Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in The

52 MARIANNE ROSTGÅRD 13 Oversigt over løn og fortjeneste for mandlige og kvindelige arbejdere på tekstilfabrikkerne i København og provinsen 1. juli 1906–1. april 1907. I.H. Rubens’ Arkiv, Erhvervsarkivet. 14 Stof og Saks, 2.årg. nr. 2 februar 1951, artiklen: Kvinder. Løn. Arbejdsglæde. Chapter 4 Foreign Technology and the Gender Division of Labour in a Dutch Cotton Spinning Mill Gertjan de Groot Since Marx, cotton spinning has been the classical example for studying the relationship between technology and skill. Extensive historical research on cotton spinning has, until very recently, concentrated on the Lancashire situation.1 By comparing the workforce in British and Dutch cotton spinning, it is possible to evaluate some of the explanations that are often offered for gender segregation. This comparative perspective has the advantage that the application of the same kind of technology can be studied in a different social setting. As the Dutch cotton spinning mill started off employing British technology, the technology itself was identical in both countries. The role of technological change in the process of sex-typing of jobs can thus be demonstrated by comparing the influence of the same technology in two countries. I shall argue in this chapter that the gender division of labour was transferred from one country to another along with the technology. The English Debate When a group of Manchester mill owners commissioned Richard Roberts to design a self-acting mule, their principal objective was to break the power of the militant spinners’ union. The self-acting mule was to be tended by cheap female or juvenile labour.2 Contrary to the employers’ expectations, however, adult males managed fully to retain their position as spinners in England. Various authors have different explanations for the fact that the employers’ expectations were never realized. Four views can be distinguished on this problem. The first stresses the continuing importance of greater physical strength needed to operate a self-actor. Otherwise unskilled female labour would have replaced skilled male labour at the self-actor.3 Recently Eleanor Gordon took the edge off this argument: ‘the Scottish evidence illustrates the folly of generalizing on the basis of Lancashire experience and the dangers of a posteriori reasoning. Women’s work as spinners may have been restricted to the coarser numbers and the smaller mules, but in Glasgow women worked as piecers on all classes of spinning, that is, all sizes and speeds of common mules and self-actors…with the same number of piecers per self-actor as the Lancashire system, namely, two piecers to one 54 GERTJAN DE GROOT spinner.’4 The argument that physical strength explains the dominance of men is refuted by the Scottish situation. A second school of thought has identified the exclusionary rules and practices of male-dominated trade unions as the critical factor which prevented the hiring of unskilled women.5 This view is shared by Maxine Berg: ‘By the 1830s Andrew Ure could represent the factory system and the machine as a method of disciplining labour and dispensing with difficult groups of skilled workers. But the most difficult group of workers, the mulespinners, managed to maintain their position in face of the threat from the self-acting mule, by fighting for control over the new machinery, rather than by trying to stop its progress altogether.’6 A third view adopts an eclectic approach and maintains that female exclusion is due to both these factors, linked with the inability of women to exercise authority over piecers.7 Lazonick insists that the gender division of labour within cotton spinning finds its source in the influence male spinners exercised over their assistants. In his view, men were more able than women to supervise their assistants and thereby increase production. This made spinning a male job.8 A fourth perspective is held by Mary Freifeld.9 Contrary to the prevailing view she maintains that spinning on the self-actor remained skilled work. In her provocative article she argues that the self-actor did not deskill the mule spinners; on the contrary, the new machine provided ‘the foundation for the reconstitution of skill on a new basis’ so that ‘mulespinning on the “self-actor” remained skilled work’.10 The deskilling interpretation, she insists, is a myth propagated by the machine builders and by Karl Marx, Neil Smelser, Joseph White, Keith Burgess, John Foster, William Lazonick, A.E.Musson, and Isaac Cohen. She undertakes the task of demystifying ‘the concept of the deskilled machine tender taken from Marx’, noting: ‘We are all so much under the influence of Marx…that evidence to the contrary with respect to the “selfacting” mule is ignored, or explained away’.11 It is remarkable that she, as the only female author in this debate, defends the ‘skilled’ work of the male selfactor spinners. The only support for her interpretation that self-actor spinning was skilled work comes from trade unionists. For example in 1919, John Taylor of the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners declared: ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the mule spinners are men. The reason why men are employed is that it is a large and complicated machine and requires skilled attention and the rooms in which the work is done are very hot.’12 Since the publication of the article ‘Sex and Skill’ by Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor,13 we are warned not to take judgments of men on skill for truth. Phillips and Taylor were the first to show that what generally had been described as skilled work was men’s work. The work of most women was automatically labelled as unskilled or semi-skilled. It was not so much the content of labour, but the gender of the performer that defined the ascribed level of skill. Skill was largely a social construct. Seen from this perspective, it is logical that the trade unionist John Taylor defines the spinner’s work on the self-actor as skilled in 1919. During the First World War, women took over the work of men who went A DUTCH COTTON SPINNING MILL 55 to the front on a large scale. They showed that they were able to perform the so-called skilled male jobs. During an investigation after the First World War, male trade unionists were very keen on proving that some jobs were really skilled and therefore men’s jobs. Cohen strongly disagrees with Freifeld. He admits that the self-actor did not live up to the claims of its inventor; it did not diminish the skill required of the spinner. Freifeld, according to Cohen, correctly argues that spinning on selfactors required familiarity with different types of raw cotton, knowledge of the influence of humidity and temperature on the yarn fibres, experience in supervision, and the skills that are necessary to maintain the machine and to control yarn quality. But, in addition, she goes on to say that ‘while the quality control and mental oversight functions remained unchanged…all that had been accomplished by the introduction of the “self-actor” was the intensification of the mechanical adjustment tasks of the spinner’.14 Cohen argues: ‘Although the adjustment of the quadrant nut required attentiveness, and although the regulation of the faller demanded a certain degree of dexterity, both these operations could be taught in a relatively brief period of training. By no means did their execution constitute any longer a highly skilled craft, as had been the case with the hand mule and, to a considerable extent, with the power-driven mule as well.’15 Freifeld claims that the exclusion of women as spinners was caused by ‘the breakdown in the intergenerational transmission of female skills…. It was the lost female craft heritage on short mules that provided the deep structure for the rise of an all-male aristocracy of labour, and the exclusion of women from the skilled work of mulespinning on the “self-actor” during the late nineteenth century.’16 Gordon argues in her recent study on Scotland: Whether or not the loss of the craft of mule spinning to a generation of women explains their exclusion from the Lancashire trade, it has little relevance for the Scottish situation. Admittedly before 1837 there were few women spinners and piecers, but after the strike female piecers were widely recruited, ensuring a plentiful supply of women who had acquired a training in the craft of spinning. Whether or not women were specifically trained as spinners, they seemed to pick up the skill From the 1840s in Glasgow there would have been no shortage of trained women with requisite skills, and yet men continued to dominate spinning for twenty years after this.17 Dutch Cotton The Dutch cotton industry started in the region of Twente, in the eastern part of the Netherlands. In this region, the soil was very poor, and peasants used to spin and weave at home in addition to working their land. The Dutch cotton industry was mechanized much later than the British. Even in the 1840s, Ainsworth 56 GERTJAN DE GROOT advised Dutch cotton manufacturers to set up schools to teach homeworkers the technique of weaving, instead of mechanizing weaving. According to him: To establish powerlooms, where labour is as low as in this country, would be an undeniable absurdity.’ According to Ainsworth, wages in Twente were a quarter of those in Manchester at this time.18 Cotton spinning was only mechanized on a large scale after the 1860s, and it took another thirty years before weaving was fully mechanized. The foundation of the Dutch Cotton Spinning Mill in 1865 was one example of the large-scale mechanization that took place in cotton spinning at that time.

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