thébaud 2007: 140-141. 9. Stoller 1968; Oakley 1972. 10. Thébaud 2007: 121. 11. Scott 1999: 42 [article first published in. 12. Lees 1994: xv-xvi. 13. Butler 1990: viii and ix respectively. 14. See Drake 2008; Burgwinkle 2006. 15. See website Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index (http://www.haverford.edu/library/ reference/mschaus/mfi/mfi.html). Please note this site has not been updated since April 2010. 16. See in particular Little & Rosenwen 1998; Partner 2005; Mairey 2008: 154. 17. Includes chapters in edited works. 18. The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, available in hard copy only, makes this type of survey much more difficult. See the 2008 edition, vol. 82. 19. For the debate between anthropologists see Goody 2000, who sets out his thinking on the impact of writing technology. 20. See the pioneering works by Clanchy 1993; Stock 1983; Briggs 2000 for a recent historiography. For the German historiography, see Keller & Kuchenbuch 2002. 21. Some researchers have adopted a French version of “literacy”: “littératie”. 22. Ferguson 2003: 3-4. 23. Coleman 2007: 69. Her approach is developed in Coleman 1999. See also Cherewatuk 2004. 24. Mostert 1999 (a significant bibliography). 25. Genet 1997: 13. For linguistic matters see Mairey 2011.

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26. Mulder-Bakker 2004: 11. See also: Mulder-Bakker & McAvoy, 2009. 27. In the Middle Ages, learning how to read and how to write constituted two distinct processes. 28. Clanchy 1993: 251-252. 29. Sheingorn 193; See also Scase 1993. 30. See in particular Alexandre-Bidon 1989. 31. However, for the High Middle Ages, we are able to refer to the works by Rosamond McKitterick and her disciples both for the Carolingian Period and for works on Anglo-Saxon literacy: McKitterick 1990. 32. Bell 1995. On the knowledge of Latin in secular circles, see, for example, Hirsch 2007. 33. Bell 1995: 76-77. 34. Erler 2004. 35. Wogan-Browne 2003. 36. On English correspondence in general, see Taylor 1980; for women's correspondence, see Cherewatuk and Wiethaus 1993; Daybell 2001. 37. Davis 1976-2004. Some letters by women from the family have been modernized and published separately by Diane Watt (2004). On the Pastons, see Richmond 1990-2000; Barber 1993. 38. Krug 2002: 29. See also Harding 2004. 39. Douglas 2009. See also Speeding 2008. 40. Richardson 2005: 57. 41. See Bell 1988; McCash 1996; and more recently, McCash 2008. 42. See Michelove 2004. 43. Honeycutt 1996; Parsons 1996; Short 1992. 44. Bell 1998. 45. Riddy 1993. 46. Erler 2002: 6. 47. See in particular McSheffey 1995; Aston 2003. 48. Aston 2003: 173-178. 49. See for example Scott-Stokes 2006; Smith 2003. 50. Salih 2006. On the wider movement of reflection on the Cult of Saints see Ashley & Sheingorn 1990; and more recently, Jenkins & Lewis 2003; Coletti 2004. 51. See in particular Mooney 1999; Sanok 2007; Winstead 1997. 52. Winstead 2007: 90. 53. Rosenthal 2002. 54. Bibliographies can be found in McAvoy 2008; Arnold & Lewis 2004. The Book of Margery Kempe has been translated into French: Magdinier 1989. 55. See Mulder-Bakker 2001. I should point out that at one period in the historiography, Margery Kempe was perceived more as resisting the system. See for example Staley 1994. 56. The pioneering article is Beckwith 1992. See also Benedict 2004; Coakley 2006; Renevey & Whitehead 2000. On the particular point, see also Erler 2007 57. Coakley 2006. 58. Dronzek 2001: 151. 59. Their title comes from Brutus, grandson of Aeneas and eponymous founding hero of Britain. 60. Matheson 2008: 237. For a slightly different interpretation of the place of women in the Brut, see Baswell 2007. The author studies the subversive aspects of “Albyne”, the “pre-founder” of Britain. 61. Barr 2008: 19. See also Barr 2006. 62. See Phillips 2008. 63. See Warren 1999. 64. Erler & Kowaleski 2008; Collette 2006. 65. Coss 1998.

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66. Note the number of entries in the bibliography of The Royal Historical Society. With reference to France, see Lett & Mattéroni 2005. 67. Ferster 1996. 68. Which itself is an adaptation of Liber consolationis et consilii, by Albertanus of Brescia (1246). 69. Walling 2005. 70. Schieberle 2007: 104. 71. Bartlett 2005: 57-58 72. Winstead 1994: 375. See also Winstead 1990.

ABSTRACTS

In recent years many English-speaking (but also Dutch and Scandinavian) scholars have fruitfully explored the interactions between gender and written culture in late medieval England. These studies merit consideration and comparison with recent developments in French historiography. Many of these works can be placed within the framework of studies on « literacy/orality/ aurality » and pay particular attention to the complexities of the content and forms of women’s knowledge and their transmission at all levels. These studies emphasize the multiplicity of situations and models according to social, political and religious contexts. They enlarge and question the notion of literacy as well as the relations of domination between men and women and the resulting tensions and negotiations. As such, they map a far more complex cultural landscape.

Nombre d’analyses et de réflexions d’Anglo-Saxons (mais aussi de Scandinaves et de Néerlandais) sur les interactions entre genre et culture écrite en Angleterre à la fin du Moyen Âge ont été, ces dernières années, d’une grande richesse. Elles méritent d’être appréhendées dans toute leur complexité et d’être confrontées aux récents questionnements de l’historiographie française. Une grande partie de ces travaux s’est inscrite dans le cadre d’une analyse renouvelée du triptyque « literacy/orality/ aurality » et insiste sur la complexité des contenus et des formes de savoirs féminins et de leurs transmissions à tous les niveaux. Ces études soulignent la multiplicité des situations et des modèles selon les contextes sociaux, politiques et religieux. Elles élargissent et problématisent la notion de literacy ainsi que les rapports de domination hommes/femmes qui en résultent, dessinant un paysage culturel toujours plus dense.

INDEX

Mots-clés: historiographie, Angleterre, Moyen Âge, genre, culture écrite Keywords: historiography, England, Middle Ages, gender, written culture

AUTHOR

AUDE MAIREY Aude Mairey is an agrégée with a doctorate in history, and has a research post with the CNRS (Paris laboratory for western medieval studies). She specializes in the cultural and political

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history of late medieval England, especially the links between lanuages and society. Her recent publications include a co-edited Dialogues et résistances: anthologie de textes anglais de la fin du Moyen age (2010) and a biography of Richard III (2011). [email protected]

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