‘In Donkey Jacket and Doc Martin Boots’: Women Workers, Uniforms and the Patterning of Exclusion in the Male-Dominated Transport Industry
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Uniforms played a key role in the construction of masculine occupational traditions in the British and Australian transport sectors: traditions that made it extremely difficult for women to enter these particular areas of employment.This article explores how attitudes to women's clothing in non-traditional areas of transport work (especially on trains, trams and buses) changed over the course of the twentieth century.It shifts focus away from the wars as the only moments when women donned uniforms to enter these male professions.Women workers in the late twentieth century, even with anti-discrimination legislation in place, found a battle to enter male-dominated workplaces and to be provided with appropriate clothing.Management and union preferences for a feminised uniform, bound up with assumptions about women's bodies, devalued women's status in comparison to male colleagues and persistently excluded women from equal access to appropriate workwear.Nevertheless, women developed sartorial tactics, including dressing in men's uniforms, that helped them to succeed in non-traditional roles.Some women transport workers 1 An early version of this paper was presented by Diane Kirkby and Emma Robertson at the AWHN symposium 'The Female Frame' in October 2019.The research was undertaken by Diane Kirkby, Emma Robertson and Lee-Ann Monk as part of 'Breaking Down Tradition: Women in Non-Traditional Occupations', funded by ARC DP160102764.The reproduction of images was
DOI: 10.22459/lfhj.27.10
Authors: Emma Robertson, Lee-Ann Monk
Institution: La Trobe University
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4200005167