| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson, eds., Women and Work Culture: Britain c.1850–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing 2005)

WOMEN AND WORK CULTURE: Britain, c.1850–1950, edited by Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson, is a collection of essays developed from a 2002 conference of the same title. A difficult challenge faced by editors of such books is bringing unity and cohesion to essays that cover a wide range of research questions over an extended time frame. In this instance, however, Cowman and Jackson use the edited collection format to its best advantage with essays that address common themes and issues, while at the same time providing a sampling of the richness and diversity of the scholarship being done in the broad field of the cultural history of women's work in Britain. Their useful introduction and clear organization help to draw out the common threads running though each of the essays. Some of the similar themes touched upon by the book's twelve contributors include the variety of contested meanings carried by the different types of work done by women, the identities created by women in association with work, and the ways in which women negotiated masculine cultural practices and discourses related to work in order to create feminine or feminist space. The assortment of historical and interdisciplinary methods and approaches that inform the authors' exploration of the experiences, negotiations, and understandings of work done by women make this collection potentially very useful for teaching in a seminar setting. This collection would be helpful for encouraging students to think not only about the conflicting and fluid ways in which different types of work performed by women were represented and understood, but also about different approaches to the craft of history.

The twelve essays in the book are divided into five sections: "What do We Mean by Work?," "Factory Labour," "Youth," "Science and Medicine," and "Women and War." Two of the three essays in the first section demonstrate the important role of religion in shaping the meaning of work for different groups of women. Joyce Senders Pederson uses the writings and biographies of a number of prominent Victorian feminists to illuminate how their conception of work was infused with Protestant religious convictions, liberal thought, and the public service ethos of professionalism. For these feminists 'useful' work, both paid and unpaid, if undertaken in an altruistic spirit, answered a godly calling to all and fostered communal integration and individual moral development. While this idea of work was initially thought to be inclusive, by the end of the century more materialist and secular perspectives on work began to emerge, opening up a divide between the economic necessity of working-class and middle-class women. Religion also informed the meanings of work for four generations of middle-class Quaker women among the Bright circle, as demonstrated in Sandra Stanley Holton's contribution to the collection. The Quaker stress on good works, inner light, and oppositionism with respect to the established order informed the attitudes of these women to class, work, and wealth. These principles also guided their labour over the generations in operating businesses, caring for kin and community, and political activism through campaigns against slavery, alcohol, and the corn laws, as well as their active involvement in radical politics.

As the editors point out, few subjects have received as much attention from historians of women's work in Britain as the "factory girl." Emma Liggins and Emma Robertson are able to offer fresh perspectives on this frequently explored topic by focusing on the role of women in the construction of female factory worker identities. Emma Liggins examines the narratives produced by the research of female social investigators like Clara Collet, and of feminists like Clementina Black, comparing them with, and tracing their influence upon, fictional accounts of the London work girl written by writers such as George Gissing and Margaret Harkness in the 1880s and 1890s. Social investigators like Collet were important in producing identities for the work girl, and in raising concerns about the morality and sexualities of women workers in the public sphere. Emma Robertson uses 13 oral interviews with women who worked at the Rowntree Chocolate Factory between 1936 and 1989 to look at women's workplace cultures, and the centrality of friendships and interactions between women workers in shaping how they understood their experiences in the workplace. Robertson shows the ways in which workplace camaraderie both helped to socialize women workers to the factory regime, while also providing strategies for resisting oppression. She also emphasizes that relationships among co-workers were often complicated by differences among women such as age, marriage, motherhood, respectability, and race. While one of the most fascinating essays in the collection, the evidentiary base of this piece is understandably thin due to the challenges of locating subjects for interviews.

In the section on youth, Selina Todd uses census records, social surveys, and testimonies drawn from autobiographies and archival collections to investigate the experiences and interpretations of the high proportion of young women aged 14–24 who were involved in paid employment in the inter-war years. Despite the historiographical emphasis on the youthful consumer, Todd finds that young women's work and employment patterns were driven by family necessity and connections, and their wages were essential to the family budget.

The essays of Kaarin Michaelsen and Claire Jones show some of the ways in which women negotiated involvement in the fields of medicine and science, which were dominated by masculine cultures, discourses, and institutional forms. Michaelsen looks at the struggle and strategies of women physicians in Britain to overcome discrimination within the profession. Specifically, Michaelsen examines the work of the Medical Women's Federation (MWF) in advancing the professional interests and helping to shape the identities of female physicians between 1917 and 1930. She shows that the MWF used ideas of both equality and difference in the construction of professional identities, arguing for greater assimilation into the profession, while protecting the unique interests and perspectives of its female members. Michaelsen illuminates how in practice attention to difference could be used to promote equality, and that these ideas were not perceived as mutually exclusive. Jones's essay uses memoirs and obituaries of male scientists, as well as their representations in the press, photographs, and fiction, to show how the laboratory was constructed as masculine space antithetical to femininity, where heroic virtues of courage and stoicism could be demonstrated. Jones shows how these constructions of laboratory culture worked alongside professionalization and institutionalization to exclude or ignore female participation. Jones uses the transgressive career of physicist Hertha Ayrton to illuminate the ways in which these processes shaped representations of women in the laboratory.

Much of the traditional historiography of women's work in wartime has concentrated on the degree to which such work advanced the cause of greater social, political, and economic opportunities for women in the long term. The essays in the war section of the book contribute to this debate but focus more upon the identities constructed around different types of female labour during the war years. Angela K. Smith uses literary texts, including Irene Rathbone's We Were That Young, as well as memoirs and diaries to explore the many diverse and contested ways in which the women's work in munitions factories in World War I was constructed by themselves and others. Smith shows how later literary representations, particularly Rathbone's, compared the experiences and sacrifices of women on the home front with soldiers serving in the war. Few occupations are as closely linked with masculinity as service in the military, and Lucy Noakes's essay shows how female participation in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and the Women's Volunteer Reserve during World War I had the potential to upset traditional gender roles by militarizing women, who were supposed to represent the civilians whom the military defends. The presence of many suffrage activists in promoting female service in military organizations also made them more threatening. In the end, however, great effort was made to emphasize the boundary between female and male military service, with the former taking on roles that stressed the feminine virtues of caring and nurturing.

Women and Work Culture is a valuable addition to the Studies in Labour History Series. It provides the reader with a sample of the diverse issues and methodological questions that scholars in the cultural history of women's work in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are engaging. In addition to being a useful teaching tool, the collection will also be of great interest to researchers in labour and women's history, as well as a variety of other sub-fields in British history.


Christopher J. Frank University of Manitoba

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