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The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class

University of California Press

Sitting cross-legged on benches, sewing elaborate topcoats with strong stitches, late eighteenth-century tailors prided themselves not only on their skill but on the fact that they worked in all-male shops away from the home. They needed their wives' earningsyet they insisted on keeping their workshops sacrosanct (see Figure 1). Even when the press of work forced them to stay up all night finishing a special order, tailors would not allow their wives to assist them. Instead, their spouses kept small millinery shops or, as a last resort, went out to do laundry or char by the day.1

In contrast, weavers relied on their wives' and daughters' labor in the task of making cloth. Women had always spun, and they could also wind spindles for their husbands while they rocked the cradle or watched the soup. When spinning moved into the factories, women began to learn to weave, bending over the looms for long hours alongside their husbands and brothers in shops under high, wide windows that were closed tight to keep the yarn soft and clean.

Why did tailors shun family labor when weavers valued it so? After all, artisans and textile workers faced similar problems. Few men earned enough to support a wife and children consistently, for even where wages were high, most trades followed seasonal patterns of frantic labor interspersed with unpaid lulls. As a result, on the one hand the men needed the labor of their wives and children in order for their families to survive. On the other, they faced the threat of having their wages undercut when employers hired cheaper female and child labor in mechanized or sweated processes. But the experiences and responses of artisans and textile workers in combining family and work were very different.2

Both patterns were probably rooted in the traditional northern European patriarchal family economy of earlier centuries, where the father

functioned as master of a productive unit, whether farm or urban workshop, and was assisted by his wife and children. Some historians, speculating that women's productive contribution allowed them to enjoy personal power as they melded home and work, have nostalgically imagined the preindustrial family as egalitarian.3 However, as Judith Bennett points out, that system always subordinated women, who labored in many urban occupations out of necessity rather than as a means of improving their status.4

In any case, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the patriarchal family economy had been undermined. Enclosure and the agricultural revolution meant that many families could no longer make a living from the land. They sought instead to earn subsistence in domestic industry, spinning and weaving the raw materials merchants put out to them and receiving cash in return. Families profited as women turned to looms during the brief golden age of the textile industry, the last decades of the eighteenth century. Glasgow and Lancashire textile workers often followed the family labor system, whether outside or inside the home, with the father receiving a wage for the labor of himself, his children, and sometimes his wife.5 But this system could lead to self-exploitation. As Medick points out, women and children were often paid less than subsistence wages, for it was assumed that they were subsidiary laborers whose chief value lay in providing domestic services.6 Conversely, single men could not compete with the labor of a whole family.

Urban artisans sought to avoid this problem by keeping their families out of their occupations. As international and national trade grew in scale, the traditional progression from apprentice, to journeyman, to mastership and marriage became impossible, leaving many artisans mired at the journeyman stage. They survived by building on traditional bachelor journeyman culture, with its jovial fraternal bonding, to create fierce, cohesive combinations to keep up skill and status. But this required strict exclusionary policies against cheap, unskilled laborespecially that of women.

This chapter examines these different strategies in the urban areas of London, Lancashire, and Glasgow, analyzing the interaction of work, family, and community. Ultimately, the gender division of labor and workers' responses to it were determined, not by the location of work or the nature of the technology or skills, but by power relations within the family and in the workplace.7

London's Family Economies

Artisan culture flourished in the fierce competition and vigorous growth of large cities, and especially London. London's population more than doubled

in this period, from approximately 670,000 in the middle of the eighteenth century to 1,379,000 in 1821.8 In the capital and court center, highly skilled artisans, such as silversmiths, coachmakers and painters, wigmakers, mantuamakers, milliners, clockmakers, carvers and gilders, and cabinetmakers, were known for their expertise in fashioning precision and luxury goods.9

Yet the position of an honorable tradesman was never secure. Many London workers may have aspired to be a lower-middle-class master or shopkeeper, but constantly feared the plunge to the miseries of sweated labor in a garret. The opposite trajectory, of course, was also possible. The life of Francis Place provides a perfect example of the vicissitudes of work in the trades. His father was variously a journeyman baker, a master baker, a prison officer, and a publican, ultimately failing in business and dependent on his wife's wages from washing clothes. Place himself was apprenticed as a leather breeches maker, but soon fell into dire poverty as the trade became obsolete. He began again as a tailor and eventually established a successful business.10

Pressures on artisans intensified in the nineteenth century, as London's economy was transformed through "metropolitan industrialization."11 Small workshops continued to dominate London's economy throughout the century, and the exceptional large-scale industries of docking, shipping, and brewing were not significantly mechanized. Men were not replaced by machines in the capital. Instead, many employers turned from luxury goods to the mass consumer market, cutting costs by subdividing tasks so that they could hire cheaper, less skilled labor. Makers of consumer goods provided the bulk of London's work force; shoemakers and tailors were the most numerous male workers.12 The middling ranks and artisans themselves would buy cheap finery from slop shops, cobbled-together shoes, chapbooks hawked on the streets, or ready-made pies from the corner cookshop, but they could not afford a coat that took a skilled tailor a week to make, or carefully crafted boots of fine leather. As a result, many artisans were forced into the "dishonorable" branches of trades, which meant that they could not enforce apprenticeship and often faced competition from cheaper, female labor. Those who kept themselves in the "honorable," luxury branches of trades such as shoemaking or tailoring combined in fraternal organizations, based on the workshop and pub, to maintain tight control over...