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Women's History: The Second Wave

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Patricia Hilden
Patricia Hilden
Affiliation:
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
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Type
Review Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 501 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Examples of such work include Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, resistance, and revolution (New York, 1972)Google Scholar and Hidden from history (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Morgan, Robin, ed., Sisterhood is powerful (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Bouchardeau’s, HuguettePas d’histoire, les femmes…(Paris, 1977).Google Scholar

2 The most familiar proponents of this view are Louise Tilly and Joan Scott: see Women, work, and family (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Theresa McBride put it, ‘Women often strongly and violently supported male strikers because these protests related to their own welfare as wives and daughters. But this kind of participation and support underlined women’s traditional role as consumers rather than as breadwinners’: see McBride, ‘Women’s work and industrialization’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming visible: women in European history (Boston, 1977), p. 290. William Reddy, in ‘Family and factory: French linen weavers in the belle epoque’, Journal of Social History, (Fall, 1974), pp. 102–12, shares this view of women’s vicarious militancy.

4 The classic statement of this argument is found in Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, ‘Women’s work and the family in nineteenth century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xvii, 1 (January 1973), 36–64. Since Tilly’s and Scott’s original formulation, the argument has appeared again and again. For example, when rural women left home to work in, e.g. textile factories in towns, they are portrayed as different from their male counterparts, in so far as they retained a familial focus by sending wages home. Thus males who left home developed individualistic values, while females clung to their domestic instincts. One recent example of this argument is found in Hanagan, Michael P., The logic of solidarity: artisans and industrial workers in three French towns, 1871–1914 (London, 1980), pp. 142–9Google Scholar. See also Tony Judt’s review, forthcoming in Social History, 1981. One book which proves the uselessness of this formulation as an historical generalization is Dublin’s, ThomasWomen at work (New York, 1979), which discusses the motives of Lowell, Massachusetts textile workers-who rarely, if ever, sent their wages home to families living in rural areas.Google Scholar

5 One example of work that includes women without highlighting them as a marginal group is Lequin, Yves’s Les ouvriers de la région lyonnaise, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1977)Google Scholar. Another is Chatelain, Abel, Les migrants temporaires en France de 1800 à 1914, 2 vols. (Lille, 1976).Google Scholar

6 This unfortunately chosen title is a literal translation of Proudhon ’s dictum that a woman was either a ‘courtisane ou ménagère’.

7 Perhaps nowhere are women more frequently excluded from agency than in discussions of birth control. ‘The family’ may limit its size, but few women are granted the capacity even to desire control over reproduction. See, for example, Peter Stearns’s ‘Working-class women in Britain, 1890–1914’ in Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and be still (Bloomington, Indiana, 1972), pp. 101–2.

8 Dangerfield, George, The strange death of Liberal England (London, 1935).Google Scholar

9 I am indebted to Dr Gillian Sutherland for this information.

10 This is the interpretation of Bonnie Sullivan Smith in ‘The women of the Lille bourgeoisie, 1850–1914’, PhD., University of Rochester, 1975.

11 Eric Hobsbawm argues this case in ‘Man and women in socialist iconography’, History Workshop Journal, no. 6 (Autumn 1978), pp. 131–40Google Scholar. See also Hunt, E. H., British labour history, 1815–1914 (London, 1981).Google Scholar

12 American graduate students are sometimes thus encouraged by supervisors with an eye on the shrinking market for historians.

13 Tim Mason, ‘Women in Nazi Germany, Part I’, and ‘Women in Germany, 1925–1940: family, welfare and work, Part II’, History Workshop Journal, nos. 1 and 2 (Spring and Autumn 1976), pp. 74–113. 5–32.

14 Sheila Lichtman, ‘Women at work, 1941–1945: war time employment in California’, PhD., University of California, Davis, 1981.

15 Three of the classics of women’s history are Olive Schreiner, Women and labour (New York, 1911)Google Scholar, Clark, Alice, Working life of women in the seventeenth century (London, 1919)Google Scholar, and Beard, Mary, Women as a force in history (New York, 1946).Google Scholar

16 , Gordon, Women’s body, women’s right (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, and , Lerner, Black women in white America (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

17 See inter alia , Guilbert, Les fonctions (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar, and Les femmes et l’organisation syndicate avant 1914 (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar; Mayeur, Françhise, L’Enseignement secondaire des jeunes files sous la troiséme république (Paris, 1977)Google Scholar; Sohn, Anne-Marie, ‘Feminisme et syndicalisme’, Thèse du troisieme cycle, Parisx, 1973Google Scholar; and Zylberberg-Hocquard, Marie-Hélène, Féminisme et sjyndicalisme en France (Paris, 1978).Google Scholar

18 The French journal, le Mouvement Social offers examples of these various approaches to women in history. Thus it devoted an entire issue to ‘les Travaux de femmes’ (no. 105, octobre-decembre 1978), but has, at the same time, continued to offer history without the participation of all the protagonists. See, for example, Robert J. Bezucha’s ‘Aspects du connit des classes à Lyon, 1831–1834’, in Mouvement Social, no. 76 (juillet-septembre 1971), pp. 5–26. In this version, no Canutes participated in the struggles of the canuts. Lest it be thought that Bezucha’s view was an accurate one, see Yves Lequin ‘s’ La Formation du proletariat industriel dans la région lyonnaise au XIXe siecle’ in Mouvement Sociale, no. 97 (octobre—decembre 1976), 121–38. Bertrand Badie has portrayed strikers in the Renault factory at Billancourt in 1936 as exclusively male. His article notes calmly that ‘Billancourt comptait 30,000 hommes rassemblés sur un seul et meme terrain...’. (See ‘ Les Greves du Front Populaire aux usines Renault’, no. 81 (octobre-decembre 1972), pp. 69–110.) Ironically, the Mouvement Sociale photograph of that strike displayed in the Paris-Paris exhibition, Centre Pompidou, mai-novembre 1981, shows an all-female strike meeting. Of course it is likely that Badie meant to indicate both males and females in his masculine nouns (‘ouvriers’, ‘hommes’), but such usage keeps women hidden, and prevents an accurate portrait of female industrial workers - and their militancy-from being painted.

19 The most famous proponent of this view is Edward Shorter, in The making of the modern family (New York, 1975).Google Scholar