Factory Women Research Articles

Self-surveillance practices of factory women migrant workers receiving SRH interventions in Malaysia: The effects of salience, gendered subjectivity and universalism

Managing sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs remains a challenge for many women migrant workers in developing countries. Nonetheless, the extent to which they can be supported in meeting these needs remains underexplored, with implications for worker health and working life. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 25 factory women migrant workers in Penang, Malaysia, this article applies a Foucauldian lens of governmentality to explore directly their agency in managing their SRH. The authors consider the self-surveillance practices the women adopt in response to a programme of SRH interventions. The findings reveal varied degrees of compliance with programme expectations. The article demonstrates empirically the importance of the perceived salience of SRH as a motivating force in self-surveillance practices, drawing out the disempowering effects of self-consciousness and shame in gendered subjectivity. The authors further consider the impact of universalist prescriptions for SRH within locales in the developing world, and the implications for SRH interventions with factory women migrant workers in such settings.

The Dynamics of Women’s Empowerment as a Real-life Alternative Project for Women’s Engagement in the Traditional Coffee Industry

This study aims to explore the role of women in traditional coffee factories in remote areas of Indonesia. It employs the Power and representation analysis, phenomenological research, and “Representing Other” approach in Travel Literature to examine how people use a universal structure or essence to understand their experiences. It highlights the significance of women's involvement in the coffee industry, particularly those who have long been part of the field. The research specifically examines the contribution of women to the world of traditional coffee factories, using a case study of "Kopi Cap 3 Kunci" located in Barabai, Hulu Sungai Tengah, South Kalimantan. Its goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of women in the coffee industry and their contributions to traditional coffee practices. Furthermore, to identify the challenges faced by women in their participation of practices and explores strategies to promote gender equality and empower women in the coffee industry. The findings of this study have important implications for policy and practice, as they inform initiatives to enhance the participation and contributions of women in the coffee industry.

Minimnya Dukungan Industri dan Negara: Kerja Perawatan pada Perempuan Pekerja Pabrik dan Rumahan

This article aims to delineate the systemic challenges and discrimination faced by women workers in the footwear and home-based industries, both in terms of working conditions and caregiving responsibilities. The findings of this study were obtained through in-depth interviews with women workers in three footwear factories in Banten Province and home-based workers in North Jakarta. The experiences of these women workers were analyzed within two interrelated domains: the realm of production and social reproduction. The research reveals that women workers, both in factories and home-based settings, face a dual burden, striving to meet high production targets while also bearing the responsibilities of caregiving. Specifically, women home-based workers are more vulnerable to health risks compared to factory workers due to the lack of separation between their workplace and living spaces. The study also uncovers that women workers in both factory and home-based settings encounter economic violence, as their caregiving work goes unpaid and lacks support from the government and the industry.

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Special Section on Productive Hierarchies in Global Perspectives: Gendered Skill, Labor Control and Workplace Politics

From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban formation, and indeed, nation building. Depending on the political economy of the labor market, the images of laboring women accordingly oscillated between, for instance, helpless and exploited victims to national heroines in the service of developmental projects. At the same time, since the early nineteenth-century, the steadily accumulating social reform, labor inspection, or social scientific accounts of women's paid and unpaid labor testified to states’ and employers’ growing comfort with hiring what was and is still, in many ways, a cheap, easily exploitable category of workers, one whose profitability increased the more precarious their employment became. Such discourses and labor control practices were deeply racialized and classed. On the other side of the public imagination and employer's surveillance, women who engaged in paid work sometimes appropriated the discourses and reshaped the practices that were used to characterize their labor and judge their choices.

Metaphorical Machines or Mindless Consumers: Young Working-Class Femininity in Early Postwar Turkey

AbstractThe simultaneous processes of secular state-building and state-led industrialisation resulted in a new ideology of women's labor in Turkey in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. As the country moved away from protectionist, state-led industrialisation in the post-war period, female industrial labor received increasing and contradictory attention from policy makers, employers, the new trade union movement, and middle-class feminists. On the one hand, there emerged an idealized image of factory women that emphasized their productive potential by metaphorically linking them with technology and mass production. However, this proud, progressive message was counterbalanced by an anxious, conservative view of young women's work—one that criticized factory girls’ consumption choices as posing a threat to respectable femininity. Weaving together lines of inquiry such as the change in industrialisation policy, women's access to technology, the sexual division of labor, and the emergent consumption patterns, I unpack the tropes of working-class productivity and femininity against the backdrop of the post-war expansion of capitalism in Turkey.

‘The Best Job in the World’: Breadwinning and the Capture of Household Labor in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century British Coalmining

This article explores the effects of gender inequality and women's disempowerment in the context of historical coalmining. Across the United States and Europe, ex-coalmining regions are characterized by significant deprivation. While there are many reasons for persistent problems, this study focuses on the restrictions imposed on women's involvement in economic life. Families in mining communities exemplified the male breadwinner structure, in which men's earnings supported wives and children who provided domestic services in return. Using evidence from Britain, this article exposes a different reality of household economics characterized by dominance and subordination: All family members were integrated into the coalmining production process and the creation of profit. Women's unpaid work did not simply provide domestic comfort; it transferred well-being from women and children to men and simultaneously contributed to the colliery companies’ profits. These findings revise accounts of mining families while explaining the intransigence of deprivation in ex-coalmining areas. HIGHLIGHTS Women's disempowerment in historical mining communities had adverse effects that persist today. Pit women's labor propped up profits and wages and discouraged infrastructure investment. Breadwinning secured increased leisure time and higher income for men not women. Hours and incomes of “double shift”” factory women compare favorably to pit women. Regeneration must confront the gendered identities embedded in ex-mining communities.

The impact of women as human capital on perceiving sustainable development in Egyptian industry

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of women as human capital on sustainable development in the Egyptian community factories. Presently, sustainability has become one of the targets all over the world , especially the Egyptian strategy that focuses more on women’s empowerment as human capital. There is a positive trend among organizations, governments and communities to focus more on the lead of sustainability in all our daily activities and business activities.Design/methodology/approachSelf-administered questionnaires were distributed to gather data from 100 engineers (50 women and 50 men) employees of Egyptian factories and industries located in Egypt. To analyze, the collected data, regression analysis and correlation coefficient were employed to examine the study objectives and questions. A statistical Package for Social Sciences has been used for data analysis.FindingsResults reveal that there is a direct positive relationship between women as a capital and sustainable development with its four interrelated pillars (economic, social, environmental and education) in a positive and significant way and the three factors of Human Capital (leadership and motivation, qualifications and satisfaction and creativity).Research limitations/implicationsThe findings only apply to the sample (engineering women, men) that has participated in the questionnaire in the Egyptian factories. More research would be recommended in terms of further research study, highlighting the role of women in other categories in the STEM field as they are the human capital crucial for sustainable development and highlighting its impact on the Egyptian sustainable strategy 2030.Practical implicationsAlthough the Egyptian strategy reinforces gender equality and gaining more roles for women in the Egyptian community, there is still absence of women in factories and science. Based on the findings, there are three concerns that must be addressed: First, opportunities need to be embedded in the factories for more women, especially in engineering categories. Second, authorities must encourage human capital development for women. Third, there is a strong need to create responsible leadership between all human capitals which are especially important in areas of industry.Social implicationsEgyptian factories need to support women’s enthusiasm for innovation, continuously advance science and engineering, foster a business environment that fosters the coexistence of science and technology, the economy and society, support enterprise transformation and optimize the industrial structure of Egyptian industry. Simultaneously, it should encourage and promote the transformation of female achievements and strengthen the role of women leadership enterprises in Egyptian society. In order to promote the ideas of women, more money must be spent on scientific research, human capital must be allocated more effectively and fresh momentum for sustainable economic growth must be generated. It must expand training investment, encourage high-quality human capital and remove the bottleneck.Originality/valueThis paper is unique in presenting women as human capital in Egyptian society and reflects its impact on sustainable development pillars. Although much literature and study is dealing with the two topics of human capital and sustainable development separately or with links to other topics, they have not been dealt with together and there is a scarcity in the literature related to these topics focusing on women separately.

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Empowerment as a pre-requisite to managing and influencing health in the workplace: The sexual and reproductive health needs of factory women migrant workers in Malaysia

Malaysia is a major importer of migrant labour within the ASEAN region, and migration has adverse implications for the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of women migrant workers. Given the centrality of the workplace to the lives of such women, this article reports a qualitative analysis of interview data with women migrant workers ( N = 14) and wider stakeholders ( N = 10) and considers the extent to which they are able to effect change in workplace SRH policy and practice. Informed by Jo Rowlands’ typology of power and model of empowerment, the analysis considers the extent to which normative expectations of process and collective mobilisation upon which feminist empowerment models are predicated operate in such contexts, and discusses the implications of the findings for research to advance workplace democracy.

“Ne’er Were Heroines More Strong, More Brave”: Victorian Factory Women Writers and the Role of the Working-Class Poet

ABSTRACT Self-identified women factory poets remained a rare phenomenon within the larger mid-Victorian outpouring of working-class verse, publishing mostly after 1846 and more frequently after 1860. This article examines the verses of four mid-Victorian women poets, self-identified as factory workers, who published a significant body of work either in periodicals or in published volumes. The poems of all four—“Marie”, Ellen Johnston, Fanny Forrester, and Ruth Wills—are autobiographical in cast; all record personal difficulties or depression, and each poet responded self-consciously to her working- and middle-class audiences. Although only Johnston and Forrester refer to the specifics of factory labour within their poems, all of these writers affirm their solidarity with their fellow workers, celebrate the heroism of survival under difficulties, and support politically reformist causes such as independence movements or abolition. All four assert the special mission and subject matter of the working-class poet and thus the significance of their own verses as a form of personal self-validation, a witness to otherwise unrecorded lives, and a tribute to their wider working-class community.

A poor woman's lawyer? Feminism, the labour movement, and working-class women's access to the law in England, 1890–1935

ABSTRACT Women were excluded from both branches of the legal profession before the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act 1919. Whilst campaigning for women's entry to the law was also part of wider efforts to make the law more accessible. Before and after the 1919 Act, middle-class women were able to offer legal support to working-class women, through feminist and trade unionist networks and the professions that were open to them—factory inspection and social work. By examining key women’s organisations between the 1890s and 1930s, we trace the development of work to both educate women and girls on their legal rights and to directly tackle problems and breaches of the law. We argue that, by looking at the legal activism of women in the factory inspectorate, social work, trade union and women's organisations, fresh insight into the development and ‘mainstreaming’ of working-class claims on citizenship in the early twentieth century can be found.

Factory Workers in Tanzania: The Case of Chinese Enterprises at Mkuranga Industrial Park

FDI’s plays are of great significance on economic development on both the host country and place of their origins. Tanzania’s recent move of industrialization witnesses a handsome influx of Chinese foreign direct investments in special economic zone. With the increase of FDIs and industrial parks, cheap migrant labors are of great importance to the development of these factories in industrial zones.There has been speculation on mistreatments and misconduct of factory workers in Chinese enterprises. Western scholarship perceives Chinese presence in Africa as the predatory and Chinese workers are not only racist but belittle Tanzanians. On the other hand, Chinese scholarship sees Chinese investments in Africa as mutual beneficial between the two parties.Spending a year on different Chinese and one local owned company in Tanzania, this study employs a reflective model/grounded theory to study Chinese -Tanzanians work relation in industrial area at Mkuranga industrial park in Tanzania. This study discovered that, there is exploitation of unskilled labor through lower wages, unequal treatment of women in factories, skilled labor and those with basic Chinese language skills are treated differently.The study also discovered that, there is racialization of labor in factories. The kind of racialization exists in this factories is however different from that exists between Indians and Tanzanians. The difference is based on the extent of “oppressiveness” as Chinese seemed to be more considerate to workers than Indians. Keywords: migrant, workers, factory, racialization, Tanzania. DOI: 10.7176/DCS/10-5-04 Publication date: May 31 st 2020

Other’s place or othering space

PurposeThis paper aims to understand the dialectical relationship between place-making and identity formation of factory women in a free trade zone (FTZ) in the Global South.Design/methodology/approachInspired by Judith Butler’s notions of performative acts and performativity, the paper uses poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyze data – oral and written texts – generated through a fieldwork study conducted in an FTZ in Sri Lanka.FindingsPerformative acts and the performativity of the occupants in the FTZ demarcate the boundary of the zone and articulate the identities of its occupants. Furthermore, the study shows that, in this process, such performativity and performative acts function as a form of “glue” to amalgamate the places of the zone space askalape, a complex socio-geographical landscape in flux.Research limitations/implicationsThis study provides a new insight into the relationships between discursive-performative acts, place-making and identity formation of (factory) women in the neoliberalized (zone) space(s) of the Global South.Originality/valueBy articulating the FTZ as a (neoliberalized) space in a perpetual present, the study provides new insight into the relationships between performative acts, place-making and identity formation (of factory women) in the zone space.

Vera Hjelt and the calling of theosophical universal work, 1894–1904

This article discusses the theosophy of Vera Hjelt (1857–1947), who was inspired by Annie Besant. Hjelt led an active life as a schoolteacher, factory owner, writer, occupational safety inspector and member of parliament. Hjelt experienced a theosophic-al awakening at the latest during the summer of 1894, after which her theosophical endeavours in Besant’s spirit and in imitation of her are revealed in Hjelt’s letters to her friend Cely Mechelin. These letters have not previously been used in scholarly study. The article argues that it is not possible to understand the underlying ethos behind Hjelt’s activities without considering her esotericism. In the worldwide unity of all creations, all bad deeds done to one were done to all. Thus it was essential to improve the working conditions of women in factories, for instance. When Hjelt experienced difficulties in her position as an inspector during the Voikka strike, and became an object of hatred amongst the workers against all her wishes, she was comforted by her theosophical thinking. This article for its part shows the many ways in which Western esotericism exerted an influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finnish culture, politics and policy making.

“Rightly Enough Called Girls”: Melville’s Violated Virgins and Male Marketplace Fears

AbstractThis essay contextualizes Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” alongside antebellum portrayals of the female wage earner. Melville’s decision to measure the costs of economic change by sexualizing female wage earners typifies antebellum conversations in which men interpreted women’s labor in relation to an increasingly outdated framework for their activities, here termed the patriarchal shelter. This trope presumes that women’s activities ought to take place under conditions found in the preindustrial household and helps to explain why male authors interpreted factory operatives as women of suspect virtue. I argue that male authors who sexualized female wage earners alleviated their own anxieties about their compromised independence in the industrial marketplace. Male authors fixated on factory women’s sexual identity in an attempt to control their activities rhetorically, but in the process they symptomatized the many ways women’s labor no longer clearly evidenced male dominion.

DSIR’s Industrial Psychology Division 1942–1954

ABSTRACTDSIR’s Industrial Psychology Division was founded in 1942 by Ernest Marsden, and its mission was to research the working conditions in factories of wartime New Zealand. The education of management and workers on good working practices was also an important part of its work, as was the undertaking of special service investigations, as required. The first director was Leslie Hearnshaw (my father), at the time a psychologist at Victoria University College, and he hired Ralph Winterbourn, Arthur Churton and later Ralph Waite to the division’s staff. Visits were made to factories all over New Zealand. Some of the issues that arose were the high level of absenteeism in New Zealand factories, the employment of women in many munitions factories, keeping workers motivated for tedious and repetitive work, excessive hours of work (in one case up to 74 hours per week) and poor lighting in factories causing eye strain.

Beyond Rosie: A Documentary History of Women and World War TwoJuliaBrock, Jennifer W.Dickey, Richard J. W.Harker, and Catherine M.Lewis, Editors. University of Arkansas Press, 2015.

Rosie: A Documentary History of Women and World War Two Julia Brock, Jennifer W. Dickey, Richard J. W. Harker, and Catherine M. Lewis, Editors. University of Arkansas Press, 2015.Beyond Rosie was developed from a 2012 traveling exhibition, Beyond Rosie: Women and World War Two, by members of the Department of Museums, Archives, and Rare Books at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. The book is mostly a collection of primary documents about women during the war, accompanied by commentary on why the various texts, illustrations, and photographs were included. It is designed for a school audience, either upper division high school or college, with the assumption that readers will know little or nothing about the war, especially the part that women played in it. The introduction provides some basic information about the war and makes it clear that age, race, class, sexual orientation, marital status, and children affected how women were able to participate. Areas of focus include factory workers, women's auxiliary services, women on the Home Front, espionage, and the opportunities afforded women as journalists, medical workers, and government girls.The editors provide a nice variety of texts, photographs, posters, oral histories, film script excerpts, and federal documents. The oral histories express the experiences of different kinds of women including Latina and African-American women in factories and war plants, a WAAC, an interned Japanese woman, a lesbian in the WAVEs, a WASP, a member of the Army Nurse Corps, a cryptographer, and a chemist for the Manhattan Project. These are interesting, but some could have been better edited in that if a question were asked and the respondent didn't answer, the question was left blank. These reminiscences are complemented by excerpts of letters written by wives to their husbands overseas about life back home.What may strike readers, especially students, about these materials is the condescending language used to describe women by the men for whom they were working. This is especially clear in statements about hiring practices and how managers should deal with women workers. For example, a film script excerpt, Problems in Supervision: Supervising Women Workers (1944), has a foreman telling his manager that women workers scare him. However, by the end, he realizes that women just need processes explained to them and that they have home responsibilities as well. Some of the suggestions for working with women, as in a brochure created by RCA (Radio Corporation of America), are actually just good managerial practice, such as arranging for brief rest periods, having good ventilation and lighting, and having clean restrooms and a lunch area. …

"And, oh! but the lilies are pure and fair": Fanny Forrester, Ben Brierley's Journal, and the Creation of a Working-Class Women's Pastoral Tradition

Fanny Forrester (1852–89) was a dye worker and poet who lived in Salford, near Manchester. As a house poet of the popular working-class periodical Ben Brierley's Journal between 1868 and 1882, Forrester addressed a wide regional audience, which enabled her to redefine the imaginative possibilities of the working-class pastoral poem. This essay illustrates how her newspaper poetry referenced the social tensions surrounding representations of working-class women. By writing urban pastorals, Forrester demonstrated how factory women could be integrated into a conservative, masculine poetic genre.

Female Factory Workers in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Quest

AbstractFemale workers represent a fundamental component of the workforce to the extent that it is true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a huge debt. However, despite the unfair exploitation of many women in factories in which conditions resembled manslaughter, they have been often neglected and reduced to liminal characters by Victorian novelists. An interesting exception in the early Victorian period is represented by the writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose fiction works as a medium of social criticism. Her semi-fictional The Wrongs of Woman is a reform novel which sheds a controversial light on female working conditions. On the one hand she indeed deplores the inhuman treatment of female labourers, but on the other hand she also argues that female employment provokes a consequent increase in male unemployment! My paper aims to investigate the role of Tonna’s text and her attempt to alleviate working-class suffering.