how did women remain excluded from the workforce for so long after the rise of cap.?

[Lobotomy]

If capitalism thrives when it has a large workforce to exploit, why were women excluded from the workforce for so long after capitalism became the dominant mode of production? why did this not happen until a huge ordeal (WWII) rendered it necessary?

[NewLeft]

I'm interesting in what others have to say. I think that women played a role in the expansion of the reserve army of unemployed. The role of women to solely unpaid labour was no longer practical, the expansion of wage labour demanded an expansion of the reserve army. It made possible the ideological shift to accept women in wage labour.

[blake 3:17]

The exclusion of women from the workforce happened only very briefly in some countries.

Before a fairly advanced capitalism asserted itself, a very extended family was the primary source of productive labour.

There is a strong suggestion that the social-political division of public/private only happened a couple of hundred years ago. The exclusion of women from waged labour was often achieved by masculinist trade unionists.


Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution isn't about labour but about the social discipline which left women with only the private sphere.

I was trying to find a reference from Sheila Rowbotham about women and 'family wage', but found this information about an historical exhibition instead:


ll Work and Low Pay puts paid to the myth that the majority of women did not work until the second half of the twentieth century brought social change, the Women’s Liberation movement and equality legislation. In fact, most women have always worked, in paid jobs or in the home, but their work has consistently been unrecognised and undervalued. This exhibition shows the extraordinary range of jobs done by women over the past 150 years, from forging iron chains to assembling fine electrical components.

Source: http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/whats-on/exhibitions/all-work-and-low-pay-the-story-of-women-and-work.cfm

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Children were utilised to a greater or lesser extent.

In industrial Britain, for example, there is evidence that the male wage may have accounted for 60-95% of the household wage, with female wages at 5% of the household wage total, meaning that child labour account for 0-35% of household wages. 1/3 of households in the period were fatherless, which meant that children were the breadwinner.

Of course, all this stopped in the latter part of the 19th century as the morality of the beast changed slightly. Popular morality that is, not teh morality of Capitalism. In the late 18th and early 19th century, children were seen as very economically useful, for low-skill/small person jobs, so were more useful as cheap, unskilled labour than they were being educated in school. Between 1817-1839, 47.8% of all child exploitation at work occurred in the factories, which at the time were the centrepiece of British output - industry. Children were a vital supplementary income to the household wage, in other words, perhaps explaining why female labour was not so heavily utilised in this period.

[campesino]

weren't most textile mills in the early part of the industrial revolution, worked by women and children.

[Hit The North]

weren't most textile mills in the early part of the industrial revolution, worked by women and children.

Yes the separation of women from the economic sphere was selective and uneven. The pottery industry in Staffordshire was also dominated by female labour throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But all sorts of stupid and petty limitations were imposed on women by industrial capitalism. In the textile mills and the pot banks of nineteenth century England, only daughters were allowed to work. Mothers and married women were not allowed. Even in the early 1960s, my mother was forced to relinquish her full time post for a part-time one when she became a married woman.

All of this was to honour a tradition of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity that predated capitalism. The emergence of the idea of a sole male breadwinner only became sustainable (at the level of ideology) with the emergence of industrial capitalism. It was considered a social and moral disgrace for a man to allow his wife to go out to work.

Even today, some men have a problem with their female partners bringing in a bigger wage than them.

[Enragé]

why? because they offered free labour to reproduce the workforce (nobody gets paid for household chores, raising of children - this only arose en masse after women entered the labour market)

how? ideology.

though it must be said in the really early days, as the people above have pointed out, they worked just as much if not more. Only bourgeois women didnt work (which meant it became a status symbol for men to be able to not have their wives to have to work).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It should be noted that there was great regional variation in female employment, as high as 63% in Bedfordshire, and as low as 3% in Dorset, as late as the 1850s. Also the case that with a pretty shit dataset available, it's difficult to get an accurate measurement of the range and effect of female labour.

Sadly, many economic historians to this day still make grand assumptions about the nature and extent of wage labour in early modern and industrial Britain by looking solely at male labour and ignoring female and child labour, the latter of which was arguably very, very useful to industry in the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

[Tim Cornelis]

To my knowledge, women were used extensively in industrial production from very early on, at least in the Netherlands.

[Invader Zim]

If capitalism thrives when it has a large workforce to exploit, why were women excluded from the workforce for so long after capitalism became the dominant mode of production? why did this not happen until a huge ordeal (WWII) rendered it necessary?

They weren't, at least not entirely. Rather various groups of women were excluded from various types of work at different times. The gendered classification of labour still exists today.

[Ocean Seal]

If capitalism thrives when it has a large workforce to exploit, why were women excluded from the workforce for so long after capitalism became the dominant mode of production? why did this not happen until a huge ordeal (WWII) rendered it necessary?
Women were always exploited. From the beginning of capitalism. With the rise of automation many of the jobs where the bourgeoisie hired women ( in order to pay them less) were taken away. The amount of workers necessary in many sectors fell and in addition workers rights movements made it such that many (not all, perhaps not even most) families were able to survive on a single income. With wages freezing, world wars, capitalism has made it an all out scramble to survive hence employing the world's population.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Women were always exploited. From the beginning of capitalism. With the rise of automation many of the jobs where the bourgeoisie hired women ( in order to pay them less) were taken away. The amount of workers necessary in many sectors fell and in addition workers rights movements made it such that many (not all, perhaps not even most) families were able to survive on a single income. With wages freezing, world wars, capitalism has made it an all out scramble to survive hence employing the world's population.

I'm not sure this is factually correct. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that, looking at Britain during its industrial revolution, industrialisation not only increased wage-labour dependency, but decreased the ability of families to survive through a sole income stream (i.e. the male 'breadwinners' wage). It would appear that child labour and, to an extent, female labour, were vital supplementaries in allowing working class families to survive in urban centres.