Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish, County Down 1690-1914 (review)

Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish, County Down, 1690-1914, by Marilyn Cohen; pp. 287. Dublin: Four Courts, 1997, £19.95, $65.00.

Marilyn Cohen has written an exceptionally detailed yet lucid and evocative study of the impact of capitalist development on Tullylish parish, near Belfast, the center of the Irish linen industry over two centuries. Cohen writes as an historical anthropologist in a genre of regional and local history, pioneered by the French Annales school, but now more stylishly dubbed "micro-history." In recent years, micro-history, following the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, had been associated with close textual readings of historical documentary sources. But now it has been applied by several historians who, like Cohen, are commendably reviving a genre that in its scope and complexity further enriches our appreciation of the meaning of "cultural studies."

Cohen is a Marxist-feminist for whom social class, mediated by gender, remains central to working-class experience. This mediation holds true, quite obviously, for the structure of work, in which women always occupied the lowest-paid and least-skilled occupations. But it is true more ubiquitously, from the social policies paternalist employers adopted toward their workers to the internal dynamics of the family itself, in which the burden of organizing the family's survival fell largely on wives. Theoretically, Cohen adopts an eclectic mix of materialist dialectics and poststructural cultural analysis, though she effects this synthesis undogmatically, even empirically, without formal declaration. On the one hand, such ingenuousness charms; on the other, a little more formal clarification might help. It seems curious, for instance, that her prose should be peppered (though never jarringly) with such Marxist terminology as "petty commodity production" and "primitive accumulation," while her argument in key places draws heavily on the work of Patrick Joyce, non-Marxist and committed poststructuralist.

Apart from her theoretical stance(s), Cohen addresses several important historiographies regarding socioeconomic change under industrialization, and her findings make impressive contributions to each of them. These include controversies over the transition to the factory system; debates over paternalism and working-class living standards; and the issue of "separate spheres" ideology as applied to the reality of Victorian women's lives.

First, Cohen broadly affirms the too heavily criticized general theory of "proto- industrialization." She demonstrates that the transition from rural household production to the classic factory system actually succeeded in both subregions of the Tullylish linen industry, even if nominally following divergent paths. In one, the transition from Kauf to putting-out to the factory system occurred classically through the intercession of merchant capitalism. In the other, the morcelization of landholding by farmer-weavers had threatened to retard economic development; but the intercession of demographic crisis (the Great Famine) created labor shortages that necessarily stimulated mechanization. In the first subregion, moreover, Cohen discovered that some farmer-weaver households actually engaged in capital accumulation to emerge eventually as merchants and later as manufacturers. This novel finding qualifies the Chayanovian assumption of peasant "self-exploitation" at the heart of proto-industrialization theory and hedges the Marxist emphasis on class division by offering the possibility of genuine social mobility.

Cohen's embrace of "paternalism" as a legitimate means by which employers conducted their labor relations would also seem to hedge Marxist notions of class conflict. Here she follows Joyce's model for the Lancashire cotton industry. She demonstrates the ubiquity of employer activity in providing workers with a range of social services aimed ironically at promoting "self-help." These efforts, however, did not include the formation of trade unions, the ultimate organization of worker self-help, which clearly undermined paternalism's corollary, deference. Middle-class paternalism rooted itself in patriarchalism and differed from its aristocratic variant in its comparative indifference to the "condition of England" question, despite passage of the Factory Acts. In paternalist firms, wages remained low and working conditions were uniformly appalling from a health standpoint, so much so that Cohen's findings imply...