Gender and Deindustrialization: A Transnational Historiographical Review

Abstract

This contribution takes stock of the growing research on deindustrialization from a gender perspective. Much of the work in deindustrialization studies is rooted in local studies, within single national contexts. This article provides a perspective that cuts across case studies and national historiographies. It reviews findings on the implications of deindustrialization for working-class masculinities and considers the extent to which research has privileged a focus on white masculinity in crisis (a theme which is more present in some national contexts than others). The article goes on to show how a more complex and nuanced understanding of gender, class, and race is emerging. It highlights women workers’ experience of deindustrialization and considers the ways in which deindustrialization is associated with a restructuring of gender relations. Acknowledging some of the limitations of the current state of research, the article points to a number of potential avenues for further enquiry.

Introduction

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a growing body of work has emerged in history and the social sciences about deindustrialization and its long-term effects.¹ This resurgence of scholarly interest was first apparent in North America, where historical research by Steven High, Jefferson Cowie, and Joseph Heathcott built on the work of an earlier generation of scholars such as Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison.² More recently, the implications of industrial closures and declining industrial employment have begun to receive greater attention in the European context, as a number of conferences, special issues, and new research groups testify.³ The British historiography, in particular, has developed significantly—so much so that Jim Tomlinson has suggested that the concept of deindustrialization provides a new metanarrative for twentieth-century British history.⁴ Earlier studies in the USA, such as Bluestone and Harrison, focused on class and social networks, exploring the impact of the process on workers, their families, communities, and landscapes.⁵ They emphasized what Cowie and Heathcott refer to as the “capital-versus-community tension.”⁶ The twenty-first-century literature has continued to address the politics of industrial closures but has also explored their longer-term social and cultural implications in deindustrialized communities, not least in the pages of this journal.⁷ In this essay, we consider how far and in what ways this rapidly developing body of scholarship has grappled with the gendered dimensions of deindustrialization. In doing so, we read across local case studies and national historiographies.

The figure who tends to embody the experience of deindustrialization in popular cultural narratives is the male worker stripped of his job—often a miner or steelworker, sometimes a shipbuilder or (especially in the US context) an autoworker.⁸ Male workers and heavy industry have also occupied a central place in a scholarly literature on deindustrialization where industrial “heartlands” (the American Rust Belt, the British coalfields, the Ruhr, or the coal and steel regions of northeastern France) are in the spotlight.⁹ The sheer scale of industrial job losses in these regions and the devastating impact on communities that were often dependent on a single industry go some way to explaining this focus. Industries such as coal-mining and steel production had also long enjoyed a symbolic status that made them synonymous with the national economy, and hence the nation itself, especially in countries where these industries were nationalized. This symbolism relied in part on a certain idea of working-class masculinity.¹⁰ Indeed, until 2010, most scholarship on the Ruhr—the region that has been most emblematic of German industry and of what the German literature terms, “Strukturwandel” or structural change—tended to position men as the unchallenged representatives of the working world in the region.¹¹ It is no surprise therefore that, as scholarly interest in the gender implications of deindustrialization has grown, significant attention has focused on the question of working-class masculinities.

In this article, we begin by reviewing the insights that have flowed from a literature on masculinity in crisis, before examining the extent to which recent work has complicated and looked beyond this narrative. In doing so, we acknowledge a critique offered by Matera, Natarajan, Perry, Schofield, and Waters in response to the renewed attention being paid to deindustrialization, and to labor more generally, in the British historiography. Matera et al. caution that, in centering the stories of working-class men without addressing the question of race or the extent to which the working-class population of the UK was shaped by migration and empire, this historiography risks “reproducing the white male worker as a subject of history,” to the neglect of other historical subjects.¹² In a context where right-wing national-populist movements have flourished in deindustrialized regions, fueled in part by narratives of white working-class victimhood, this warning is a salutary one.¹³ Moreover, while the aforementioned authors’ primary concern is race, they also hint at the marginalization of women in the historiography.

This critique has potential implications, not just for the British context but for the field of deindustrialization studies as whole. That said, there has been a notable tendency in recent research to reach beyond the preoccupation with (white) masculinities in crisis. In what follows, we consider how the latter narrative has been complicated by studies of resilient and adaptive masculinities and how new work has turned attention to women wage-earners, moving away from the figuration of women primarily as “wives.” At the same time, some of the most thought-provoking work in the field has drawn out the structural and relational dimensions of gender, rather than focusing on the identities of specific groups of workers. Reading across national historiographies, we aim to map the contours of this diversifying body of work which not only has privileged the intersections of class and gender but also has at times explored the dynamics of racialization.

Masculinity in crisis? Deindustrialization, destabilization, and emasculation

Focusing primarily on twentieth-century US culture, Sherry Lee Linkon has posited that there were four main characteristics of working-class masculinity, at least in its dominant heteronormative form, which was also closely associated with whiteness: a high and steady wage that allowed the man to support a wife and children (the male “breadwinner” model); physical, manual work, and pride in the job; product association (an identification with products like ships that enhanced the status of those who built them); and camaraderie through masculine social networks that deepened solidarity. Linkon argues:

While the work itself was often boring, unpleasant and dangerous (accidents were common, and workers sometimes battle work-related diseases for the rest of their lives), the mythology surrounding productive labor, with its associated benefits of the family wage, labor solidarity and physical prowess, has long played a key role in defining working-class and masculine identities.¹⁴

While class and gender identities certainly vary geographically, many of the features identified above were found across industrial societies. Such identities have historically been incubated through upbringing in the home, street, and neighborhood; forged in the workplace through hard physical graft; and expressed in leisure practices and collectively created belief systems.¹⁵ Different types of work have also been associated with different levels of masculinity, with the physicality of the work and exposure to risk on the job an important determinant, in wartime and peacetime.¹⁶ Hence, the heroic status of miners in particular: as Martin Lücke has observed of mining culture in the Ruhr, the blackened body of the miner was figured as both polluted and ennobled by coal dust.¹⁷

As deindustrialization destabilized these identities, some have suggested that the process has been experienced by working-class men as a form of emasculation, giving rise to a crisis of masculinity. Linkon, for example, shows how white working-class masculinity is figured as a site of crisis in contemporary American fiction about deindustrialized places.¹⁸ The emasculation thesis had already taken root in British studies of unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s, where scholars suggested that the identities of jobless men were corroded, as they found themselves unable to provide for their families (and perhaps replaced by their wives as the primary earner): they had become, in the terms of Daniel Wight’s ethnographic study of a deindustrializing town in central Scotland, “wasters” rather than “workers.”¹⁹ Likewise, Angela Coyle argued that unemployment led to “the unsexing of men,” affecting male identities in a significantly different and more profound way than it did women.²⁰ As Andrew Perchard notes, stories of “broken men” contribute to an ongoing sense of social abandonment in former Scottish mining communities which have contributed to the emergence of Scottish nationalism.²¹

In their study of gender and community in “Steeltown” in South Wales, Walkerdine and Jimenez argue that male ex-steelworkers were shamed by having to take on alternative “bad work,” which was more poorly paid and often lacking a trade union presence.²² This work was often more feminized (e.g. in retail), lacking the requirements of toughness, courage, and resilience associated with the steelworks. Service sector and white-collar office work were considered by middle-aged and older ex-industrial workers as feminine work or “pen-pushing,” in contrast with “real work,” defined by dirty, hard physical labor that conferred what Anoop Nayak has called “body capital.”²³ While Walkerdine and Jimenez argue that economic insecurity was a longstanding feature of industrialized working-class communities, this was also taken to another level as deindustrialization accelerated and deepened from the 1970s on, further eroding the basis on which provider masculinity had been constructed in good relatively well-paid unionized jobs. The collapse of trade union membership was another feature of this corrosion of male identities, as the unions had empowered working men, helping to sustain the family wage and, until the later twentieth century, the traditional gendered division of labor.²⁴ With their collapse in income, men could no longer afford to sustain social activities that had defined male-only spaces, such as the pub and the football, nights out at the steakhouse or Indian restaurant. In this way, as Wight notes, masculine consumption atrophied; David Kideckel observes a similar phenomenon in deindustrializing communities in postsocialist Romania, where, he argues, both men and women found themselves unable to “live up to the demands of their gender role” as purchasing power dwindled.²⁵

Moreover, it was not just unemployment and loss of earnings that threatened the status and identities of displaced workers (as those who lost their jobs as a result of industrial restructuring or relocation are sometimes known). As industrial employment declined, the social and cultural status of industrial work was also changing. Marion Fontaine notes, for example, how mining increasingly came to be stigmatized as an “old-fashioned,” dirty industry in France.²⁶ While the industrial working class could be represented in much of mid-twentieth-century Europe and North America as the embodiment of the nation at work, this position would become increasingly difficult to sustain.²⁷ The relegation in status was particular stark in postsocialist countries. As Kideckel observed of miners in the Jiu Valley in Romania, “many Valley men—miners of great renown, former socialist heroes (…)—have become superfluous, their lives mocked as worthless anachronisms.”²⁸

While the narrative of masculinity in crisis has been particularly prominent in the British scholarship, there is evidence from a range of geographical contexts that deindustrialization threatened not just the identities of male industrial workers but their health, challenging the very core of what it meant to be a man, with mass unemployment precipitating serious mental health issues, depression, anxiety, and trauma at unprecedented levels in peacetime. Recent work has built on a long tradition of sociological and medical studies on the health impacts of mass unemployment, precipitated by the acceleration of the pace of deindustrialization from the 1970s. Ex-industrial workers could be left anxious, self-doubting, fearful, and bewildered in the post-industrial age, struggling to fulfill their role as provider-fathers, undermining their sense of well-being and health.²⁹ Their position as role models in the family and community disintegrated, increasing levels of despair and guilt. The rise in heart disease, rates of alcoholism, clinical depression (and use of antidepressants), suicides, and para-suicides were manifestations of this, contributing to the uptick in male mortality rates and lowering of male life expectancy in working-class neighborhoods.³⁰ While whole communities were affected, it appears from the literature to date (and the epidemiology) that it was male bodies that bore the direct brunt of the dangerous and toxic industrial workplaces, their legacies in the aftermath of closures, and the ravages of job loss and redundancy linked to deindustrialization—though as we will see this was not without significant consequences for women and for gender relations more broadly.³¹

Several studies have also explored how the “crisis of masculinity” unfolded across the younger generation of working-class youths brought up in communities characterized by a lack of opportunities for the kinds of well-paid and unionized manual jobs that had valorized the labor of older working-class men. These losses were experienced intergenerationally through the collapse of industry and disruption of social transitions and economic structures.³² The emergence of “protest masculinities” is evident as young men struggled to replicate the transition from school to employment, resulting in attempts to reclaim power through aggressive forms of masculinity which were manifest in what Linda McDowell called “reckless and hedonistic” behavior, in violence, crime, racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.³³ In his ethnographic research on a group of 16-year-old white male youths in the North-East of England, Anoop Nayak noted that constructions of masculinity within football and drinking cultures were pervasive and enmeshed with the valorization of white, masculine labor heritage. In an argument which has also found resonance in a number of other studies, he contends that the subcultural identity of the group was being refashioned within alternative masculine arenas in the face of industrial decline.³⁴

Resilience and reconfiguration

In parallel, and particularly more recently, the emasculation thesis has been challenged and refined, through an ongoing conversation around variation and diversity in the identity transformations that occurred. A more nuanced recognition has emerged of the fluidity and plurality of working-class industrial masculinities, as well as a sense that there was resilience, adaptation, and reconfiguration of these identities within new jobs and new opportunities. In other words, not everyone adhered to the hegemonic “hard man” style of masculinity and transitioning to nonmanual, more feminized jobs was not necessarily experienced or understood as a loss of manhood. Location and age or generation also appear to be factors in this variation in experience of gendered identities.

James Ferns’ study of Scottish steelworkers offers a case in point. In Ferns’ oral testimonies, men did not articulate any sense of loss of manhood in relation to their transition from heavy industry into more feminized sectors. Rather, it was being employed and getting a wage that mattered. The lived experience of his interviewees suggests that identities could be reconstructed within the parameters of very different working lives, for example in social work, teaching, and local politics, including working closely with women—an experience that was highly unusual in the heyday of the steelworks, mines, and heavy industries of Lanarkshire and Clydeside.³⁵

This approach echoes other work that challenges the idea of identity disintegration and deepens the conversation around the resilience and survival of gendered occupational identities.³⁶ Steven High has demonstrated how masculine work-based identities were reworked in a show of resilience by a group of men who proudly styled themselves the “I-75 Gypsies,” as they transferred from one site to another in the face of successive downsizing plans and closures in Michigan.³⁷ In a detailed oral-history-based study of the closure of the Royal Dockyard at Chatham in southeastern England, George Ackers found little evidence of any “crisis in male identity,” highlighting instead the agency of redundant workers in finding new jobs.³⁸ Another notable recent intervention is Phillips, Wright and Tomlinson’s sensitive examination of the endurance of skilled male identity beyond the point of job loss in the heavy industries of Clydeside, Scotland. Key elements of what they term a “Clydesider mentality” were maintained and adapted as men transitioned from employment in shipyards, through to car manufacture and beyond to white-collar jobs. This identity, they argue, helped to provide a buffer, muting and mediating the impact of the market and autocratic anti-union employers, managers, and repressive work regimes. The notion of emasculation hardly resonates here as the authors argue for the maintenance of a working-class craft culture based on trade unionism, collectivism, and activism.³⁹ At the same time, it is important to recognize that such studies, based heavily on oral history evidence, do not pretend to offer a representative overview. The most demoralized unemployed ex-workers are perhaps less likely to want to share their stories with researchers or even to have survived to tell those stories.

Generation is another a salient factor in shaping different experiences and narratives: a large proportion of displaced industrial workers over the age of 50 could not find other work and were never reemployed, whereas younger men were more likely to have to adapt to new forms of employment. In his study of deindustrializing Sudbury, Ontario (a metal mining town), Adam King found that, as stable unionized jobs declined and more precarious contracts became common, a generational gap emerged in how male workers understood the “male provider” model:

For older workers, solidarity and collective action through the union are positioned as both masculine in their form, and as necessary to preserve a particular family structure. For younger workers, on the other hand, precarious employment has redefined the masculine obligation. In a slack labor market with less room for upward advance, and without the collective protections that a strong union presence once provided, young workers need to ‘do what needs to be done.’⁴⁰

Similarly, studies of working-class youth have at times challenged or qualified the notion of masculinity in crisis, highlighting the extent to which working-class masculine identities are varied, multi-faceted, and adaptable. Thus, while Linda McDowell notes the incidence of antisocial behavior among her young research participants, she also positions them as active agents capable of navigating structural change and transcending gendered binaries. While recognizing that economic restructuring pushed working-class youths into unskilled, precarious, and stigmatized “poor work” with little chance of upward mobility, undermining their transition to “adult independence,” McDowell argues: “These men were neither rebels nor yobs, neither failures or successes, but instead they lead careful, constrained local lives in their attempts to construct a version of acceptable working-class masculinity in the face of economic circumstances that militate against their efforts.”⁴¹

Women industrial workers in crisis?

While white working-class men have occupied a central place in the historiography, recent research has begun to amend this picture to some extent by bringing the experiences of women more clearly into view. In particular, women’s experiences as industrial workers affected by restructuring have begun to be explored more fully. Women were not an insignificant group in the industrial workforce, notably in sectors such as textiles or electrical goods, where they often occupied posts as machinists or assembly-line workers. Such jobs, generally classed as low-skilled, were particularly vulnerable to being replaced through mechanization, relocation, or offshoring, as Jefferson Cowie noted in his study of the RCA electronics company in the USA.⁴² Likewise, recent work by Amandine Tabutaud on the contrasting French départements of Seine-Saint-Denis and Haute-Vienne (the former highly urbanized, the latter more rural) shows that women were actually more at risk of unemployment than men in these areas in the 1970s and 1980s, as their predominantly semi-skilled jobs were often the first to be targeted for short-time working and redundancies.⁴³ In the 1990s, trade liberalization had a significant impact on the textile industry in Europe and North America, resulting in the loss of thousands of women’s jobs in industry.⁴⁴

While the expansion of the service sector may have provided alternative sources of employment for women, there is evidence from a range of geographical settings that the restructuring of industry and the labor market have been associated with gendered, ethnic, and racialized patterns of precarity.⁴⁵ In a large-scale study of workers’ employment prospects in the wake of the Moulinex factory closures in France in 2001, sociologist Manuela Roupnel-Fuentes found that women fared worse compared to their male colleagues, having less chance of finding stable, full-time employment.⁴⁶ Birgit Beese has highlighted similar patterns in East and West Germany, noting both lower rates of female employment in the deindustrializing regions compared to the national average and the clustering of women in “modern” precarious, casual, low-paid employment, such as social care, distribution, and call centers. “In the competition for qualified, better-paid jobs,” she argues, “the male workers remain the winners.”⁴⁷

Immigrant and racialized workers of any gender were, of course, among those disproportionately employed in vulnerable low-skilled jobs. Thomas Sugrue has shown how black workers were most exposed to the impact of restructuring in Detroit.⁴⁸ Similarly, in the French car industry, immigrant and racialized men had limited access to the kind of training that might have helped them to secure alternative employment as the sector contracted in the 1980s. As crisis hit this industry, non-European men were frequently constructed in management and media debates as unemployable and potentially dangerous.⁴⁹ But as Christopher Lawson and Lauren Laframboise have shown in studies of the shrinking garment-manufacturing sector in the north of England and Montreal respectively, immigrant and racialized women were doubly exposed to discriminatory and exploitative labor practices as employers drove down costs.⁵⁰ In a case study of the English textile town of Oldham, Lawson notes how growing unemployment and poor childcare provision forced women into undertaking piecework at home for local textile businesses in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The majority of these women, who worked for wages below the poverty threshold, were South Asian, a community disproportionately affected by unemployment in the town.⁵¹

One factor that likely contributed to poor employment outcomes for women in periods of industrial restructuring is the gender bias of public policy responses. Lawson argues, for example, that British policymakers were more inclined to intervene to support jobs and retraining in predominantly male sectors such as coal and steel, than in the textile sector. He attributes this stance in part to a prevailing “male breadwinner ideology” which helped to construct job losses in coal and steel as a problem of national importance but did not afford the same significance to women’s jobs. Even where UK policymakers acknowledged the importance of women’s employment for local prosperity and sought to foster women’s work through the development of light manufacturing to replace textile jobs, as they did in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, as well as in Scotland, they took little account of the structural obstacles to women’s employment that derived from the gendered division of labor.⁵² Tabutaud has documented a similar reluctance to support women’s employment on the part of French policymakers, at least prior to the victory of the left in 1981. Thus, in 1975, the Minister of Labor, Michel Durafour, publicly declared that mothers and those looking for a “supplementary” salary [read women] should not be the priority for jobs at a time of crisis, a view that was echoed by civil servants.⁵³

As the international literature on women and deindustrialization has grown, it has provided an opportunity to explore the significance of waged work in the identities of women industrial workers. The loss of industrial employment (or the threat of its loss) often brought into sharp relief women’s pride in their work and sense of dignity as producers and wage-earners—factory closures were understood as an assault on this hard-won sense of value, constructed in the face of gender and class subordination. This is apparent, for example, in work by Manuella Roupnel-Fuentes, Jackie Clarke, and Fanny Gallot on domestic appliance and garment workers in France; Chiara Bonfiglioli on textile workers in the former Yugoslavia; Aimée Loiselle on Puerto Rican needleworkers in the northeastern US; and Lauren Laframboise on the Montreal garment industry, as well as Andy Clark, Ewan Gibbs, and Rory Stride on women in Scottish manufacturing.⁵⁴ In this sense, scholarship on industrial closures and on women’s mobilization to save their jobs has countered the persistent assumption that waged work did not play a central role in women’s social identities as it did for men.

By the 1980s women’s labor market participation had increased notably (albeit unevenly) in North America and at least parts of Western Europe, not least because more women were continuing in waged work after marriage and having children.⁵⁵ Where this pattern was apparent, a generation of women had come to think of their jobs as a permanent aspect of their lives, rather than a prelude to settling down and starting a family. Indeed, Gallot has noted that rather than seeing domestic and industrial labor as separate spheres, women tended to see paid and unpaid work as a continuum and fought for their contribution to both to be valued.⁵⁶ While they were less likely than (white nonimmigrant) men to have strong occupational identities grounded in a skilled trade, their identities as producers could be expressed in other ways—in strong attachments to the product or the brand, for example.⁵⁷

The stakes of losing one’s job in a shrinking industrial sector are apparent in a number of accounts of bitter struggles over factory closures or mass redundancies which have drawn attention to the gendered mobilization of bodies and objects. Such struggles are defensive in nature: aimed at saving threatened jobs or securing better compensation for the loss of employment, they have often been understood as struggles for community survival. Many of these conflicts have taken place against a backdrop of declining trade union strength and a growing sense of working-class disempowerment; where women have mobilized they have frequently faced the additional obstacle of patriarchal cultures of labor organization.⁵⁸ It is perhaps not surprising in this context that resistance to deindustrialization has often taken forms that are as much about securing visibility and recognition, as they are about achieving economic outcomes, notably in France where such practices have received significant scholarly attention in recent years. Echoing some of Mary Margaret Fonow’s findings in relation to the US steel industry, both Romain Castellesi and Alexandra Oeser have shown how performances of working-class masculinity, including displays of strength or the controlled use of force, were mobilized by male workers in French public space in struggles against closures.⁵⁹ For women workers, fighting to save their jobs always involved a degree of transgression of gender norms and expectations, an ambivalence that is well-captured in Eve Meuret-Campfort’s study of lingerie workers who vowed to “fight like men” against the closure of their factory.⁶⁰ One way in which these workers ensured the visibility of their struggle and affirmed the quality of their work was by wearing the luxury products of their labor in street protests against threatened job cuts.⁶¹ Taken together, these studies suggest that heightened displays of masculinity or femininity, which transgressed middle-class gender norms, have been a feature of resistance to deindustrialization, at least in some settings, as workers responded to the particular forms of disempowerment that are associated with deindustrialization.

Restructuring the gender order

In a longitudinal ethnographic study of a steel town (“Freeway”) in the US rustbelt in the late twentieth century, Lois Weis posits that deindustrialization led to “a deep restructuring along gender lines,” as the empowerment of women coincided with what she terms “male collapse,” due to unemployed and underemployed men finding themselves in a “devalued position in the economy and in the family.”⁶² In this way, Weis directs our attention not just to gender identities within a specific social or occupational group, but to gender relations, and to the structural role of gender within communities. Over time, Weis argues, men and women adapted into a new configuration of what she terms “settled lives.” At the same, she identifies a persistence of patriarchal relations and even a resurgence in domestic violence, sexism, and racism (right-wing “protest masculinities”) among displaced white working-class men.⁶³

Reading across the international deindustrialization literature, it has been striking to find examples of the incidence of domestic violence in work on France, Italy, Scotland, Romania, and India, as well as the USA.⁶⁴ Some of this evidence crops up in studies where it is not the primary focus of investigation, but the significance of the phenomenon becomes more apparent when read alongside evidence from other locations. Although a more systematic study of the relationship between deindustrialization and gender-based violence would be welcome, the phenomenon appears to be rooted in the sense of class and gender disempowerment experienced by at least some working-class men as jobs were lost, occupational identities fractured, and social status diminished. The phenomenon may be more marked in industrial communities where highly patriarchal relations persisted and where this sense of disempowerment was thus particularly acute. In the Indian context, for example, Chitra Joshi argues that:

The erosion of spaces around which the culture of work and leisure was built has created a crisis of male identities. The invisibilization of men in the workforce touches the inner space of the domestic—threatening male authority in the household, dislocating gender equations.⁶⁵

This fed, she argues, into movements that mobilize around a politics of hatred and communal violence, as well as gender-based violence, undermining traditions of working-class solidarity. These findings resonate with studies that have found a direct relationship between male unemployment and women’s heightened risk of domestic violence in a range of time periods.⁶⁶ If there was a crisis of masculinity associated with deindustrialization, it was not just a crisis for men.

In a rare study of lesbian, gay, and transgender workers, Anne Balay has likewise suggested that industrial restructuring may have been associated with an increase in so-called “toxic” masculinities. In her study of steelworkers in the USA, Balay shows how the steelworks were characterized by a hyper-heteronormative and homophobic culture which kept gay men in the closet at work, even as it fostered a space for same-sex sexual encounters. She hypothesizes that this antigay culture had been reinforced as restructuring had reduced employment in the steel industry since the 1980s: at a time when American public culture was becoming more accepting of gay people, she observes, steelworkers were becoming less visible and experiencing greater insecurity, prompting a reassertion of an aggressively straight industrial masculinity.⁶⁷ These findings offer a troubling counterpoint to the solidarity embodied by the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners movement in the UK during the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike.⁶⁸

The “deep restructuring” of which Lois Weis speaks was also apparent in other ways. In her autoethnographic study, Exit Zero, Christine Walley offers a sensitive portrait of the impact of deindustrialization on her own family and the southeast Chicago neighborhood where she grew up in what she calls “a world of iron and steel.” She recalls how the closure of the steelworks and ensuing period of unemployment shattered her father’s confidence, detailing how he sank into depression and inactivity—his workless days filled with naps, watching ball games, and policing the behavior of the neighbors.⁶⁹ He was not alone: in the 10 years after the mill closed 800 of 3400 men who lost their jobs had died, many from alcoholism, stress-related illness, or suicide.⁷⁰ At the same time, Walley watched her mother’s confidence grow as, like many women in the neighborhood, she returned to employment in an effort to compensate for the loss of her husband’s wage, though there is no indication that her husband took on a corresponding share of the domestic labor.⁷¹

Such shifting dynamics within heterosexual couples had potentially significant implications for the emotional labor performed by women, as Walkerdine and Jimenez have noted. In their study of “Steeltown” in South Wales, they argue that throughout its long industrial history, the community had developed a set of gendered affective practices that protected it from the dangers and insecurities that characterized that history. The authors see gender identities as rooted in fantasies of masculinity and femininity that were central to the sense of community in “Steeltown,” with masculinity embodied in the figure of the strong man and breadwinner, while the “fantasy of femininity embodied nurturance, self-sacrifice, the maternal.”⁷² After the works closed, not only did women’s paid work become increasingly important to the household economy, and their resourcefulness vital to making ends meet with reduced household budgets, but their nurturing role led them to take on responsibility for managing the impact of the closures on the community and especially its men. “What seems to be the case,” Walkerdine and Jimenez suggest, “is that this support—domestic, financial, emotional—is what allows the men to continue to inhabit a masculinity that women support.”⁷³ In other words, even as they took on aspects of the conventionally masculine role of provider, these women sought to shore up a destabilized gender order through their affective labor.

For married women of the generation of Christine Walley’s mother, being able to “stay at home” had been a signifier of American white middle-class respectability that had come with the stable employment of their husbands at union rates in the decades after World War II. What Walley witnessed at a familial level were the cracks appearing in a Fordist-Keynesian model of social relations in which well-paying industrial jobs offered (some) men a “family wage” and access to the welfare state, while women took on the unpaid burden of reproducing the worker through their role as “housewives.” This model was not universal, nor did all workers benefit from it equally. As Gabriel Winant notes, it was racialized as well as gendered: African Americans were less likely to benefit fully from the higher wages and job security that underpinned the male breadwinner model.⁷⁴ Nonetheless, models of social citizenship that rested on the ideal of the male provider and the housewife had been widely institutionalized and promoted in Western Europe and North America. The transnational sacralization of the figure of housewife in the 1950s underscores the close association between mid-twentieth-century industrial capitalism and this model of social reproduction.⁷⁵ Deindustrialization was not the only factor that destabilized this gender order, but it surely played a part.

Winant has approached the entangled histories of deindustrialization and social reproduction by examining the rise of the healthcare economy in post-industrial Pittsburgh. In this city that was once at the heart of the US steel industry, he argues, the embodied impacts of deindustrialization could not be managed within the family unit and fed demand for healthcare. He points to a direct connection between the disastrous health outcomes of deindustrialization, the aging population of Pittsburgh (as people of working age moved to find employment), and the city’s expanding healthcare sector, which drove the proliferation of low-paid jobs that were disproportionately occupied by women of color. Rather than seeing “the expulsion of men from industrial labor and the absorption of women into the bottom ranks of the care industries” as two separate processes, he argues, we should see them as one.⁷⁶ The gendered and racialized model of social citizenship forged in the mid-twentieth-century United States had assigned a significant part of the labor of social reproduction to the unpaid “housewife,” while providing access to the welfare state through industrial jobs with family breadwinner wages, jobs that were occupied disproportionately by white men. As this family model of care came under pressure from growing health problems, an aging population and increased participation of women in the labor market, Winant argues, social reproduction industries, including the institutions of the welfare state responded, recruiting yet more women into the low-wage service economy.⁷⁷

In addition to inviting us to think about how deindustrialization is connected to long-term changes in family structure and the organization of care work, Winant’s account is a reminder that the shift to a more service-led economy was not necessarily empowering for women. In 2008, Ebru Kongar asked the question, “Is deindustrialization good for women?” She concluded that neither the increased participation of women in the labor market in the major industrial economies nor the expansion of women’s employment in export-oriented industries in the Global South permitted this conclusion. As in the expanding service sector in the Global North, women’s employment in the manufacturing sector in the Global South has been associated with low pay and part-time, non-unionized work.⁷⁸

Conclusions and future directions

At the heart of much of the research to date on gender and deindustrialization has been the figure of the “displaced worker” and the experience of losing one’s job, often with little prospect of finding similar or similarly remunerated employment. In centering the question of work-based identities, these studies have illuminated the complexities of class and gender, including the ways in which such identities are undermined and/or reconfigured through experiences of job loss or employment transitions. Likewise, performances of gender have been an important part of labor struggles over job losses. This is not just a story about “broken men.” Indeed, while studies of the impact of mass redundancies and industrial closures until recently focused heavily on men and male-dominated sectors, a sea change appears to be underway, as scholars increasingly turn to women workers’ experiences of industrial restructuring, to the ways in which gender expectations and the gendered division of labor shaped such experiences and the role of women in collective action. As a more expansive understanding of the gendered experience of declining industrial employment has developed, a space is also opening up for a much-needed conversation about the place of race and immigration in this history.

As the preceding discussion makes clear, the last two decades have seen a wealth of local and regional studies, some of which focus on a single workplace, company, or sector. Reading across these studies highlights certain recurring themes—changes in the gendered division of labor, the crisis, and/or reconfiguration of class and gender identities, the place of gender in struggles to save industrial jobs and communities. Such a reading also raises questions about geographical variation. While it is difficult to draw direct comparisons in the absence of more comparative and transnational research, the sense class and gender in crisis comes across most strongly in contexts where rapid industrial restructuring has been associated with political rupture and an acute sense of political abandonment—in the postsocialist states, for example.⁷⁹ Likewise, one might hypothesize that the particular interest in the perceived crisis of masculinity in the British literature reflects not just a surge of interest in masculinity studies in the UK from mid-1990s onward but something about the history of deindustrialization in Britain. It seems plausible that the damage wrought by the accelerated and brutal phase of deindustrialization that occurred under Thatcherism played a part in provoking this sense of crisis. The comparison with Germany, where there has not been a similar focus on wounded masculinities, is instructive in this respect. This discrepancy can surely be attributed at least partly to the rather different political and economic conditions that prevailed in Germany, notably in the Ruhr, where the spirit of cooperation typical of the Rhenish capitalist model resulted in a long, phased transition from coal from the 1950s onward, with the last mine closing in 2018.⁸⁰

A feature of much of the work published to date, particularly in the Anglophone world, has been an interest in the subjective social experience of deindustrialization, explored through a methodological emphasis on oral history and ethnography. Insights into the place of gender in managerial, political and even trade-union decision-making, are more scattered. How did gender expectations and the gendered division of labor shape such decisions? The evidence available so far suggests that assumptions about the role of male workers as household providers and about the secondary nature of women’s employment informed policy responses in several western European countries, at least initially. Further research is needed to develop a more systematic account of the extent of this phenomenon, its geographical and political variations, and the ways in which it changed over time. As government archival records from the late twentieth century are increasingly exploited over the coming years, there will be considerable scope to extend our understanding of these issues.

Thinking about deindustrialization as a long-term structural change also raises the question of how that process is intertwined with other long-term social and cultural changes that have reshaped gender norms and gender relations. Although communities built around coal and steel, for example, have often been seen as spaces where “traditional” gender relations prevailed, and the decline of these sectors has been understood as a disruption of this gender order, we should be wary of allowing the totemic nature of these industries to result in an oversimplified understanding of gender. After all, the period since the 1960s has been widely associated with changes in family structures and in norms of gender and sexuality, as well as in women’s employment. Recent work on British coal-mining communities, for example, suggests a generational shift in women’s aspirations and desire for autonomy by the 1980s, accompanied by a normalization of women’s participation in waged labor.⁸¹ The image of the “miner’s wife” that was mobilized to characterize women’s support for the 1984–1985 strike was already a misleading one.⁸²

Likewise, while the question of waged labor and the fate of the pit and the factory have occupied a central place in our understanding of deindustrialization, the process was felt well beyond these spaces. In many cases, industrial communities were built around distinctive and highly gendered leisure and consumption practices (such as working men’s social clubs) which were also subject to forms of restructuring, as industrial jobs were lost, new commercial leisure spaces developed in a more service-centered economy, and gender expectations shifted. Marion Henry’s study of the process of feminization that accompanied the impact of deindustrialization on British brass band culture is a case in point.⁸³ In this sense, the growing body of work on the relationship between gender and deindustrialization also has the potential to expand our understanding of the sites in which the long-term implications deindustrialization can be explored—in the home, in the hospital, and in leisure spaces.

Most fundamentally, this historiographical survey underlines the centrality of gender to any deep understanding of deindustrialization. The field that now calls itself “deindustrialization studies” has emerged largely through the development of scholarship that explores the phenomenon and its legacies as a social and cultural process. That process must be understood not just as one that had profound (but variable) implications for industrial masculinities but as one that is entangled in a much broader restructuring of gender norms, gender relations, and the gendered division of labor.