From ‘family labour’ to ‘family wage'? The case of women's labour in nineteenth‐century coalmining∗

Abstract

In much of the literature on women's oppression under capitalism the exclusionary tactics of working-class men are seen as a major source of patriarchal control in the nineteenth-century workplace. Such exclusionary tactics have taken many forms but historically the most frequently cited example is the support of male trade unionists for protective legislation which, in the course of the nineteenth century, increasingly restricted the range of occupations open to women as wage labourers. While each concrete instance of protective legislation occurred under different historical circumstances, on the whole the British state intervened in particular occupations to regulate and control the hours and conditions of the labour of women and children. The effects of this were not always clear cut. In some instances it had the indirect effect of excluding women entirely from some processes and occupations; in others regulation improved the conditions under which all workers in particular occupations sold their labour. In cotton weaving, for instance, 'the battle for the limitation of the hours of adults in general was fought from behind the women's petticoats' (quoted in Hewitt 1958:23). But in one particular case state intervention brought about the direct exclusion of women from one occupation. This was the i 842 Mines (Regulation) Act, an apparently uncontroversially patriarchal instance of male workers' successful exclusion of females from underground mining. In a recent article Seccombe has argued cogently that the male breadwinner norm was a nineteenth-century construct and has called for greater historical appreciation of the way in which this norm was generated (Seccombe I986). The importance accorded to the exclusionary tactics of organized working-class men within materialist explanations of patriarchy suggests that particular instances of protective legislation merit more attention than they have perhaps attracted. This paper is an attempt to reopen debate on some aspects of the theorization of gender relations within nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, particularly the significance of a concept of patriarchy in explaining those