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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Elisabeth Prügl, The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) |
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IN A FINELY NUANCED, and perhaps the first serious study of homework, Elisabeth Prügl unravels the gendered economy of those who "sew garments, embroider, make lace, roll cigarettes, weave carpets, peel shrimp, prepare food, polish plastic, process insurance claims, edit manuscripts, and assemble artificial flowers, umbrellas, and jewelry." (1) On a presumed path of social progress, however, homework emerges as an anomaly. After all, we are all made to expect a change away from "traditional" to "modern" ways of life where the realms of home and work were neatly separated. Economic theory had long predicted that progressive industrialization would move all production into factories. With its failure to disappear from the modern landscape, homework became an anathema to modern work practices, a problem to be solved, and a setback to global expectations of modernity. It was not until the 1980s that homework received some legitimation, ironically enough, under the flexible economy of temporary labour that has valourized forms of production previously considered marginal. |
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In order to uncover the highly contested terrain of home-based work, I will discuss three major faultlines along which Prügl's analysis moves simultaneously: gender, labour, and language. Along the dimension of gender, Prügl shows how feminism itself has not been an unbroken unity or a single movement in its response to an emergence of industrial patriarchy that progressively excluded women from paid work. The author unravels discourses of domesticity and true womanhood that revolved around the idea of the male breadwinner. The notion of motherhood as a defining aspect of womanhood reinforced a new gender order centered on the home-work separation. In the first half of the 20th century, the issue of special protective legislation for women created a split within the global women's movement. While equal-right feminists condemned such legislation for its discriminatory effects, union women defended protective legislation, arguing women's work conditions were at times objectively different from those of men. Curiously, those favouring protective legislation also favoured a ban on homework, leading in the late 1920s to a split in the International Alliance of Women. |
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Although both defenders and enemies of protective legislation preferred equal employment status for women, those who favoured protective legislation regarded women and actual and potential mothers, recognizing motherhood as a disadvantage in the labour market. Equal-rights feminists, on the contrary, defined women as free individuals in the liberal sense, and thus contested the association of womanhood with weakness and dependence. Confining womanhood to motherhood legitimized inequality; indeed, national bureaucracies used pay rates 50 to 65 per cent lower for women in Britain and Germany in the 1920s and 30s. At the time, both the International Labour Organization and International Labour Office opposed equal pay and equal protection for women. After the 1950s, another rift occurred in the feminist space between Western feminists and feminist nationals from newly independent countries from Asia and Africa. The symbolic and economic value of home-based craft for these nations cast doubt on the efforts of women in the Roosevelt administration who had discussed industrial homework as a place of exploitation and inefficiency. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that feminist activists from the South, for example, the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India, attempted a synthesis between crafts production and industrial homework, and gained acceptance in global debates. Within Western feminism too, the language of maternalism was accepted without giving up demands for equal rights. With the development of the post-Fordist flexible mode of production, however, homework was no longer a problem but an opportunity for the employers to cut costs and gain flexibility. The rhetoric of flexible labour "de-feminized home-based work and created an androgynous worker flexibly integrated into a new technologically enabled circuit of production." (106) |
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The author notes that homework came into increasing conflict with organized labour by the early 20th century. As unions turned to the state for protection from the effects of the capitalist mode of production, they saw homework as undermining factory legislation and thus the male breadwinner role that was vital to the industrial-era patriarchy. Some worker representatives at the International Labour Conference supported equal pay for homeworkers, as they feared that women's lower wages were a serious threat to men's employment. Such thinking, Prügl maintains, was based on the presumption that under equal-wage conditions, men would emerge victorious because of their inherent superiority. With the rise of a post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation, however, the International Labour Organization adopted a convention on homework in the 1990s, adopting a guiding principle of the equality of treatment between homeworkers and other wage earners. "Home-based workers became ideal workers in a restructured global economy, providing flexibility and costing little.... Home-based work and microenterprises no longer provided a romantic alternative to global capitalism, but became an integral part of domestic and global production chains." (102) Increasingly, Western employers stopped viewing domestic commitments as impediments to income earning. |
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The linguistic dimension of homework is no less important. Language is not a mere passive bearer of existing power relations, it also actively structures perceptions about what counts as legitimate. The exclusivity of categories enables particular power relations, as reflected in Fordist class categories of "employer" and "employed." The author documents battles around the categorization of home workers as "self-employed," as it has important consequences. When defined as "self-employed," homeworkers are inserted into the "employer" category, which, despite sounding nice, is a losing proposition. In this way, homeworkers lose labour rights, protections, and access to benefits that arise from the rules that defined worker and employer relationships under Fordism, in which workers' acquiescence to their own subordination was often forthcoming because it came with protection. One of the major battles for the feminist activists under post-Fordism has been to destabilize clear hierarchies of employer and employee, and thereby open the definitions of home-based work to include both self-employed and dependent workers. There are some minor issues that are not clearly addressed in this otherwise sophisticated analysis of home-based work. The author at times tends to combine all subcontracted, temporary, and other contingent workers in her image of homeworkers. (E.g., 121) But , where, for example do we fit in workers who are permanent employees of a firm that supplies, for example, programmers to other companies on a temporary project-based basis. Obviously, such workers do not have much in common with home-based manual workers, in contrast to "self-employed" home-based programmers with whom they do. Second, the idea of the global as a social space, which is constituted by "a specific set of influential agents, through practices that reach beyond state boundaries," is not very clear. (15) How does such a global space achieve its unity in order to be called "a" space? What discourses or episteme form its basis? Is this space infinite and all-encompassing? Where are its boundaries? I do not think this concept is necessary to "the global construction of gender," which can easily be seen as crystallizing from institutional encounters of different discursive practices around the globe. Finally, the constant use of Nicholas Onuf's awkward terminology of instruction-rules, directive- rules and commitment-rules, appears tired and forced in an otherwise clear and lucid analysis. In short, Elisabeth Prügl deserves applause for bringing the long-neglected practices of homework to our attention, a job she has done with aplomb. |
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A. Aneesh
Stanford University
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