Journal of Women's History

During the nineteenth century, the figure of the working woman “served as a way of signifying disorder” because she existed in a world in which the gender of the universal worker and the public work space were male. ¹ In contrast, women who remained in the private sphere as wives and mothers seemed to ensure order and protect morality. Feminist scholarship has contributed significantly to labor history by calling into question the public/private dichotomy as an organizing principle. In an influential 1988 essay, historian Joan W. Scott argues that there were fundamental links between gender and class which blurred a clear division between them. Moreover, she reveals that women’s daily roles exceeded the boundaries of the private sphere. ² Feminist historians have demonstrated that the paradigm of the male worker is inadequate to describe women workers’ experiences. In fact, universal words like “worker” and “skill” are themselves social constructions with important political and social implications. These gendered words fortify the division between the public and private, and blur the degree to which many women actively participated in the public sphere and held political positions despite their domestic responsibilities. Indeed, as historian Kathleen Canning has argued, women’s identities were often formed through their productive work even if they were also wives and mothers. ³

During the last two centuries, the alleged conflict between women’s [End Page 166] roles as wives and mothers and their potential (or actual) role as workers has been debated by government officials, policy makers, employers, clergy, and women. Because women’s employment was often seen as a threat to men’s right to jobs and their responsibility for the survival of families (and hence nations), many states considered and created legislation to curtail or control women’s paid work. The type of policy developed to address the “problem” of women working has varied in time and place to reflect national demographic, ideological, and economic circumstances. While some states emphasized maternity leave, others instituted the family wage or protective legislation. However, policy implementation only roughly mirrored policy design; local officials often adapted national policy to fit their specific political, economic, and social conditions. Moreover, women’s failure to support policy and to conform their private behavior to meet state demands often further confounded policy implementation.

Although their thematic focuses, methodologies, and geographical scopes are distinct, three of the books reviewed here examine the relationship between women’s work and state policy. Each author analyzes state policy goals and working-class women’s lives. Despite vastly different historical and ideological contexts, the authors reveal that similar attitudes toward women’s work prevailed in Soviet Russia, Germany, and Australia. In all three states, policy debates focused on the appropriateness and suitability of women’s work and the need to balance women’s domestic roles with the state’s labor demands. Public morality and respectability recur in conjunction with ideology as themes in each state’s policy. Framing these debates—sometimes explicit, other times implicit—was the way in which the states understood the relationship between the public and private. But while these states sought to define the ideal woman—citizen, mother, and worker—women themselves were never passive in the face of state policy. Instead, Soviet, German, and Australian women accepted and rejected state dictates according to their life circumstances. Using archival sources, personal narratives, and oral history, these books investigate the personal side of working-class women’s history. Not only do these studies reveal what the state sought, but they also provide valuable insight into what working-class women wanted for their own lives.

Many industrial states wrestled with issues related to women and work, but only the Soviet state claimed to have solved the conflict. In 1930, top Soviet officials publicly proclaimed the resolution of the age-old “Woman Question.” They believed that in the new Soviet state, legislation and education guaranteed women equality with men. The monolithic nature of Soviet gender ideology and the persistent emphasis on class divisions to the exclusion of all others has discouraged historians from examining [End Page 167] Soviet views on gender more thoroughly. Elizabeth Wood’s study The Baba and the Comrade is thus a welcome addition to the historical narrative on the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet gender policy. Using reports from Soviet state officials and leaders of women’s sections, minutes from Communist Party policy debates, and a vast collection of published sources, Wood challenges the view that Soviet gender policy was monolithic and uniform. Instead, she contends that attitudes, still largely unformed during the revolution, were gradually shaped to fit state needs during the civil war and bolster state security thereafter. The result, she argues, was an ambiguous policy that constantly shifted to bring ideological demands in line with the everyday needs of the state.

At the center of Bolshevik debates over gender policy was the question of whether women were the same or different from men. Wood’s careful analysis of party discussions reveals that the Bolsheviks were perpetually torn between their assertion that women were equal to men, and their fear that the baba, an “illiterate, superstitious, and generally ‘backward’” female figure who served as a foil for the comrade, would undermine the revolution (1). Yet, despite this concern, during the early years, the Bolsheviks focused their energy on economic issues, particularly creating a dedicated proletariat, rather than on gender issues. Only after living conditions deteriorated, hunger became rampant, and food prices rose did the Bolsheviks begin to fear that without a specific gender policy, the party would lose its female constituency. As a result, they drafted equal rights legislation, created programs to appeal to women, and laid the groundwork for separate women’s sections within the Communist Party. This legislation did not, however, harmonize the contradictory roles for women. As Wood asserts, despite equal rights legislation, it was “natural” female strengths—“tender hearts, caring hands, [and] sharp eyes” (66)—that Bolshevik leaders valued most in women. Thus the desired female comrade, though allegedly equal to men, was praised primarily for her feminine characteristics.

By proclaiming women’s equality with men, Bolshevik officials obviated the need for separate organizations to address women’s issues. They believed that too much emphasis on women’s gender-specific needs would create divisions between women and men and subvert the more important class struggle. And yet, the Communist leadership felt compelled to create women’s sections in the party to attract women to the party and educate them as comrades. Wood argues, however, that from the beginning women’s sections faced an identity crisis that was fundamental, intractable, and intrinsic to state ideology. Women’s section leaders were perpetually at pains to defend the sections’ valuable role in attracting women to the party and desperate to distinguish themselves from Western [End Page 168] feminists who they thought to be the antithesis of the proletarian revolution. The resultant quandary, reminiscent of theoretical debates other women’s movements raised, was particularly troubling in Soviet Russia because the label “feminist deviant” was aggressively used to silence women who challenged the party. The party’s ambivalent feeling toward women’s sections also meant that section leaders continually struggled for acceptance, members, and the party’s financial and ideological support.

Bolshevik labor policy was also riddled with contradictions. Although the Bolsheviks rhetorically supported both male and female workers, Wood argues that in reality the quintessential Soviet worker was male. Women’s ambiguous place in the workforce resulted in the state’s inability either to combine work and family smoothly or to separate them decisively. After 1923, this shortcoming led Bolshevik party leaders to devote more attention to everyday life and in the process brought women’s lives under greater scrutiny—and greater criticism. But Wood contends that their focus was “not so much on questions of women’s emancipation as on the harm women would bring to the revolution as non-Communists, untutored, backward, and potentially subversive wives, mothers, and mothers-in-law” (194). Women were blamed for problems in the family and society’s moral decay. And although the contradictions between women’s public and private roles were discussed, women who worked outside the home and were politically active continued to be held responsible for their domestic duties at home. Thus, in the final analysis, Wood argues that although Bolshevik party leaders encouraged and even demanded that women play more political and productive roles as comrades, they were unable (or unwilling) to free women from their domestic and maternal roles.

Wood’s well-researched and skillfully written narrative illuminates both the daily antagonism between Soviet state officials and women’s section leaders, and the intractable ideological contradictions that promised women equality while denying gender difference. She is less interested, however, in the response of actual women and men to Soviet ideology. Wood points out that some men were hesitant to marry “comrades” since they only needed “‘a female [baba], a housewife [khozaika]’” (205). She also explains that women’s section leaders struggled to balance the party’s demand that they focus on politics with women’s demand that they address everyday issues like maternity benefits and day care. Her focus on the leadership reveals contradictions in gender ideology, but these examples suggest that gender policy was also shaped on a daily basis by both women’s section leaders and individual women and men. While some women struggled to become comrades, others probably found the role as baba more compatible with their life goals of marriage and child rearing and sought the women’s sections to solve daily problems, not to change their worldview. [End Page 169]

Ute Daniel, in The War from Within, analyzes the relationship between German working-class women and the state policy created to regulate their lives in the context of war. German policy makers faced the challenge of creating policy that would simultaneously satisfy the increasing demands of a country at war and maintain “traditional” gender roles on the home front. Using a combination of government records and statistics on labor and domestic issues, national and local monthly reports on home front conditions, and memoirs, Daniel argues that ultimately “the state’s inability to integrate working-class women and families into the framework of its domestic politics of behavior control” prevented it from rallying the home front to support the war effort (129). Throughout the war, labor experts, emphasizing the vital role women played in providing food and supplies to soldiers, debated whether to include women in labor conscription. In the end however, women’s labor force participation remained limited in part because policy makers recognized the important domestic roles women played. Declining marriage and birthrates and increasing delinquency rates signaled that women—especially working-class women—were failing to fulfill their domestic roles. To counter this trend, perceived as dangerous by the state, a new level of respect was officially bestowed on housewives and mothers. War wives received support under the new family aid program which, the state emphasized, was “not state or municipal charity, but rather the fulfillment of a moral claim” (185). Faced with the need to encourage working-class women to act as both industrial workers and domestic mothers, German policy makers waffled. Rather than create a single policy, they launched an ideological campaign to convince working-class women of the benefits of war.

In contrast to Wood, Daniel is intensely interested in German women’s interpretations of and influence over German policy. She argues that the dual aim of forcing women to work and be mothers affected women’s attitudes toward their lives in war. For example, despite calls to join the labor force, the number of women who went to work during the war was no greater than it had been in preceding years. In fact, she asserts that the “image of the hordes of women who supposedly appeared on the labor market for the first time between 1914 and 1918 must . . . definitively be abandoned” (45). Daniel also contends that the German state’s demobilization policy influenced women’s participation in the labor force. At the outset, German authorities had steadfastly maintained that jobs would be restored to men after the war. Thus, women who entered the labor force knew their work was temporary; this discouraged many women from making the extra sacrifices employers and state officials expected of them. Women changed jobs frequently to increase their pay or to stay with friends and often quit if their family aid was threatened. Officials interpreted such [End Page 170] actions as signs of women’s inconsistent and irresponsible behavior. In contrast, Daniel points out that most women made choices based on their individual life circumstances rather than the demands of the state. Working-class women, in particular, rejected the state’s authoritarian, patriarchal model family and thwarted calls to motherhood by using birth control. They undermined the state’s food allocation program by “hamstering” food and establishing their own black market; and they refused to enter the war industry solely at the state’s behest.

The War from Within is a valuable contribution to current knowledge on working-class women and the First World War. Daniel asserts that the war did not have an emancipatory or modernizing effect on women. Her evidence of the many ways in which women pursued their own interests regardless of state demands casts a new light on the relationship between the German state and its populace. This assertion, however, raises the question: Which women supported the government’s war aims and how do they compare to Daniel’s more rebellious women? Daniel also probes the traditional boundaries of class in war. As she points out, male conscription left many women of all classes without income. Although the family aid many women received was loosely based on their husband’s income, the deterioration of the value of cash blurred traditional class boundaries. A closer reading of how women, who belonged to different classes prior to the war, reacted to the demand that they work and the scorn they received as war wives would prove interesting for future study. Finally, it must be noted that the English translation of Daniel’s book is often difficult to follow and sometimes obscures her important argument.

Diane Kirkby also examines the intersections of gender, work, and state policy in Barmaids. Using a provocative collection of archival sources, barmaids’ memoirs, and photographs, Kirkby weaves a narrative that contributes an important and innovative chapter to labor, cultural, and social history. She focuses on both the sweat and grime of bar work itself and the mythology and symbols that came to be associated with barmaids. Kirkby argues that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both skill and sex were central to Australian bar work. Barmaids pulled beers and mixed drinks for a mostly male clientele, but their very presence in pubs precluded a strict division between public and private space and blurred gender boundaries. The intertwined issues of work and sexuality, masculine and feminine identity, and respectability drive Kirkby’s study. But Barmaids is also a masterful history of space—pubs and taverns, towns and cities—and how space was gendered in Australia. Taking the reader both behind the bar and into parliamentary chambers, Kirkby creates a compelling story that is at once visual, symbolic, and historical.

At the heart of the nineteenth-century battle over barmaids was the [End Page 171] question of what constituted appropriate work for women. For barmaids, bar work promised higher wages and more freedom than domestic service, and it garnered a greater sense of respect: barmaids were addressed as “Miss” and enjoyed an opportunity to meet men unchaperoned. But while barmaids demanded respect as workers, they were also evaluated for both their skill and their appearance. Kirkby emphasizes that barmaids’ “explicit sexuality” and respectability defined “women’s employment in a public space in a new, highly charged way” (46). In particular, she claims that the line between work and sexuality in bar work was blurred, making bar work seem more like prostitution than other service work. She also reads the physical positioning behind the bar as downplaying work (feet are hidden) and increasing intimacy (faces are revealed).

The explicit and implicit sexuality in bar work caused temperance organizations and state governments to attack barmaids vociferously during the nineteenth century. Temperance fighters harked back to more traditional definitions of women’s work and claimed that “if her work wasn’t motherly or wifely tasks, cooking and making beds, then it must be sexual” (97). Barmaids, they argued, were hired because they were young and sexy and thus lured men to drink. The temperance campaign so effectively framed bar work as a moral issue that when government commissioners targeted barmaids for legislation in the 1880s, they also portrayed the proposed reform as a moral and not a labor issue. They granted other women workers protective legislation, but excluded barmaids because bar work was neither respectable nor “sufficiently domesticated” to be considered “appropriate women’s work” (77). Ignoring both women’s economic reasons for choosing higher paid bar work and employers’ interest in hiring women, who commanded lower wages than men, all Australian states created legislation to limit women’s bar work after the turn of the century. As a result, fewer women worked as barmaids and age limits ensured that those who did were more mature, maternal women.

Barmaids were neither passive nor without supporters in this climate of changing attitudes. Focusing on the economics of women’s bar work, supporters emphasized that women’s jobs were scarce and new laws, instead of eliminating barmaids, should improve their working conditions. Brewers emphasized that women were important to the bars because they improved the atmosphere and made men feel more comfortable. Barmaids also acted on their own behalf. Interestingly, however, they found allies not with other women workers, but with the Liquor Trades Union. During the Second World War, this strategy paid off, and the union supported female bar workers’ right to equal pay.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed both the demise of barmaids and their immortalization within Australian national mythology. [End Page 172] These parallel developments reflect closely the division between sexuality and work in women’s bar work. Since 1950, the explosion of car ownership has drawn people away from downtown pubs, and liquor, now available at grocery stores, is increasingly consumed at home. The nature of bar work has also changed. Feminism and sexual harassment debates during the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the professionalization of bar work. Barmaids were replaced by younger, more casual “bar attendants,” who used bartending as a stepping stone to careers in hotel management. They demanded equal and professional treatment as workers, and did not form personal bonds with customers. Simultaneously, by the 1970s, a resurgence of Australian nationalism led to the creation of a drinking myth: “buxom genial barmaids” served “boorish men” in lively pubs. Thus, Kirkby shows that while in the general workforce bar work became divorced from sexuality, a myth developed that celebrated barmaids as the object of the male gaze—as a “‘sort of wife to a great number of men’”—and not as workers (200). Oddly, Kirkby’s exclusive focus on work makes it difficult to place off-duty barmaids in society or bar work in women’s lives.

Anna Davin’s study, Growing Up Poor, is immersed in the sounds and smells of English working-class life. In contrast to the other three books reviewed here, however, her focus is not on working-class women, but rather on their children, especially their daughters. Davin skillfully weaves myriad sources including parliamentary papers, school board and education reports, textbooks, and oral histories to construct a kaleidoscope of scenes of everyday life from the perspective of working-class children. At one level, Davin focuses on the impact of child welfare on children. She argues that children’s experiences underwent a gradual—but ultimately dramatic—transformation after 1870 as middle-class notions of respectability permeated school life and imposed new standards of normalcy. At the same time, the British state began to assume the role as “over-parent” and challenged working-class parents’ authority and ability to raise their children to be proper British citizens. Despite this framework of state ideology and policy, however, Davin allows her working-class subjects to narrate the story she tells. Their voices predominate and enable her to illustrate how the state’s increased presence in working-class life coincided with the stricter divisions of gender in childhood.

Davin marks 1870, the year elementary school became compulsory, as the moment when the influence of middle-class respectability on working-class life escalated significantly. For working-class families, attaining respectability was a family enterprise that demanded everyone’s participation. Even so, middle-class values had to be adapted to working-class circumstances and were adopted only gradually. Some families enforced [End Page 173] early bedtimes; others set a premium on cleanliness; and others restricted Sunday behavior. The values adopted reflected individual life experience and poverty level, but Davin asserts that although “Everyone knew the difference between ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ . . . almost no-one saw themselves as not respectable” (70). While Ellen Ross has argued that it was women who embodied respectability, Davin reveals how much this was a mother-daughter endeavor: “Respectability demanded that the mother control her children’s movements, especially the girls, and keep girls’ work (and dress and interests) distinct from boys’” (72). ⁴ Respectable girls could not be left to run in the streets with their brothers. Not only did such restrictions have a negative impact on working-class girls’ social lives, but, in many cases, also took a toll on their health.

Davin argues that many children received their education in middle-class values at school. The separation of girls and boys on the playground and in the classroom, in particular, stood in stark contrast to working-class life. Textbooks reinforced gender-specific tasks and girls spent hours in school doing needlework, while their brothers studied science. Attendance records reveal that parents also regarded school differently for boys and girls. Girls were absent more frequently, a fact Davin attributes to their greater responsibility for younger siblings. But Davin contends that after 1880 the school also increasingly “provided a wedge with which to open up the privacy of the working-class family” (214). Middle-class teachers tried to “civilize” working-class children even if this conflicted with the daily realities of many working-class families. They set new standards of cleanliness and criticized mothers who failed to keep their children clean, and they enforced discipline and order which, Davin emphasizes, coincided with the state’s program to shape children to meet the needs of a “modern” nation.

Yet, despite increased state intervention into childhood, Davin does not lose sight of the variation that continued to characterize working-class childhood. “For London children, the ‘civilizing’ influence of the school was in constant competition with life in the outside world, which most children found infinitely more interesting and convincing” (216). Though parents could not keep their children out of school, many continued to resent schools’ intrusions into their lives. Some rebelled by allying with their children against schools and teachers, especially when teachers used corporal punishment. Although rising standards of living limited girls’ worlds by expanding their domestic responsibilities, most families could not afford to divide work along gender lines completely. Poverty continued to play a critical role in shaping working-class childhood for girls and boys into the twentieth century.

These four books reveal the tremendous and exciting diversity in [End Page 174] working-class women’s history today. Clearly, women’s work was and continues to be a subject of considerable contention in state policy, on the shop floor, and in workers’ homes. These studies also underscore the importance of approaching working-class women’s history from a variety of perspectives including professional, ideological, and personal. They reveal the pervasive ways that states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed they could manipulate working-class women to meet state needs. Importantly, however, these authors also confirm that working-class women (and their daughters) could and did navigate around state-designated roles.