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- Title
Patriarchal constraints on women workers' mobilization: The Lancashire female cotton operatives 1842-1919.
- Authors
Benenson, Harold
- Abstract
The Lancashire women cotton workers were the best paid, most highly unionized female manual workers in Britain whose non-domestic way of life contravened Victorian domesticity. The paper examines the conditions that made possible their mobilization. It analyses how during early industrialism these women breached men's job monopolies, participated in communal protests and established unconventional family arrangements; how late nineteenth-century material and cultural ameliorations amplified their resources; and how interaction with middle-class women organizers then helped spark their own confrontation with gender inequities. Their experience illustrates a paradox in employed women's activism: the least dependent female workers were the ones to claim women's right to work and vote; those with the lowest fertility sought reproductive self-determination; and the sector with de facto equivalent wages to men's were the staunch advocates of 'equal pay'. The conjunction of partial emancipation from Victorian domesticity and patriarchal subjugation as working-class women determined this group's course of action.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; WOMEN employees; WOMEN'S employment; COTTON trade employees; LABOR movement
- Publication
British Journal of Sociology, 1993, Vol 44, Issue 4, p613
- ISSN
0007-1315
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/591413