Class and Gender: Conflicting Components of Women's Behaviour in the Textile Mills of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, 1880–1914
There is at present much interest in historical explanations for the political attitudes and collective behaviour of industrial workers. Typically, such I explanations develop out of descriptions of production relations. In some cases, historians have adduced the constituents of such relations (including shopfloor conditions, job skills and hierarchies of workers and employers) to explain strikes, unions, and mass-based political parties. In other cases, historians of labouring people have emphasized one or another of these elements – e.g. relative levels of skill – in efforts to explain collective behaviour. Still others have taken a more general view, ascribing workers' collective rebellion to the history of industrial capitalism itself; in this view, conditions for rebellion depend upon the historical moment, or conjuncture.