Anthropology, Class and the ‘Big Heads’: An Ethnography of Distinctions between ‘Rough’ and ‘Posh’ amongst Women Workers in the UK Pottery Industry

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hart
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Pottery Industry ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Global Corporation ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
The Way

In the context of the take-over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family-owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke-on-Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re-structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives. I was the first one in our family to go in decorating end and they thought I was a bit stuck-up. My sister was in clay end as a cup-handler and I had used to walk off factory without her, or wait for her to leave before I left, though she said, ‘If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have anything to paint!’ They were much freer in the clay end – had more to do with men – we thought we were one up. 1

Class, Gender and Cold War Politics: The Union of Australian Women and the Campaign for Equal Pay, 1950–66

2019 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Katherine Keirs
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The 1960S

The confluence of social and political forces during the Menzies era stalled the progress of wage justice for women workers until the end of the 1960s. Nevertheless, women’s organisations and the progressive trade union movement advocated equal pay for the sexes throughout this period. This article examines the contribution of the Union of Australian Women (UAW), which represented the interests of working-class women, to the campaign for equal pay from 1950 to 1966. It discusses the ways in which the mixture of women’s culturally accepted domestic roles and widespread anti-communism muted enthusiasm for the UAW’s message. The article argues, however, that the UAW made an effective contribution to keeping equal pay in the public consciousness, redressing the inattention to working-class women’s role in their economic emancipation.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Nick Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Subsequent Growth ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
The Uk

In common with its companion volume - Soldiers as Workers – Class, employment, conflict and the nineteenth century military (2016), this study argues that class is the primary means of understanding the topic. Focusing on rank and file soldiers it concludes that they were not a separate caste. Instead, soldiering was often just a phase in civilian working lives. The nineteenth century was overshadowed by the mass mobilisation required for the generation-long French Wars and concurrent Industrial Revolution, with emerging working-class popular politics. The chapter reviews developing working class literacy and subsequent growth of rank and file memoirs, which are an important source for this study. The chapter stresses the importance of the new barrack system in the UK and the growth of British Empire, both of which had profound consequences for British society.

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

scholarly journals “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Eva Peron ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Key Resources

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

scholarly journals A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidra Kamran
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Hegemonic Femininity ◽  
Class Distinction

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts or in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capitals at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Further, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, this article explains the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

Crisis at Work: Gender, Class, and the Dehumanization of Jobs

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Harriet Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
The Uk

Drawing on Huw Beynon’s paper in HSIR 40 (2019), this article surveys the position of women in the UK labour market over the last fifty years. It suggests that many of the developments Beynon describes are relevant to women’s employment, but with the added twist that women’s position in the labour market and society is structured by their responsibility within the total social organization of labour for reproductive labour. Despite increased women’s employment, gender segregation, both horizontal and vertical, is obstinately persistent, especially in working-class occupations. Two of these occupations, care work and retail, are used to illustrate how increasing precarity of jobs combined with technologies of control have brought about a dehumanization of work. It is concluded that the restructuring of global capitalism on neoliberal principles has negatively affected opportunities for women workers.

Valuing and strengthening community

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Mckenzie
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Distinct Group ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores how there is a growing and distinct group of people in the UK who are faring badly in this period of advanced capitalism. As inequality rises and the gap between the top and the bottom of society widens, their lives are becoming more precarious. The people struggling the most are the working class, but unlike in previous generations, they have little in the way of self- or state-organised stability, from trade unions, political parties, or from identities connected to their employment. It is this group of people at the bottom of society who have been harmed the most by capitalist economics and who have traditionally relied on ‘the social’, whether in their employment or in their communities, to thrive.

Class

2021 ◽  
pp. 110-135
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Significant Source ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Fresh Insight ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This chapter shows that Annie Kenney’s suffragette career offers fresh insight into the way that class was represented, understood, and experienced within the WSPU. While WSPU activists frequently claimed that theirs was a classless organization, historians have often been sceptical as to whether this was reflected in their policies and attitudes. Class remained a significant source of tension in the organization even as women attempted to pursue a common goal. This chapter traces how Annie Kenney was first positioned as a representative of, and advocate for, working-class women, and later celebrated for her outstanding commitment to the cause, indicating that the meaning of class was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static. The chapter raises ideas about the role and representation of working-class women within the WSPU, and demonstrates how women themselves attempted to navigate the complicated terrain of class hierarchies and gendered inequality.

“Beneath Our Dignity”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Theater Program ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Fair Wages ◽  
Working Class Women

Chapter 5 analyzes the initial rocky years of black working-class women’s entry into the needle trades, boot and shoe, and laundry factories and their unions during the early to mid-1940s. Black working-class women exposed the fault lines of the American racial liberalism espoused by civil rights and union progressives who worked to establish “interracial good-will” in unionism and the industrial workforce. Women’s resistance on the shop floor and in the union hall, demanding respect and fairness, challenged and altered community leaders’ programs. Black working-class women were less interested in breaking the color barrier than in earning fair wages, establishing fair standards, organizing work hours around other commitments, and working and organizing in a hospitable climate. Focusing on black women’s work with the ILGWU, this chapter examines their work and union experiences in the union’s worker theater program to consider why conflicts over historical memory; black women workers’ long demands for dignity, autonomy, and respect; and social reformers’ interracial experiments produced intense battles.

“American Matrons and Daughters”

2018 ◽  
pp. 198-219
Author(s):  
Judith Giesberg
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Window Of Opportunity ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Formative Stage ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Federal Contracting ◽  
American Labor

Judith Giesberg explores the intersection of national loyalty debates and the labor activism of Philadelphia seamstresses in war industries. Women workers understood the vital service they performed sewing military uniforms and equipment but were largely exploited and vulnerable in a system of federal contracting reliant on middle-men and “outwork.” Giesberg argues that the exploitation of women workers, and the denigration of their labor activism, rested on an idealized depiction of female patriotism in supporting roles, as soldiers’ wives and family. Working class women turned the rhetorical tables by laying claim to their own service and patriotism, legitimizing their protests in a republican language of rights and tyranny. In examining seamstresses’ protests at the Schuylkill Arsenal, Giesberg uncovers a forgotten chapter in American labor history, connecting antebellum activism with Gilded Age strife. The author depicts a brief window of opportunity where women challenged the formative stage of the sweatshop system drawing in part on professions of their own loyalty.

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