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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Jan Kok, ed., Rebellious Families: Household Strategies and Collective Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Berghahn Books 2002)
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| THE TITLE of this collection is somewhat misleading. One of its two main goals is to make the question of why people did "not engage in collective action" as important as why they did. This, the author of the introduction and conclusion, Marcel van der Linden argues, is a principal weakness of much labour history. (1) The second goal is to explore the relationship among family strategies, union involvement, and militancy. Most of the eleven essays were delivered at a workshop organized by researchers in the research department of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam on "living strategies." Participation in several workshops threads some coherence through the collection, though the authors approach their subjects from different ideological and theoretical perspectives and through a range of subjects. Several deal with workers and their families in specific industries — weavers in Silesia in 1844 (Christina von Hodenberg), bricklayers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Madrid (Justin Byrne), silk workers in early 20th century Pennsylvania (Bonnie Stepenoff), construction workers in early 20th-century Amsterdam (Henk Wals) and plantation families in 20th-century Philippines (Rosanne Rutten). Eileen Janes Yeo looks more broadly at the early British labour movement, Bruce Scates and Theresa Moriarty study particular crisis moments in 19th-century Melbourne and 1913 Dublin respectively, while Mark Pittaway examines the retreat from collective protest in Stalinist Hungary. The introduction and conclusion, both written by van der Linden, seek to tie the collection together and to set up a shared framework by thinking through the issues the authors all address and by providing clear definitions of such terms as families, households, household strategies, and collective action. As a socialist-feminist historian, I found the overall framework proposed by van der Linden, with its tax-onomies, typologies, and a tendency to treat households as collective units, rather mechanical and disappointing. There are only occasional muted reminders about differences of age and gender within households in these two chapters, and they draw from arguments in other articles in the collection rather than any systematic integration of a gender analysis. Other readers of Labour/Le Travail may also be uncomfortable with his typologies of types of workers' organizations according to whether they pose high or low risks financially, or in terms of repression or the "freerider problem," and a tendency to make very broad and simplistic characterizations of Marxist scholarship, without providing references. |
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These essays explore links between families and militancy in a range of ways. Eileen Janes Yeo's brief chapter on "Early British Labour Movements in Relation to Family Need" moves masterfully across the 19th century identifying institutions and practices that working people created for themselves to respond to their own needs for dignity, security, and pleasure. In looking at institutions like co-operative stores she counters the tendency of some of the other articles to treat unions as if they were foreign to the workers who join them or "risks" that had to be rationally assessed. Like Wals and Byrne she highlights the attraction of institutions like friendly societies and unions that offered workers and their families a decent burial or security in times of unemployment. Widespread unemployment in Melbourne during the 1890s is the context of Bruce Scates' study. Facing starvation for herself and her four children, Clarina Stringer, the widow whose case he uses to explore "strategic options and the household economy in late nineteenth-century Australia," went to the Melbourne Trades Hall for help. The support given her by "the Salvage Corps," unemployed men who had organized to prevent bailiffs confiscating goods for non-payment of rent, turned into a full-scale riot. In this excellent article, Scates explores the diverse ways single mothers like Clarina Stringer made ends meet and makes a cogent argument for the importance of studying the politics of the street as well as those of "union or parliament" (68) and of exploring women's militancy and the moral economy and citizenship claims that sustained it. In a similar way, Christine von Hodenberg re-assesses the well known Silesian weavers' revolt in 1844, by arguing that this protest was only a last resort. The proto-industrial weavers did not target all entrepreneurs. Rather, their violent protest was against particular manufacturers who violated a shared set of norms around prices, respectful relations, levels of wealth, and who should receive work. Thus the protest, she argues, was not an articulation of working-class consciousness or Luddite behaviour. Rather it was a stand by men who considered themselves self-employed artisans and feared losing not only that status, but the respect that went with it. |
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Justin Byrne also explores a moral economy rooted in gender, family, and class relations within communities and households that he sees as supporting the massive upsurge in support for the socialist-led union federation, El Trabajo, among bricklayers in late 1890s Madrid. He too stresses the attraction of the union's ability to provide benefits in times of accidents, incapacity, death, and, after 1913, old age. In Madrid, he argues, support for the union built on existing solidarity, social networks, and household survival strategies rooted in the cramped areas of the city where the bricklayers lived. Bricklayers agreed to bargain for shorter hours and hence lower pay, so that work could be spread around more evenly because so many wives and other family members were already making major contributions to family incomes. Wals paints a very different picture of the situation among construction workers in Amsterdam in the first quarter of the century, where costs seem to be the major factor influencing their decisions. There, construction workers appear to have been able to choose between syndicalist and social democratic unions. The numbers who were unionized never exceeded 50 per cent, and increases in membership, he argues, all occurred when attractive unemployment benefits were instituted. In attempting to explore union membership explicitly as a family strategy, and to consider it through family budgets, he concludes, in part, that a major source of opposition to union membership came from wives as the managers of the family budget. The evidence for this is thin. The union press is read without any sensitivity to how gender differences were represented and why, and workplace-based issues and moral economies disappear completely. |
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Stepenoff, in contrast, is sensitive to the ways unionized males and reformers in the hard-coal-mining areas of Pennsylvania portrayed women in the silk industry as young, dependent, and secondary wage earners so that only too often they were denied support in strikes and union drives. In other regions the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) succeeded in organizing silk workers, but, Stepenoff argues, the strength of the United Mine Workers of America in the coal region, many of whose members were fathers of workers, and the condemnations of the IWW by community and church leaders, prevented success there. This in turn meant that production continued during the 1913 Paterson silk strike, ultimately contributing to its failure. One strategy deployed during that 1913 strike and the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 is the focus of Theresa Moriarty's article, "Who will look after the kiddies?" Two months into Dublin's six-month-long 1913 lockout, London socialist feminists offered to shelter Dublin children in sympathizers' homes for as long as the dispute lasted as had been done in Belgium and during the two American strikes. Moriarty points out that such plans built on long-established habits of informal fostering in working-class households. Many wives of the locked-out male workers, already actively involved in collective cultural activities at Liberty Hall, were anxious to have their offspring sent to places where they would be safe and well-fed. The scheme provoked extreme reactions, fracturing Dubliners along lines of class, gender, religion, and nation. Departing children had to be protected from crowds of noisy demonstrators. Under a barrage of written and material assault from in and outside the labour movement, the scheme ground to a halt. It was replaced by programmes distributing food and clothing to the wives and children of strikers. |
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The strengths of most of these essays lie in the ways the authors clearly root their studies of the decisions made by family members about collective action within the social and cultural dynamics of specific times and places. Changing contexts are the critical elements in Rosanne Rutten's study of the situation in the Philippine province of Negros Occidental. She explores reasons for the growing acceptance among parents of sons and daughters becoming full-time revolutionaries working for the NPA in the 1970s and early 1980s, then charts the decline in such support as the NPA moved from securing material advantages for the poor to armed struggle. Changing contexts are equally important to Pittaway's demonstration of the ways workers in Stalinist Hungary dealt with increasingly low wages, poor work conditions, and terrible food shortages. They rejected public, collective protest, he argues, and focused instead on family, the home, and self-sufficiency. Women became critical to the informal economic activities that increased household autonomy from the state. This focus on private household survival in turn led to a decline in social solidarity, and to a public/private split along gender lines countering the Stalinist advocacy of gender equality in the workplace. |
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Together the articles in this collection reveal the complex and diverse ways individual men and women struggled to ensure they had food and clothing for themselves and their children in a range of places and times. Individually and collectively they contribute to building bridges between studies of the workplace and the home. The richness of human behaviour and the range of choices that they reveal transcend the limits of approaches framed through the lenses of risk analysis or "household strategic repertoires" as proposed in the collection's introduction and conclusion. |
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Bettina Bradbury
York University |
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