University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/36273 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Gender and Technology in the East Midlands Boot and Shoe Industry: 1850-1911 Jill Greenfield Submitted for the degree of PhD, Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick. March 1998. 1 Acknowledgements Firstly I wish to express my thanks to my supervisor Maxine Berg, particularly for sticking by me at times when things were not progressing smoothly. My thanks are also due to Terry Lovell, Director of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender. Terry's sage advice and her ability to appear calm, perhaps when she did not always feel it, was much appreciated. Also I would like to express my gratitude to various students in both the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, and in t'.e Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick 'ho \ia'e,, o'er tl'e 'yeam, Oii friendship and stimulating discussion. I am indebted to staff and archivists at Northampton Record Office, Lc)ccster Record Office and various academic and local libraries. I would like to give a special thank-you to the staff at the headquarters of NUFLAT at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, who over many weeks of research were so kind and helpful - the regular cups of tea were very much appreciated. Chris Reid has been involved in this project from its inception right through to the finished thesis. He has read many and various drafts and always offered sound advice and criticism. I would particularly like to thank him for always believing in me, even when I had ceased to believe in myself! I owe another major debt to Mike Tadman, whose support and encouragement has lifted me on so many occasions, and who has read the whole thesis and offered much appreciated comments. Thanks for the apostrophes! Finally I would like to acknowledge the huge debt which I owe to Sean O'Connell. Sean has worked tirelessly on my behalf, reading and re-reading H everything and making endless valuable comments on my work. More importantly, Sean has shown a commitment to both my work and to me which has constantly astonished me. His love, kindness, intelligence and occasional tetchiness have, quite literally, got me through the long process of writing this thesis. I would not have done it without him. iv Contents Title Page 1 Acknowledgements 11 Contents iv List of Figures iv List of Tables V Introduction 1 Chapter One Dating the Growth of the Boot and Shoe Industry 15 Chapter Two Cultures of Production: Traditions and Influences in Leicester and Northampton 47 Chapter Three Cultures of Production: Responses to Technology in Leicester and Northampton 65 Chapter Four Reactions to Industrialisation 102 Chapter Five New Technologies and Their Threat to 'Masculine Skill' 150 Chapter Six Gender, Technology and Industrial Relations 182 Conclusion 213 Appendix One Chronology of Major Events 220 Appendix Two Glossary of Shoemaking Terms 222 Appendix Three The Debate about the Sewing Machine's Introduction 229 Bibliography 231 V List of Figures Chapter 3 Figure 1 A Middleman Manufacturer's Upper Chamber 78 Chapter Six Figure 2 Union Banner (National Union of Operative Rivetters and Finishers) Figure 3 Union Banner (National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives) 198 vi List of Tables Chapter 1 Table 1 Number of Boot and Shoe Manufactures in Northampton 30 Table 2 Leicester Hosiery and Footwear Firms 1846-19 14 44 Chapter 3 Table 3 Size of Factories in the Boot and Shoe Industry 1851 68 Table 4 The Growth of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Leicester 1841-1877 91 Introduction 1 Introduction Gender and History Many scholars now consider that gender is an important category in historical study, but unfortunately many do not practice what they preach. Feminists have recognised for some time the importance of some form of historical analysis to feminism, or at least what Judith Allen calls 'a historically grounded feminism'. The protagonists in the debate disagree considerably, however, over the methodology which feminist historians should adopt. The various positions taken up have led to a schism between those who believe the feminist challenge to mainstream, or what Elizabeth Fox- Genovese calls 'official' history, should be mounted from within the discipline of history or from outside it. Judith Allen claims that the work which has been done in women's history to date serves to raise considerable doubt that accepting the discipline of history as present'y constituted is a 'riabe option lot feminism. Sie sees the phallocentric characteristics of history as an obstacle to feminists using history. Allen feels that 'no less than Marxism, feminism is opposed by professional historians as an ahistorical grid of abstraction and prescription, threatening the integrity of the historical evidence. 'LlI The attitude of historians imbued with 'positivist' conceptions of history have thus tended to relegate women's history into a sub-disciplinary specialisation which J. Allen (1986) 'Evidence and Silence: feminism and the limits of history', in C. Pateman and E. Gross (Eds.), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, Sidney: Allen and Unwin, p. 177. 2 can, in effect, only make an implicit challenge to the credibility of the mainstream. Allen argues that from a feminist perspective, this challenge should be made explicit and her solution to this is to place feminist history outside mainstream history, claiming 'it is only when we realise that we lose nothing in recognising and acknowledging our position outside traditional academic disciplines, that we find where our strength lies'.'2 Fox-Genovese disputes this claim and goes so far as to argue that the wholesale rejection of 'official' history is dangerous - 'for the strategy capitulates to official history's insistence upon the universal claims of female biology.'t31 Feminist historians agree that the writing of so-called 'women's history' which has tried to work within the existing positivist parameters of history - that is those which see empirical data as the ultimate authority in historical analysis - has been valuable in providing much descriptive material about women in the past. It has at least forced a grudging acceptance upon 'official' history that, although women did not win wars and set up the great institutions of state, they were actually doing something - if only reproducing the next generation of 'history makers'! However, feminists argue that this type of women's history is not enough - in the words of Fox-Genovese: 'Adding women to the received account - especially in the form of a few more neglected worthies or a lot more descriptive social history - does not necessarily change anything substantive in our manner of writing [2] Ibid., p. 188. [3] E. Fox-Genovese, 'Placing Women's History in History', New Left Review, No. 133 (1982), p. 14. 3 history' . E41 In fact, if anything, this approach to women's history may well have led feminists into a cul-de-sac where women as 'historical subjects' are somehow removed from the broader historical process. This problem has been reinforced by the practice of social historians looking at human relationships, which has led to the legitimation of areas of study such as the history of the family. However, Fox- Genovese argues that these accounts have been hampered by Parsonian functionalism which, while acknowledging the importance of family life in the stabilisation of social relations and political cultures, has led to viewing women as naturally fitting into female roles, and furthermore to seeing the family itself as a natural unit of study, apparently unchanging with the turmoil of the historical process. Thus women's history can be viewed as falling into the trap of treating women as 'other'. Feminist historians argue that what is necessary is a complete challenge to the current epistemology of history. Furthermore, according to both Joan Scott and Fox- Genovese, this challenge must be launched from within the discipline - otherwise feminist history is doomed to be always a sub-set of mainstream history, easily ignored (or ghettoised) by those not practising it. As Raphael Samuel has noted: 'Historians ... though increasingly divided by the multiplication of sub-disciplines, have remained apparently immune to epistemological doubt. " Feminist historians largely concur that the challenge to mainstream history should be waged through an insistence that historical investigation envisage gender as the central (to Joan Scott) or fundamental (to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese) analytic category. Gender is a way of referring to the social organisation of the relationship [41 Ibid., p. 6. R. Samuel (1991) 'Reading the Signs', History Workshop Journal, No. 32, p. 91. 4 between the sexes - or what Scott calls 'a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits. The conviction that gender is socially determined frees historians from the trap of biological determinism - and thus from ultimately fatalistic analyses of historically determined social relations. The centrality of gender to historical analysis means that we should no longer work on the subjected sex, rather on the assumption that women and men are determined in terms of one another. The implication of this is that we should be interested in the history of both women and men and, as such, the problem of viewing women as 'other' will be obviated. This thesis has been influenced particularly by the work of Fox-Genovese, who sees gender as a fundamental category for historical analysis, and emphasises that we must understand the gender system as a crucial feature of all social relations, which 'simultaneously inaugurates the essential restoration of women to historical process and moves us beyond the dead end of attempting to establish sexual difference as an agent of historical causation.