If anyone can afford to buy this book, or order it through a public library, it would be well worth it. Sheila Lewenhack has carefully documented the role of women in the productive process from pre-industrial society through the first world war to the early 60s. She does not, however, attempt to analyse the economic and ideological role of women in production in relation to her position in the family.
Most importantly, Sheila Lewenhack shatters the myth that women have only recently become part of the labour movement and thus peripheral to it. ‘Women workers… were there before unions existed. They shared in labour history from its earliest beginnings… for the mass of the female population… life meant work. Women’s lower status as citizens left them with a lower status as workers and held back their Trade Union organisation. But throughout British history they have, to some extent, been involved in organisations of workpeople and played some part in the labour and Trade Union movement.’
But it is true to say that at no time were women equal in status to men. Before the Industrial Revolution women worked in the home alongside the rest of the family — weaving, spinning, etc. and working on the land. Merchants would often pay a lower wage for the women’s products or pay the head of the household for the products of the whole family. This was known as the ‘family wage’, and ensured the binding of the family to the merchant. Some women had their own crafts as brewers, fishmongers, bell-founders, tanners or glovemakers and were often members of guilds. But here again they were often paid less for their products and the men tried to force them out of the craft.
With the Industrial Revolution the peasantry were forced off the land and into the growing towns to find work. For women this meant either work in the factories, mainly in the textiles industries where she could use her skills at spinning and weaving, or as domestic servants. Until the first world war huge numbers of women were domestic servants, working for a pittance extremely long hours. Sometimes police would literally force women into domestic work. For women who could find no paid work prostitution was often the only alternative.
Before the Industrial Revolution the running of the domestic household and social production existed alongside each other. The growth of the factory system and its high productivity made it impossible for the old cottage industry to survive. The factory system brought about a total separation in time and place between social production in the factory and domestic work in the home. For women this meant exploitation in the workplace coupled with oppression in the home — working class women’s oppression under capitalism — the basis of the modern women’s question.
As machinery became more and more advanced jobs became fewer. Women and children were used by employers as cheap labour often in preference to men. The response of the male workers was to try and protect their living standards, and that of their families, by pushing women and children out of production. The skilled craft worker was especially hostile to women workers.
In many jobs employers, with the support of male workers, operated a ‘marriage bar’ where women had to leave the job when they got married. The pattern of men trying to keep women out of work as the means of protecting their wages and jobs has persisted throughout labour history. For the employers the struggle between different sections of the working class for jobs kept deliberately scarce, defuses the militancy of the working class, enables them to cut wages and keep profits high. Furthermore, women can be used as a cheap pool of labour — a cheap, undercutting alternative to expensive, well-organised male workers.
The craft unions, with the most conservative section of the working class, were closed to women and so women formed their own Friendly Societies or all-female unions which tended to ghettoise them from the working class. Nevertheless, many sections of women were extremely militant, especially in the textile industries, which had the only mixed trade union, and where many women were active supporters of the suffragette movement.
Lewenhack documents a number of strikes led by women themselves — for example a successful strike for higher wages by Kensington washerwomen in 1834, and a struggle for equal pay by textile workers in Glasgow in 1833. But it was the unskilled unions, formed in the 1890s against the elitism of the craft unions, that drew women in. Women were often given lower grading, ensuring they couldn’t have a place in the leadership, or put into all-female branches.
The strikes in 1887 of the matchworkers union, of the onion skinners in East Ham, and the rubber workers in Silverstown led by Eleanor Marx, gave women renewed confidence. By 1913 433,000 women were in Trade Unions. During the first world war, inexperienced women were drawn into production in vast numbers, many of whom had never worked before. Child-care facilities mushroomed for this new army of labour. Men, fearing for their jobs, actually campaigned to unionise them and fought for equal pay in jobs held by men fighting in the war. By 1918 there were 1,209,278 women in Trade Unions — an enormous increase.
But after the war, women were thrown out of work with the full agreement of the Trade Unions. By 1920 women’s trade union membership had fallen to around 700,000 and women took little part in the unemployment demonstrations and marches in the 20s and 30s.
An important factor in the failure of the trade union movement to take up and support women’s rights are the trade union leaders. Sheila Lewenhack describes a strike by 30,000 chain workers in the Black Country for a minimum wage in 1912. The Union leaders negotiated with the employers and sent the workforce back with 23 shillings for the men and only 12 shillings a week for the women. The TUC resolved in 1909 to press for a minimum wage for all workers but 50% more for men. There are many other examples. It will be necessary therefore for women to fight trade union leaders as well as male workers to fight at the rank and file level.
It is not hard to see why women are suspicious of trade unions and why they are so neglected by the trade union movement today. If women are to take an active part in the trade unions they need to win policies of positive discrimination within those unions — encouraged to become shop stewards, union meetings in work time, and real commitment to their struggles from male workers in the fight to build a mass working class women’s movement.
