Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835-1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England (review)

At times in the past, scholarship seemed to take a schizophrenic approach to women in Victorian society. Much was made of the ideology of separate spheres allegedly confining women to the home, while at the same time the many women workers participating in the processes of industrialization were being documented. This divide, of course, has long been collapsed. In Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835-1913, Carol Morgan aims to bring these two historical strands together explicitly, not just overriding their false distinction but examining their mutual implications for each other. By examining women in the cotton districts of Lancashire and Cheshire and contrasting them to women working in the small metal industries of Birmingham and the Black Country, Morgan sets out to show how "what was to constitute women's work and whether and how it was to be regulated...became matters for negotiation in each industrial setting and, indeed, in each community." In fact, "understandings of gender" were "shaped and re-negotiated within a context of contradictions and tensions" (15). Gender and class interacted inseparably, and "gender thus emerged as a site of class formation" (18).

Morgan is careful to position herself within contemporary debates over cultural history and the value and role of discourse analysis. Her first chapter is a theoretical review of the scholarship on gender in labor history. Beginning with E. P. Thompson, she spends some pages taking the reader through the key historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, moving beyond the limitations of patriarchy and Marxist materialism into the reconceptualizations of gender as a category of analysis as supported by Joan Scott and others. Positioning her own study within the historiography would have been better done more efficiently, especially as she has important things to say about her own stance. Though Morgan values discourse, and is particularly interested in the idea of "experience" as it relates to women workers, she also argues:

It is equally important, however, to reject the extreme view taken by Joan Scott, that experience is actually "a linguistic event," that subjects are positioned by discourses that "produce their experiences." Rather, we must foreground the dynamics of the setting in which meanings are articulated so that we are not left with a snapshot in which decentered identities themselves appear to become fixed!

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Morgan aims to maintain for experience an important role in creating agency, a capacity she feels can be lost by too narrow a focus on discourse and the constructed nature of experience. Instead, "it is the purpose of this study to illustrate, in the context of sharply contrasting industrial settings, the dynamic tension and interplay existing between 'the material reality of working-class life' and predominant understandings of gender" (15).

To illustrate this interaction, Morgan examines two distinct industries, and a variety of populations of working women within them. Initially, she focuses on gender differences in the cotton districts and citing a broad range of primary sources, shows how ideas about women's roles—and particularly female domestic ideology—interacted with popular and individual conceptions of women's work. Intriguingly, she looks not only at women who actually worked in the cotton districts, but also how other women—as wives and mothers especially—positioned themselves in workplace agitation for higher wages and better conditions. This is a clear example, indeed, of the historical work of gender.

When she switches from the cotton district to the small metal industry, however, Morgan comes to the depth of her study. After her introduction and two chapters on textiles, the remainder of the work—almost two thirds of the book—is devoted to different analyses of the less-studied metal workers. She starts with a broader, more theoretical examination of "Gender at Work" before moving on...