Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by Gertjan de Groot and Marlou Schrover. London: Taylor & Francis, 1995. ix + 206 pp. Notes, charts, graphs, figures, photographs, and index. $75.00. ISBN 0-7484-0261-6.

Although women are taking to the "net" in large numbers, apparently finding "community on the web," technology, according to the traditional stereotype, is intimidating to women. Technical competence and innovation is associated with masculine gender identity. Yet the conventional theory of historical change argues that technology in the workplace has over time reduced the role of skilled work, and allowed the substitution of cheaper, young, female labor for experienced adult men, that is, that women replace the men in operating the new machines. The historians in this volume prefer to highlight the complexity of the interaction between women's work and technological change in Britain, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. Their interpretations on established themes are compelling if not fully satisfying.

Harriet Bradley describes the carryover of the gendered division of labor from the British cottage industry into the factory. (An interesting parallel is the work of Helen Harden Chenut, "The Gendering of Skill as Historical Process: The Case of French Knitters in Industrial Troyes, 1880-1939," in Gender and the Reconstruction of Working-Class History in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonya Rose, 1997.) Like Marianne Rostgard (who here writes of the studies the Danish textile industry), Bradley concludes that the reason for women's lower wages in weaving and spinning was not the difference in skills but the fact that men, both workers and employers, "did not see women as equals and mates" (Rostgard, p. 50), and that the general attitude made women's social roles, rather than work, central to her identity (Bradley, p. 31). Women worked in the mechanized textile industry doing many of the same tasks as men but being paid less, without threatening the male worker's domain. Gertjan de Groot insists that this gendered division of labor was then imported into the Netherlands along with the machines: "England was not only the workshop of the world, but also the first exporter of the gender division of labour to the whole world" (DeGroot, p. 63).

The transformation in office work challenges this model drawn from the textile industry. The changeover to female labor was a slow process, and the application of technology to office work could be even slower. In the French case (not included in this collection), hand-copying in banking and other offices survived well after the Second World War. Meta Zimmeck provides a highly nuanced analysis of office work in the British civil service, and convincing evidence that the ultimate transformation was due less to the cheapness of female labor or the skills (or lack thereof) of women but to two complementary factors: the "poor performance and ungovernability" of the men and boys who were replaced, and the large pool of educated women seeking "respectable" work. This is neither a simple process of "deskilling" clerical work nor the stereotyping of the new skill of typing as women's work.

In both the textile industry and in government offices, it was the First World War which allowed women to take on jobs which had previously been done by men and "created the possibility of regendering the machines" (DeGroot, p. 62). Yet the war changed less about the workforce than might seem to be the case, according to Deborah Thom's essay on the British munitions factories. Women who worked during the war were generally not new to paid work, they were recruited from other industries and from domestic service, as work on French munitions factories confirms. (See The French Home Front, ed. Patrick Fridenson, 1992). War work was intended to be temporary, and women often performed tasks they had accomplished before the war but at a faster pace and without significant technological innovation. The changes in production did not endure into peace time, nor did the female workforce. Women were pushed in and out of the workforce to suit the political and economic exigencies of the war and the peace.

In chapters by Lena Sommestad and Marlou Schrover, cultural assumptions about women's role in producing food do not predict a linear pattern of development in the mechanization of the food industry. In northern Sweden, where the men were employed in lumbering and fishing, women ran the dairy farms and were therefore attracted to jobs in industrial dairies. Men were rare there until the competitive economic environment of the inter-war years; then Swedish dairymaids were pushed aside by male competition or voluntarily chose to leave (Sommestad, p. 164). The skills needed for the work did not change but the economic and political imperatives did. In the Dutch chocolate industry, however, technology did lead to the substitution of women for men. Machines could mass-produce the increasingly popular chocolate bars and wrap them, so that in spite of the efforts of government and the male-dominated unions to thwart the process, female labor was used to replace the men who were skilled at hand-made chocolates.

Women Workers and Technological Change provides something less than a comprehensive model of technological change, and it seems a somewhat eccentric collection of essays in that it leaves out Germany, France, and the U.S. But the authors collectively make the very important point that once work becomes gendered, it is very difficult to change labeling or to introduce workers whose gender does not match the label, however much employers or government policy makers might try.

Author Affiliation:

Reviewed by Theresa McBride

Author Affiliation:

Theresa McBride is professor of history at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Domestic Revolution (1976) and numerous articles on the history of women and work.