6 - Gender and the Culture of Work

Summary

The transformation of the nineteenth-century German industrial landscape is usually described and studied in terms of structures in transition: workshop to factory, “community” to “society,” estate to class. In its tendency to focus on newly-emerging modern structures such as factories, industrial towns, and workers' communities, mainstream German labor history has emphasized the social and economic origins of structural transformation. In doing so it has neglected the importance of ideology, politics, and culture as constitutive elements in the processes of industrialization and class formation. This study of gender and the culture of work in western German textile mills explores the ways in which ideology shaped the structure of textile production, with special reference to ideologies that concerned male and female nature and productive or reproductive labor. It also discusses the significance of these ideological boundaries for the formation of work identities and work cultures. Lastly, it considers how gender divisions in the structures and cultures of work shaped the history of the organized labor movement and its politics of class.

Women and gender have remained peripheral in histories of the factory in Germany because historians have uncritically adopted the self-conceptions and class definitions of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century labor movement itself. Thus most labor histories reproduce the ideal types of male and female workers that inhabit the pages of the union press and resound in the protocols of union congresses. Labor historians draw a sharp contrast between two ideal types by defining one in terms of what the other was not. Thus the Protestant male worker came to identify with his job or craft - a prerequisite for the development of class consciousness - based on skill acquired through formal apprenticeship training, relatively well-paid employment in an economically vital and highly productive industry, and long-term job stability.