“Where Men Will Not Work”: Gender, Power, Space, and the Sexual Division of Labor in America’s Meatpacking Industry, 1890–1990

Abstract

“Where Men Will Not Work”: Gender, Power, Space, and the Sexual Division of Labor in America’s Meatpacking Industry, 1890-1990 ROGER HOROWITZ Tillie Olsen lived in Omaha’s stockyards district in the 1930s. In her novel, Yonnondio ofthe 1930s, she vividly portrayed work in meat­ packing’s predominantly female offal and casings rooms: “Yearround breathing with open mouth, learning to pant shallow to en­ dure the excrement reek of offal, the smothering stench from the bloodhouse below. Windowless: bleared dank dark . . . Heat of hell year round . . . feet always doubly in water—inside boots, outside boots . . . And over and over, the one constant motion. . .” Olsen concluded her account insightfully, describing these departments as places “where men will not work.” Her powerful and accurate description forcefully poses the ques­ tion, what made these unpleasantjobs women’s work? Greatly com­ plicating an explanation are the seemingly unrelated array of tasks performed by female packinghouse workers for much of the 20th century. Theirjobs ranged from the brutal toil in offal and casings, to the skilled knife jobs in the frigid “ice hell” of the pork trim, to the simple, repetitive operations in the immaculate sliced bacon department. How did such different settings all become places domi­ nated by women workers?1 The answer developed in this article operates at two levels ofanaly­ sis: how the sexual division of labor in meatpacking originally took shape, and why it remained so stable for almost fifty years. I argue that the pattern of women’s work in meatpacking emerged from Dr. Horowitz is associate director of the Center for the History ofBusiness, Tech­ nology, and Society, Hagley Museum and Library. This article benefited from com­ ments by Arwen Mohun, Nina Lerman, John Staudenmeier, and three anonymous reviewers for Technology and Culture. Research was facilitated by grants from the Na­ tional Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, and the University of Delaware. ‘Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio of the 1930s (New York, 1974), p. 134.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/ 3801-0005$01.00 187 188 Roger Horowitz a complex interaction between the objectives of male and female packinghouse workers, production-floor supervisors, and the per­ sonnel departments of packing companies. These struggles took place within a larger context of changes in technology and patterns of meat production, driven by new habits offood consumption. The competing agendas and needs of different groups of workers, and different management factions, produced an outcome which no one party contemplated at the beginning of the process. Conflict, rather than consensus about the appropriate role for women shaped where the women worked. The contours of women’s work in meatpacking emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. Expanding demand for meat and processed meat products led to innovations in production methods and technology that in turn created an entirely new range ofjobs. To fill these positions, meatpacking firms had to develop mechanisms to recruit workers who were available. For women interested in finding work, their family needs and labor market opportunities drastically shaped whether, and where, they obtained employment in meat­ packing. In addition to their sex, women’s opportunities were pro­ foundly influenced by race and ethnicity. Male workers influenced this process by clinging tojobs they traditionally had held, although the defeat oflabor unions in the early 20th century greatlyweakened their capacity to interfere with management’s hiring decisions. Be­ tween 1890 and 1919, the proportion of women grew from 2.7 per­ cent to 10.5 percent of meatpacking’s work force; moreover, this period established the sexual division of labor that would last, with few changes, until the 1960s. An extraordinary study of6, 000 female packinghouse workers by the Women’s Bureau of the Department ofLabor, published in 1932, allows us to identify with great precision where women worked.2 Identifying origins, however, does not explain persistence, espe­ cially as unionization ofpacking firms in the 1940s drastically altered the balance of power between labor and management. The stability of the boundaries between men’s and women’s roles in meatpacking resulted from the way the packinghouse “master machine” (to adopt Lindy Biggs’s formulation) grounded those notions in...