Preliminary Programme

The period 1860-1936 in spain was a transitional period in women's work in spain describing a U curve. This has been analyzed as a consequence of structural change, and the development of male-breadwinner model. As new evidences on female employement have emerged in the last years a new debate is taken place around the role of women in the household economy and the real impact of this model between the working-class. Using enumerator books, this paper aims to examine labour strategies of households and changes in women's labour force participation during this period in textile Catalan areas with a high demand of female labour force. Data on wages of every member of the household allow us to analyse the level and composition of family income along the life-cycle, so as to appreciate what sectors of the working class come closer to the male-breadwinner model and the conditions under which this became possible.

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New Zealand introduced its equal pay legislation in a piecemeal fashion over a decade. Women in government service received equal pay for equal work in 1960 but women in the private sector waited until 1972 for this principal to be extended to them in the Equal Pay Act. While both pieces of legislation saw small groups of dedicated activists advocate and petition for political change, these campaigners also critiqued established normative ideas of gender roles within the family, the workplace and economic citizenship. This research investigates the connections between the equal pay campaign and these wider social changes, exploring how equal pay advocates sought to influence and gain support from their communities, and how communities reacted to, resisted, and adopted these ideas. This paper will use a case study approach to explore how groups such as trade unions and women’s organisations attempted to promote their message, especially across class and racial divisions. Campaigners encountered significant resistance to any changes to the concept of a family centred on a male breadwinner. A movement that was ostensibly about women also raised anxieties about masculinity and the role of men both in the family unit, within the workplace and within society in general. New Zealand was not alone in facing these social shifts at this time. This paper will also consider how the domestic campaigns were connected to and influenced by similar equal pay campaign in different national contexts. (Show less)

For a long time the watchmaking industry has been concentrated in the west part of Switzerland, along the French border. We highlight that in this industry and in this region - real laboratories of social history - women are pioneers because they have a legitimate relationship with employment. As early as the first factories at the end of the 19th century, they compose half of the staff in workshops, without any criticism of the situation, neither in discourses nor in practices. Socio-economic elites prefer to see these women – even wives and mothers – as factory workers rather than home workers. To earn money is part of the definition of the good working class mother at the end of the 19th century, in contrast to the bourgeois mother, who doesn’t work. It inevitably raises the question of work-life-balance, especially for childminding and the 11 hours a day female workers spend outside their homes. It questions the existence of the ideal housewife. In the watch-making region, the „logic of double burden“ prevails: women are housewives AND workers.
The situation continues during the first part of the 20th century, despite economic and political crises and in spite of the promotion of a traditional housewife model in those times. It changes slowly from the World War II onwards : home working becomes more important among female workers who are mothers. This possibility is nevertheless restricted to Swiss female workers: the law stipulates that foreign workers are obliged to work in factories. Thus the categories of sex and class cross that of nationality to determine the woman’s place on the watch-making labor market.
In this lecture, we will concentrate on the gap between the watch-making industry and others, such as the metallurgical or textile industries, where women’s employment is deeply criticized. How and why is women’s employment in watch-making socially accepted and even valued? We will demonstrate that in the process of industrialization the watch-making workforce never became proletarian, because of the type of production: a luxury item, requiring clean, quiet and meticulous work, better paid than in other economic branches. The working conditions - in their realities and their representations - determine, or not, the legitimacy of female worker’s employment. So if social problem arise or have arisen, it doesn’t depend on women’s employment, but on their working conditions.
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My paper will deal with labor relations at the largest workplace for women in Minneapolis, the Northwestern Knitting Company/the Munsingwear Inc., in the political economy of the city during WW1. At the time, about 2,500 women and 500 men worked for the company that made underwear for the soldiers on a state contract during the war. The stockholders and the directors of this extremely profitable company were totally Anglo-American, while thirty ethnic groups were represented among the very low-paid women at work. It was a non-union shop, and I discuss why the women did not join Local 27 of the United Garment Workers of America in the city by turning down several existing explanations of why women in the garment industry did not join the unions. The managers developed a sophisticated class bridging paternal program (The Munsingwear Family), and the directors involved the company deeply in the pro-war politics of the federal government in 1917 and in the state policy of combatting “disloyalty” of the war efforts as well as the social order of capitalism in Minnesota. They encouraged immigrant workers in the employ of the company to join the Anglo-Americanization program of the company, and they substituted “the Nation” for “The Munsingwear Family” as the identification unit that aimed at bridging cleavages of class, gender, and ethnicity, when the U.S. entered the war.
The paper will be based on a book manuscript that might be at print by April 2014.
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Catalan studies focused on the women’s labour behaviour during the first half of the 20th century suggest that women’s labour trajectories –basically in textiles– would have been progressively longer and continuous. However, in the light of some studies about female activity during the first years of Franco’s dictatorship, that trend could have been broken, at least in Barcelona city, the main industrial centre of Catalonia. According to some studies, this change could be related to the crisis of textile industry during the post-war period or with labour behaviour pattern of immigrant women (a high fertility rate and a weak tradition of work led them to stay at home) arrived massively to the city from the first years of the fifties. Other studies suggest that this change would have been a result of discriminatory legislation regarding married women’s work. Such legislation would make difficult the continuity of women’s employment in many sectors impelling them to engage within the informal economy. The main goal of this paper is to test these hypotheses exploring the features of labour trajectories –duration, stability, occupation quality throughout life– of a group of women born between 1905 and 1944. They have in common that they worked in a tin boxes factory (Hijos de Gerardo Bertrán) at some point of their labour lives. Moreover, in general they are workers with a very low literacy rate, coming from migrant families and living in one of the poorest areas of the city. I have reconstructed their “labour lives” between 1921 and 2004 using social security contributions records and have also used the Municipal Population Registers of Barcelona (1930-1950) to obtain additional socio-demographic information.

This paper forms part of the Project I+D+I “La reconstrucción de la actividad económica en Cataluña: trabajo, demografía y economías familiares”, [The reconstruction of the economic activity in Catalonia: Work, demography and family economies] HAR2011-26951, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. IP. Prof. Cristina Borderías, Universitat de Barcelona. (Show less)