Gender in History of American Capitalism

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Gender in History of American Capitalism

Historians in the 1980s hoped that studies of categories of analysis would illuminate subjects that had previously been obscured. Joan Scott foregrounded gender in particular as one of these useful categories. ‘Gender’ has been widely substituted for ‘women’ in the labelling of this type of history which ultimately makes sense since the same cultural processes produced both ‘women’ and ‘men’. The historiography for this field is limited and fairly dated. It does not reflect cutting edge research that people are doing under the rubric of the history of capitalism. Most studies have taken for granted subjects that did not flow and could not be priced. Women as economic actors only have minor roles in the great transformations that took place in this period. They typically exist in networks with their actions determined by established relationships with men. Yet women and gender were essential to the emergence of capitalism. They were also shaped by nineteenth-century capitalism.

When using gender as a category of historical analysis, scholars have to treat is as something that is historically-contingent and must acknowledge its local and particular character. As Joan Scott asserted, the binary opposition of male and female must be rejected. In the history of capitalism, some of the most basic questions about gender relations are expressed in market relations. By using gender as a category of analysis, one thing stands out in particular. It is the way in which the story of the history of women in the United States is not one of gradual changes in gender relations and fights for greater equality. With the transition to industrial capitalism came a reversal of relations of equality in the nineteenth century. Patriarchy was actually strengthened and gender relations were hardened.

It is helpful to begin by questioning what a category of analysis actually is. It is subjective, something created by historians to assist them in finding, sorting, and evaluating pieces of evidence. Therefore, while categories of analysis seem both logical and necessary, we must appreciate that they will forever be contemporary. This does not prevent them from being valuable to historians. Indeed, they remind us of our responsibility as creators of meaning. However, we must recognize the way in which they mirror and depict our own perceptions of the world and avoid bestowing on them a sense of perpetuity and ubiquity. Categories are useful because they unscramble pieces of knowledge and enable historians to momentarily freeze the endless whirlwind of change in order to make observations. In contrast to Boydston’s assertion, as long as these categories are not disconnected from their historical context, they do not hinder our work.

Scholars in the nineteenth century could see that women and gender were central to the economic transformations that were taking place around them. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first started to write about capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century, they viewed gender relations and the family as a realm that would be radically transformed by capitalism. They saw a positive correlation between women’s lack of freedom and the rise of private property and class relations. The key basis behind this thinking was the notion that men wanted to ensure that their property would be cast down through their family lineages. Therefore, the broad institutions of patriarchy and male domination-controlled women’s fertility. Hence, Engels thought that when men had less property, they would not be troubled by these issues – they would be landless proletarians with nothing to pass down to their children. The lack of household property would mean the diminishing of patriarchy. Engels believed that the workplace as well as the home would be affected where the conditions of factory production would essentially lead to men and women both doing the same work – differences of ages and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. Thus, Engels and Marx imagined the transition from capitalism to socialism as a kind of liberating process that would actually lead to greater human equality.

Historians can uncover what actually happened by using gender as a category of analysis and examining what both women and men were doing in the American transition to capitalism. It is vital to appreciate that both farms and the wider economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were very much organized around the household as a core unit. Households varied according to time and place, as did the gender relations that they encompassed. The family was the key element of the household and family economies were the key realm both of domestic production and of economic relations. We can start by thinking about the New England farm as a site of early pre-capitalist formations and about how farm production changed over time. There was a gendered division of labor on the farm; women were more often responsible for managing the domicile (cooking, preserving food, making textiles) while men were more often tending to field crops and livestock, getting firewood, and gathering food, for example. Indeed, the New England Farmer, a monthly journal dedicated to agriculture and horticulture, declared in 1858 its hope that women would never be seen in the field, or doing any other out-door work, unless in that of the cultivation of a flower garden. Hence, the roles described seem to represent what we tend to think of as gendered relations.

However, both men and women (and children) were required to work hard in order to keep the farm economy operating for subsistence and none of the work that was designated to either of the sexes was waged. Pre-industrial urban households, especially the poor ones, also relied upon pooled economic resources with all members of the family responsible for finding work, going out and selling things on the street, or for taking on work to do in the home. In the transition to capitalism phase, family farms started to produce more for the market and did not just focus on subsistence. They utilized mills to produce flour, made butter, speculated on land, and women started spinning and weaving, for example. Again, we can essentially see a relation of equality, since both men and women were producing for the market and receiving a price for their commodities that was solely dependent upon the type of goods that they were selling.

In the early nineteenth century, there was the rise of wage labor and the emergence of industrialization. Textile production grew from a kind of cottage industry that was based on outwork and performed in the home into something that was performed on great big looms in factories. We tend to think of the early wage worker as male, hence the industrial worker becomes gendered. However, in the United States and Britain, the early textile workers were very often female. Young women in particular were perceived as the ideal textile workers. Francis Lowell pioneered the employment of women in his mills as textile workers. These women lived in great dormitories and had extremely regimented lives. Thus, the early experience of industrialization was very much born by young women in the early nineteenth century. By 1840, women held over half of all manufacturing jobs in the United States and two-thirds of all manufacturing jobs in New England. We can see female wage earners right away, working as domestic servants, childminders, seamstresses, milliners. But it is the particular feature of the household that is crucial to remember. These female workers still put all of their earnings back into the household which typically enabled the entire family to stay on the farm. Hence, it appears that the domestic economy was not really disrupted by this early wage labor.

However, we can see a divergence in gender roles with the rise of industrialization. Men started to increasingly travel to market their crops and began to move away from the household into the cities. Farms were still operating but they became less like household projects and more like family-minus-men projects. With industrial labor came the emergence of cash earnings which resulted in a differential in what men and women were paid. Part of the reason for this is that in this period, both farmers and male industrial workers were placed under increasing financial pressure. Over time we can see that there was a decline in wage rates and an increase in the pace and intensity of work with longer hours. Hence, there was no time to do the normal subsistence activities that they had been able to do in the household before. In many occupations, especially in the textile industry, we see that workers’ incomes have begun to significantly outpace the reproductive costs of running households. For trade workers in New York City in the 1850s, the average annual wage was three hundred dollars, which historians estimate was roughly half of what a family of four needed to survive.

Scholars have concluded that domestic labor regimes were central to the emergence of industrial capitalism and the ability of men to do wage work. Therefore, rather than thinking about unpaid domestic work as being separate from paid wage work, we have to see one as supplementing the other in the mixed economy of the household. The nineteenth-century wage worker needed his clothes to be made, altered, and laundered, he required shelter and warmth, and potentially someone to provide childcare. Yet the laboring man tended to only make about a dollar a day which was not enough “for a man with a wife and family, to lay by a sufficiency to pay rent, buy fire wood, and eatables, through a long, sever winter”, according to an 1804 petition for public charity. So, it was the unpaid nature of domestic labor provided at the home that made a subsistent living possible, as well as the emergence of the ‘industrial army’. Women did try to commodify some of these domestic labors; the landlady was a key figure in the mid nineteenth century who took on borders herself. A wife’s input into the family economy in unpaid labor alone was double the cost of her maintenance. As a Baltimore magazine recommended in 1800, “Get married: a wife is cheaper than a house-keeper, her industry will assist you many ways”. Hence, we can see relations of profound dependency in this particular domestic formation that were very different to what they would have been even fifty years beforehand.

The more prosperous middle-class men who were working as clerks or attorneys would have earned enough to cover the expenses of a household but they would probably have been unable to save much money. However, again we see the added value of the uncompensated labor of the wife. A good housewife became a model of the best wife; she would go to the shops and find the best meat, or she would figure out how to economize in the household by repairing things, for instance. A thrift housewife could help save enough money that could then be invested in property, thus enabling a family to rise up the social ladder. Thus, a male wage laborer in the nineteenth century certainly would have wanted a wife. It is easier for us to see this in some ways today because we have so many two-earner families and, therefore, a huge reliance on maids, childcare, and food services. But this situation took a long time to come about. In the nineteenth century, a culture was constructed in which the ‘working woman’ became an oxymoron.

In this context, it is easy to understand why gender roles were hardened so much in the mid-nineteenth century. There was the emergence of the ideology of ‘separate spheres’. Women were seen as being more suited to the household and typically wanted to be domestic while men were meant to be out in public. The range of activities that women versus men were supposed to do in the household and public sphere became much narrower during this period. Even though women were also working as wage workers- in the mill, for instance- they still did not gain greater gender equality. In reality, therefore, circumstances were very different to what Marx and Engels had predicted. It was not the case that more gender equality resulted from the transition to capitalism, indeed it was quite the opposite. There was the emergence of much more severe ideologies of gender difference.

Another phenomenon that occurred in this period was that the domestic work that women had long been doing in the household increasingly came under fire. Women had been seeking more and more wage work to do inside the home, essentially trying to bring the factory inside the house. This was called piece work and including jobs such as cigar-making, tailoring, and cracking nuts. Children often collected the raw materials for their mothers that were distributed by factory owners. This kind of work allowed the family to commodify what they had already doing in the home and to earn extra money. Sewing machines were invented in the mid-nineteenth century and were fairly inexpensive, costing around fifty dollars, so they proliferated. Some women also started to give out pieces of work to their neighbors, hence it became a cottage industry of sorts. There were thousands and thousands of these small firms of people doing work in the home. However, there was increasing pressure from reformers to outlaw this domestic work, mainly because it degraded the male laborer’s wages. The American Federation of Labor declared that “if it was not for homework, the father would have to demand higher wages”. It was also almost impossible to unionize homework and standardize it so reformers argued that it was continuing to drag down standards in their industries. Campaigns against housework, such as those by the Cigar Makers’ Union and Tailors’ Union, were often led on the grounds of hygiene since homes were sometimes extremely unsanitary.

Thus, what does all this tell us about the history of capitalism and about gender? There is a great deal more to say about this question. The farm model does not reflect the experiences of slave families in the south or ranch families in the west, even though they still tended to be domestic economies. But it is clear that key concepts for understanding economic behavior, including household and gender, must be viewed critically by historians. As Boydston has argued, historians have too often taken for granted that whatever women were doing was ‘femininity’ and whatever men were doing was ‘masculinity’. We must appreciate the fact that all of these relations were variable and historically situated, that they were not the same everywhere over time. If we do this, then gender can be a useful category of analysis and we must accept that historians of capitalism do not yet have an alternative conceptual framework. An analysis of gender reveals the ways in which the domestic work that men and women were doing in households in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century turned into women’s work and went from being household labor to unpaid work by the mid-nineteenth century. We can see that the transition to capitalism was not just a process of men doing the work in the factory. It was the whole household that enabled the emergence of factory labor and employers to do things like drive down wages. It is also clear that capitalist relations of production and the particular ways in which they happened – in the United States at least – did not produce gender liberation. All that was solid did not melt in the air in the way that Engels had predicted. Legacies of gender relations from many centuries ago were remade and refashioned in ways that were quite unexpected.

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