The colour of disorder: women's employment and ‘protective’ intervention in the lead industry in Victorian England
Year: 1998
Type: article
Abstract: The possibility of women's exclusion from work in Newcastle upon Tyne's white lead industry was raised increasingly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By 1898, the possibility had become a certainty, with the enforcement of a legislative ban on women in the industry. Such ‘protective’ intervention not only contributes a particular local example to the specific field of labour history; it also offers an opportunity to consider the broader interrelationships between material conditions and cultural constructions of working-class femininity, which have animated female scholarly debate in history and other disciplinary fields. Historians such as Joan Scott have argued that a conventional narrative approach to issues such as ‘protective’ industrial intervention risks an uncritical replication of contemporary notions about women workers. Here, by contrast, a focus on the exclusion of women from the trade – workers who sometimes bore the very real material costs of a system of labour which saw them situated in ‘unskilled’ and dangerous occupations within the industry – is developed to illustrate the ways in which the meanings of women's work and its associated ‘hazards’ were not only created and circulated, but also contested, within different discursive fields. Further, the circulation of such meanings is examined to suggest the extent to which negative characterisations of poor and working-class women in the lead works relied upon, and in turn contributed to, wider constructions of working-class female identity and assessments of female capacity and morality well beyond the factory gates. The particular debates about lead work drew upon many of the broader characterisations of ‘female disorder’ during the period – a disorder which was perhaps more commonly illustrated with reference to prostitution – adding further horrible, graphic local ‘colour’ to the conception of disorder within the bourgeois imaginary.
Source: Women s History Review
Author: Jane Long
Institution: The University of Western Australia
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2115579431