Comment

Jane Lewis

The Debate on Sex and Class

The debate amongst marxist feminists and socialist feminists about sex
and classthat is, about the relationship between gender ideology and
the material basis of womens oppression and whether patriarchal
structures exist independently from those of capitalismis presently
being pursued in two journals, New Left Review and Studies in Political
Economy.1 All the participants agree that womens subordination preceded capitalism and none explicitly espouses a dual systems approach,
although it is the contention of Brenner and Ramas in New Left Review
and of Pat and Hugh Armstrong in Studies in Political Economy that
Michle Barrett has in fact fallen into this trap. The major departure in
the work of Brenner and Ramas and the Armstrongs to identify the
material basis of womens oppression lies in their attempts to theorize
the biological component of sexual difference. Like Michle Barrett (in
her response to Brenner and Ramas) I am not wholly convinced by the
attempt. If, as Barrett says, feminists have been squeamish in the face
of biology2 it is largely because of the difficulty they experience in
skirting the mine-field of biological determinism. The arguments of
these authors do little to reassure. Both sets of authors use womens
reproductive capacities to explain sexual divisions under capitalism. The
Armstrongs argue that capitalism is premised on free wage labour and
on the separation of most aspects of workers reproduction from the
productive process,3 and Brenner and Ramas that it was likely if not
inevitable (p. 48) that in the harsh circumstances of the nineteenth
century women would take responsibility for children and domestic
labour. Biology thus appears less and less the merely limiting factor the
Armstrongs would have it be.
It appears to me that the approach of both Brenner and Ramas and the
1 Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas, Rethinking Womens Oppression, New Left Review, No. 144
(MarchApril 1984), pp. 3771 and Michle Barrett, Rethinking Womens Oppression: A Reply to
Brenner and Ramas, New Left Review, No. 146 (JulyAugust 1984), pp. 1238. Pat Armstrong and
Hugh Armstrong, Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex: Towards Feminist Marxism, Studies in
Political Economy 10 (Winter 1983), pp. 741; Patricia Connelly, On Marxism and Feminism, Studies in
Political Economy 12 (Fall 1983), pp. 153161; and Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, More on
Marxism and Feminism: A Response to Patricia Connelly, Studies in Political Economy (forthcoming).
2 Barrett, A Reply, p. 123.
3 Armstrong and Armstrong, Beyond Sexless Class, p. 39.

108

Armstrongs is not as productive as it might be. For as they all agree,

irrespective of patriarchys origins, it is now part of the same system as
capitalism. The Armstrongs suggest: Women are simultaneously subject to capitalism, male dominance and their bodies. To pose the
question in the form of alternatives is like asking whether ideas or
material conditions structure womens subordination. They are inseparable. They act together. Patriarchy and capitalism are not autonomous,
nor even interconnected systems, but the same system. As integrated
forms they must be examined together.4
And Barrett has written in her NLR response: So we cannot counterpose
ideology on the one hand and womens economic situation on the
other, because to do so is to ignore the degree to which the two are
analytically related.5 This suggests to me, and I think the historical
evidence supports it, that the main project at this stage must be to
explore further the complex dynamic of the relationship between gender
ideology and class. However, Pat and Hugh Armstrong have signalled
their impatience with this approach when in their latest contribution
they express dissatisfaction with Barretts idea of gender ideology as a
pre-capitalist vestige taken over and shaped as capitalism developed
historically in various social formations, and ask when if at all, a more
general explanation will emerge. Will it only be when in positivistic
fashion enough bits of historical evidence have been accumulated?6 I
accept that historical evidence is not necessarily binding because of its
partial nature, but both Brenner and Ramas and the Armstrongs do
take history seriously and in the case of the former have chosen to
construct their argument firmly on the basis of empirical historical
evidence.
I would maintain that it is difficult to see how much more progress can
be made in building theory without a more rigorous attention to the
historical evidence that is being used. In particular, enough work has
been done, chiefly by socialist feminist historians, to indicate that the
structure of Brenner and Ramas argument cannot adequately be
supported, and I hope to demonstrate that the development of a
materialist theory of gender ideology can proceed only after some
modifications to their interpretation. In what follows I shall take in
their original order Brenner and Ramas three areas of discussion: the
role of trade unions and protective legislation in the formation of the
family-household system; the importance of biological reproduction in
explaining womens position in family and workplace; and women and
the welfare state.
The Ideology of Separate Spheres

Brenner and Ramas start their argument by accepting the importance of

the family-household system for our understanding of the sexual
division of labour, but they reject the idea that its emergence can be
explained in terms of the introduction of protective legislation and trade
4

Ibid., p. 29.
Barrett, A Reply, p. 127.
6 Armstrong and Armstrong, More on Marxism and Feminism.
5

109

union exclusive practices which, in their reading of Barrett, account for

womens precarious place in production and hence their dependence on
men and their domestic role in the family. Almost certainly, protective
legislation as an explanatory variable will not bear the weight of this
argument, but it is difficult to see that Brenner and Ramas reading of
Barrett is correct. In Womens Oppression Today, protective legislation is
treated as one of many strategies pursued by the labour movement in
bargaining with capital. There is undoubtedly room for further research
on its effects, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The
old account by Hutchins and Harrison, which Brenner and Ramas rely
on, is undoubtedly the most exhaustive we have, but we need to be
aware that its interpretation is Fabian and that in its day it was very
much a part of the contemporary debate between liberal and socialist
feminists over the issue.7 The role of male trade unionists, however, is
more difficult to assess. Brenner and Ramas contend that, it is entirely
unnecessary to resort to ideology to explain why trade unions were
particularly adamant in their opposition to female entry into their
trades (p. 45). Of course, male unionists were right to fear that women
would undercut their wages. The Womens Protective and Provident
League, formed in 1874, was also aware of this problem, and thus when
three women mule spinners were introduced at Lostock Mill on
womens rates of pay, and the mule spinners stopped taking women
piecers as a result, the League took no action.8 But unions were very
slow to move away from a policy of exclusion towards one of organizing
women workers. The statement of the traditional, liberal, craft trade
unionist, Henry Broadhurst, to the TUC in 1877 that male unionists
should use their utmost efforts to bring about a conduct of things
where their wives should be in their proper place at home9 is well
known. But there is also Tom Manns statement, as an organizer of
semi-skilled and unskilled workers, to the Royal Commission on Labour
that he was very loth to see mothers of families working in factories at
all, adding that he considered, their employment has nearly always a
prejudicial effect on the wages of the male worker.10 Here a clear
ideology of womens proper place and the fear of female competition
are to be seen reinforcing one another, which suggests that an analysis
of the production and dynamics of gender ideology (missing from
Barretts work, as Brenner and Ramas point out) is crucial.
Where women were accepted as union members, they tended to be
confined to special sections paying lower contributions and getting
lower benefits. In the Bolton Amalgamated Bleachers, Dyers and
Finishers Association before World War I, men qualified as full
members, boys as half members and women as one-third members.11 It
was usually assumed that women would not play an active role in union
affairs. The Blackburn Association of cotton weavers provided that no
person would be eligible for office in the Society if his wife and
7

B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation, London 1903 and Josephine Butler,
et al., Legislative Restrictions on the Industry of Women from the Womans Point of View, np. 1872.
8
Barbara Drake, Women in Trade Unions, London 1920, p. 23.
9
Ibid., p. 17.
1
pp., Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Labour, c. 7063, 18931894, 39,
Q 4447.
11
Barbara Drake, Women in Trade Unions, p. 137.

110

children were not trade union members.12 Joanna Bornat has shown
how womens relationship to trade unionism and the workplace more
generally was mediated by the institution of the family;13 and it is clear
that womens domestic role, whether actual, or in the case of young
women, anticipated, did place real limitations on their capacity to
organize and on their expectations: most women accepted that because
of their extensive domestic burdens their wage-earning would be
secondary and their status at the workplace, therefore, inferior to that
of men. But it is also necessary to explain, as Brenner and Ramas do
not, how it is that the assumption that women will occupy a secondary
place in the labour force persists in the minds of large numbers of
women and even larger numbers of men after World War II, when
womens domestic burdens eased. The beliefs and behaviour of male
unionists suggest first, that opposition was based on more than just fear
of undercutting, and second, that their particular concern to prevent
married womens work was grounded in the belief that it was improper
and unnatural. Brenner and Ramas are quite correct to assert that
gender ideology is rooted in womens and mens actual experience and
not merely imposed and internalized, but that experience has different
meanings for working-class men and women, and their expressed
consciousness of gender has, therefore, been different. Sally Alexander
makes a similar point in a recent issue of History Workshop Journal. She
argues that the experience of class is not always a shared and even one,
and believes it necessary to use psychoanalytical tools to probe the
subjective meaning of class for men and women through language.14
Brenner and Ramas maintain that in the 19th century the harsh material
realities of biological reproduction were such that sexual divisions were
not negotiable and that there was little possibility of any outcome other
than that women would bear primary responsibility for children and
domestic labour. They also suggest that because of the extent of
womens domestic burdens, this sexual division of labour secured the
greatest possible welfare for members of the working-class family (p.
51). This analysis has the great merit of recognizing that the bourgeois
family ideal was indeed a shared ideal; it is important to determine
what was shared as well as what was not. Women labour leaders were
as keen as men to see married women withdraw from the workforce,
and Elizabeth Roberts oral evidence from the North West has indicated
that women who were forced through the sickness, unemployment or
neglect of their husbands to do two full-time jobs, paid and unpaid,
were pitied by thier neighbours.15 As Ellen Ross has observed, the
marriage contract between working-class men and women did not
enjoin romantic love or verbal or sexual intimacy but rather required

12

Ibid., p. 118.
Joanna Bornat, Home and Work. A New Context for Trade Union History, Radical America 12
(SeptemberOctober 1978).
14 Sally Alexander, Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on
the Writing of a Feminist History, History Workshop Journal, 17 (Spring 1984), pp. 123149.
15
Gertrude Tuckwell, The State and Its Children, London 1894; Mrs. J. R. MacDonald, et al., Wage
Earning Mothers, London nd; Elizabeth Roberts, The Working Class Family in Barrow and Lancaster,
18901930, unpublished Ph.D. Diss., University of Lancaster, 1978.
13

111

financial obligations, services and activities that were gender-specific.16

Married women expected to manage the household and keep it together,
caring for children and husbands and taking paid work as, and when,
the family economy required it.
Nevertheless, essential reinforcement for this pattern of sexual divisions
was provided by gender ideology, and this goes unacknowledged by
the authors. This is evident in their uncritical acceptance of middleclass testimony as to the harmful consequences of factory work for
women and their children (p. 52). Social investigators, whether of the
political Left or Right, and medical officers of health tended to attribute
the high infant-mortality rate of the 19th century to working mothers.
But as Carol Dyhouse has argued convincingly, womens work alone
will not explain the infant mortality rates.17 Ada Nield Chew, an early
20th-century working-class mother, feminist and labour movement
activist, pointed out that, while the infant mortality rate was high in
Burnley, where a large proportion of women worked, housing conditions were also very poor. In Nelson, three miles away, an equal number
of women went out to work, yet the infant mortality rate was much
lower.18 The majority of commentators making the link between infant
mortality and womens work were firmly convinced that working
women inevitably made bad mothers. They argued that they were
necessarily ignorant of proper methods of child care and household
management, hence the emphasis placed by the early 20th-century infant
welfare movement on educating mothers rather than on improving
sanitary conditions and the quality of the milk supply.19
Moreover, it is necessary to make the point that the effects of the
general condemnation of womens work were harmful to women as
workers.20 We can be sure that large numbers of wives and mothers
were forced to engage in arduous paid work, often at home, washing or
sewing (very little of which would have been recorded in government
documents), because as Rowntrees evidence showed, the wages of a
labourer in regular employment were insufficient to keep a family of
two to four children from primary poverty.21 Thus when, for example,
the Board of Education phased out provision for under threes by 1904
and reduced the number of places for three-to-five-year-olds by almost
half between 1901 and 1911,22 in large part as a response to criticisms of
those active in the infant welfare movement, the lot of women trying to
contribute to the family economy significantly worsened.

16

Ellen Ross, Fierce Questions and Taunts: Married Life in Working Class London, 18701914,
Feminist Studies 8 (1982), and Womens Neighbourhood Sharing in London before World War II,
History Workshop Journal No. 15 (Spring 1983).
17 Carol Dyhouse, Working Class Mothers and Infant Mortality in England, 18951914, in Charles
Webster, ed., Biology, Medicine and Society, 18401940, Cambridge 1981.
18 Doris Nield Chew, Ada Nield Chew: The Life and Writings of a Working Woman, London 1982, pp.
212.
19 Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood, London 1980.
20 This point has also been one of the major criticisms of Jane Humphries article, Class Struggle and
the Resistance of the Working Class Family, Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (September 1977).
21 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, London 1913, pp. 6672.
22 N. Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School, London 1972, pp. 64 and 50.

112

Occupational Segregation and Hiring Practices

To argue that womens domestic responsibilities also explain the origins

and reproduction of sexual segregation in the labour market (p. 55) is
additionally problematic. Even though Brenner and Ramas would never
suggest that women choose the kind of jobs they find themselves in,
their argument nevertheless comes dangerously close to a reductionism
which parallels that of the neoclassicists in many respects. Neoclassicists
hold that women are disadvantaged in the labour market because of
their family responsibilities. Womens skills are not less valued than
those of men, but women are worth less to employers because of the
constraints placed upon them by their domestic duties.23
Of course, Brenner and Ramas recognize the vicious circle24 that women
as a group find themselves in: on the assumption of heterosexual
coupling and no collective child-care provision, women are trapped
within certain kinds of work in the labour market and in certain jobs at
home, and they explain this historically in terms of the domestic burdens
which it was well-nigh impossible for women to avoid. But this is too
simple. Womens position in the workforce can only be explained by
complex changes in the relationship between women and men workers,
trade unions, employers and the state, and in relation to the changing
nature and structure of jobs, which is, in turn, dependent on the scale
and technique of production and methods of work organization.25
It is true that the sex typing of jobs has been fairly flexible (p. 57)
historically, but the crucial point is that sexual segregation has been
maintained. Historically, women have been able to move into an
occupation as particular skills have been diluted or processes subdivided (the engineering industry in World War I being the classic
example), or as a result of technological innovation (e.g., the telephone
and the typewriter), or with the introduction of a new service (e.g.,
state elementary school teaching). Some occupations have become
feminized, as changes in the scale and technique of production have
rendered them blind alley jobs; this happened in retailing and certain
kinds of office work at the end of the 19th century. Alternatively,
women have lost their place in other occupations, such as medicine
where the knowledge base was redefined (by men) and the training
formalized, with a concomitant rise in status and prestige.
The pattern of male dominance and control at the workplace must be
related to power relationships within the family.26 It has been suggested
that male domination of the pre-industrial family work unit and the
23

Leading exponents of the new family economics include: in the USA, Gary Becker, The Economics of
Discrimination, New York 1971; and in Britain, B. Chiplin and P. Sloane, Sex Discrimination and the
Labour Market, London 1976.
24 The best analysis of the various theoretical positions on women and the labour market is to be
found in Irene Bruegels, Womens Employment, Legislation and the Labour Market, in J. Lewis,
ed., Womens Welfare/Womens Rights, London 1983.
25 See Jill Ruberty, Structured Labour Markets, Worker Organization and Low Pay, Cambridge Journal
of Economics 2 (1978).
26 Sally Alexander, Womens Work in Nineteenth-Century London: A Study of the Years 18201850,
in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, eds., The Rights and Wrongs of Women, Harmondsworth 1976.

113

practice of sexually segregating work processes was carried over into

the factory when the workplace separated from the home. Men and
women did not always perform the same kind of tasks in the factory as
in the home, but the boundary between mens and womens work was
defended in the face of technological change which threatened to blur
sexual boundaries. In the textile industry, for instance, skilled men (for
example, mule spinners, overlookers, and strippers and grinders)
managed to maintain their dominant position by means of union
exclusiveness and the control they exerted over apprenticeship, and via
their power to subcontract work.27 Despite Brenner and Ramas doubts,
it seems that skilled work has become, by definition, work that is not
performed by women. For example, while oxyacetylene-welding was
classed as skilled work prior to 1914, as soon as women entered the
trade during World War I, employees reduced the pay by 50%. In this
case, the women formed a union and won a partial victory. Women in
the felt hat trade were not so fortunate. From 1920 onwards, the skilled
work traditionally done by women in this trade was increasingly
performed by semi- and unskilled male machine operators, so that by
1945 the only genuinely skilled workers left were women. But when it
came to wages, the men were still classed as skilled and the women as
semi-skilled. In both these examples, skill may be seen to have been
socially constructed.28 Women undoubtedly lacked the power to pursue
successful wage bargaining negotiations, which may be attributed in
large part to their domestic burdens, but this is not sufficient to account
for the belief of male workers, employers and women workers themselves that there existed a womans job and a womans rate.
In the case of employers, their hiring practices would seem to have
been irrational. For example, one large-scale employer told a social
investigator during the early 1930s that his firm did not permit the
indiscriminate working of men and women together.29 (A similar moral
sensibility inspired policymakers to pass protective legislation stopping
womens work in the mines during the 19th century.) Thus even though
women were cheaper and in all probability available to work in greater
numbers (the 1930s being a decade of high male unemployment, falling
working-class fertility, and rapidly increasing production of domestic
27

Recent analyses of the labour process in textiles unfortunately do not address gender explicitly:
William Lazonick, Industrial Relations and Technological Change: The Case of the Self-acting Mule,
Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (September 1979), and Productive Relations, Labour Productivity and
Choice of Technique: British and US Cotton Spinning, Journal of Economic History XLI (September
1981); and Roger Penn, Trade Union Organization and Skill in the Cotton and Engineering Industry
in Britain, 18501960, Social History 8 (January 1983). But, used in conjunction with traditional
sources, such as L. H. C. Tippett, A Portrait of the Lancashire Textile Industry, Oxford 1969, Beatrice
and Sidney Webb, Industrial Democracy, London 1962, it is possible to begin the reconstruction of
womens experience. Nancy Grey Osterud, Womens Work in Nineteenth Century Leicester: A Case
Study in the Sexual Division of Labour, a paper given at the 4th Berkshire Conference on the History
of Women, Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts 1978, is very valuable on the hosiery industry.
28 Full accounts of the examples cited are to be found in Barbara Drake, Women in the Engineering
Trades, London 1917, p. 66; and Sheila T. Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions, London 1977, p. 93.
Charles More reaches a very different conclusion on skill in Skill and the English Working Class,
18701914, London 1980, but he does not discuss gender. It is a pity that Brenner and Ramas do not
discuss either Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylors, Sex and Skill: Notes towards a Feminist Economics,
Feminist Review No. 6 (1980), or Veronica Beecheys, The Sexual Division of Labour and the Labour
Process, in Stephen Wood, ed., The Degradation of Work, London 1982.
29 P. Sargant Florence, The Theory of Womens Wages, Economic Journal 41 (March 1931), p. 36.

114

appliances, which could be afforded by the regularly employed), this

employer did not hire them because any change in the sexual division of
labour would have required the expensive transfer of a whole section of
work from men to women. Similarly, during the acute labour shortage
of World War II, most employers were prepared to employ women
only on low-grade repetition jobs; even in war-time women never
became a simple undifferentiated reserve army of labour. Despite
Ministry of Labour and National Service pamphlets showing the various
ways of using womens labour in traditionally male industries, such as
shipbuilding, employers were notably reluctant to hire them. It is also
important to remember that employers tended to play an even more
direct and central role in maintaining patterns of sexual segregation in
non-manual occupations, controlling entry to the higher professions.30
The separation of spheres was always more complete for late 19th and
early 20th-century middle-class women than for working-class women,
and the tensions between the few women who entered the professions
and their male colleagues were, therefore, particularly acute. A middleclass husband and employer who would not question the appropriateness of the work of his female domestic servant would not countenance
his own wife going out to work.
Women also shared contemporary beliefs as to what work women were
suitable for and what work was suitable for women. Ramsay MacDonald
wrote that women in the printing trades met the suggestion that they
might undertake tasks commonly performed by men as though something indelicate had been proposed. In his Foreword to MacDonalds
book, the neo-classical economist, F. Y. Edgeworth, regarded this sort
of attitude as proof of the existence of natural monopolies of custom
regarding male and female work practices.31 But both mens and
womens attitudes towards female paid employment changed considerably during the 20th century (a skilled workman no longer fears that his
wife going out to work will result in a loss of respectability), and the
labour process and the nature of domestic labour have also changed,
yet sexual divisions at home and work persist. The analysis that has
reached the best grasp of the historical development of this complex set
of sexual relations seeks to understand the relationship between gender
ideology and the material reality of womens class position. Judy
Lowns work on the 19th-century Courtauld silk manufacturers shows
that while these employers had no reservations about employing a
predominantly female labour force, they nevertheless also organized
mothers meetings and an evening school for young female workers to
teach the principles of mothercraft and a respect for domestic ideals.32
Lown has reached the important conclusion that class and gender were
constructed simultaneously, an analysis that not only sits more easily
with the historical evidence, but also gives more room for an adequate
consideration of the nature of male power (and the construction of
masculine identity) than that of Brenner and Ramas and, second, opens
30

See for example Meta Zimmeck, Strategies and Strategems for the Employment of Women in the
Civil Service, 19191939, Historical Journal (forthcoming).
31
J. Ramsay MacDonald, Women in the Printing Trades, London 1904, pp. viii and 6566.
32
Judy Lown, Not So Much a Factory, More a Form of Patriarchy: Gender and Class during
Industrialization, in Eva Gmarnikow, et al., Gender, Class and Work, London 1983.

115

up the crucial question of the production of dynamics of gender

ideology.
The Persistence of Sexual Division

For the 20th century (or more accurately, the post-war period), Brenner
and Ramas argue that lower fertility rates and cheaper domestic
appliances made the task of biological reproduction easier allowing
women to work at two jobs. But even if we accept that capitalist
economies will not permit the raising of the social or private wage to an
extent that would permit either collective provision for work done at
home or the purchase of substitutes in the market (p. 61), we are no
further forward in our understanding of why it is women who continue
to bear the responsibility for domestic tasks. What is it that stops men
sharing domestic labour, and why is it that all women continue to
perform the labour of caring for husbands, children and kin (characterized accurately and importantly by Hilary Graham as a combination of
work, affection and service)?33 Brenner and Ramas acknowledge that
the persistence of sexual divisions is partly an effect of gender ideology
(p. 61), but insist that the vicious circle of familial responsibilities and
low-paid, low-status and often part-time work forces women into a
primarily domestic role. But the emergence of sexual divisions has been
explained in terms of the exigencies of biological reproduction in the
19th century, which no longer hold. If, as the Armstrongs argue in
Studies in Political Economy, biology is not immutable,34 then why do
women continue to bear primary responsibility for childrearing and
domestic labour when the control they are able to exercise over childbearing and the material conditions of reproduction has changed so
much? Certainly free wage labour requires the separation of most
aspects of reproduction from production, but this does not account for
the powerful link that continues to be made in the late twentieth
century between childbearing and childrearing and the domestic segregation of labour on the basis of gender. Despite the firm rejection of
biological determinism by both Brenner and Ramas and the Armstrongs, there is at the very least, as Michle Barrett has observed, a
fatalism about these arguments.35 Sally Alexander may be right to turn
to psychoanalytical theory, which permits the location of subjectivity
and sexual difference in the unconscious and in language rather than in
nature.36 The sexual division of labour most certainly still has a logic
(p. 62), but that does not explain the persistence of its form.
We can only bridge this gap in the analysis by following Lowns model
and considering the way in which gender ideology has been restructured, particularly in the post-war years. Professional experts (especially
doctors and psychologists) emphasized the need to rebuild the family
33

Hilary Graham, Caring: A Labour of Love, in Janet Finch and Dulcie Groves, eds., A Labour of
Love: Women, Work and Caring, London 1985.
34 Armstrong and Armstrong, Beyond Sexless Class, p. 32.
35 Barrett, A Reply, p. 124.
36 Alexander, Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s.

116

in the post-war period.37 Influential psychologists in Britainmany of

whom acted as their own popularizerssaw the mother/child relationship as the key to the healthy development of the post-war generation
and the adequacy or maturity of the mother as the key variable. Yet
at the same time, the Ministry of Labour was actively encouraging
women to work. The 1947 Economic Survey recorded that the
prospective labour force of 18,300,000 men and women fell substantially short of that required to meet national objectives.38 And the 1949
Report of the Royal Commission on Population, anticipating the
increased demand for female labour, was prepared to state that there
was nothing inherently wrong in the use of mechanical means of
contraception.39 The resolution that emerged from these contradictory
tendencies was, as Penny Summerfield has convincingly argued, the
conviction on the part of employers and the state, that women can
combine work (particularly part-time), marriage and motherhood,
without their home responsibilities being seriously undermined.40 Pat
Allatt has also shown how the literature provided for the armed forces
during World War II aimed to make values explicit and to establish the
family as a value worth fighting for.41 The model of the family that was
used integrated the bourgeois ideal of male breadwinner, and dependent
wife and children, with the actual experience of working men and
women; housewife and working wife were drawn together. As Rayna
Rapp has observed, the phrase working mother serves to condense
formerly disparate symbols, thereby legitimating experience.42 Thus, I
want to suggest that Lowns analysis of the construction of gender and
class in the 19th century might also be usefully applied to the post-war
period when the rapid increase in capitalist production allowed women
to work at two jobs and when, simultaneously and necessarily, gender
ideology was reconstructed both to legitimate this change and to
reinforce the primacy of womens domestic role.
The Family and the Welfare State

In the last section of their paper, which is the most unsatisfactory in

terms of the understanding of the historical evidence, Brenner and
Ramas consider the role of the state and ideology in the creation and
reproduction of womens oppression. They reject the contention that
welfare provision was granted in order to ensure the reproduction of
the working class, or to conservatize or divide it. They argue rather
37

For example, the essays in J. Marchant, ed., Rebuilding the Family in the Post-War World, London
1946; J. C. Spence, The Purpose of Family, London 1946; and the valuable work of Denise Riley, War
in the Nursery. Theories of the Child and the Mother, London 1983. Rileys discussion of the biological and
the social and her historical analysis of the workings of particular ideologies seems especially relevant
to Brenner and Ramas legitimate questions about the production and reproduction of gender ideology.
38 pp., Economic Survey for 1947, Cmd. 7046, 19467, XIX, para. 124.
39 pp., Report of the Royal Commission on Population, Cmd. 7695, 19481949, XIX, 635, pp. 159160.
40 Penny Summerfield, Womens Work in the Second World War. A Study of the Interplay in Official
Policy between the Need to Mobilize Women for War and Conventional Expectations about the Roles
at Work and at Home in the Period 19391945, unpublished Ph.D. Diss., University of Sussex., 1982.
41 Patricia Allatt, The Family Seen Through the Beveridge Report, Forces Education and Popular
Magazines: A Sociological Study of the Social Reproduction of Family Ideology in World War II,
unpublished Ph.D. Diss., University of Keele, 1981.
42 Rayna Rapp, Towards a Nuclear Freeze: The Gender Politics of Euro-american Kinship Analysis,
a paper given at a conference on Family and Kinship Theory, Bellagio, Italy, 1982.

117

that the welfare state represents a series of concessions extracted by the

working class in struggle, while acknowledging that the welfare state
does not directly express working-class needs. However, if the last
point is pushed, then it becomes difficult to see welfare provision simply
as either imposed or conceded.
Before World War I, it is undoubtedly true that skilled male workers
benefited most from the major piece of legislation, national insurance.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to argue that working-class men
viewed this as an unambiguous advance; trade union opposition to the
reform was intense. The first demand of the labour movement throughout the years before World War I was for the Right to Work; after that
working people wanted non-stigmatizing, non-intrusive welfare.43 Furthermore, the legislation passed had different effects on working-class
men and women. Class experience was fractured by gender and it is
impossible to speak of the working-class family as an undifferentiated
unit as Brenner and Ramas do in this section. Much early welfare
provision was intrusive, and it was the working-class wife who had to
deal with the school attendance officer or the health visitor and who
found that the mandates of these officials often either placed impossible
demands on the fragile household economy, for which she was
responsible, or tended to undermine her domestic authority. With
regard to the provision of school meals, for example, there is some
evidence that working-class women in the early 20th century resented
what they perceived as an erosion of their domestic role and, like
bourgeois politicians, feared that the measure would undermine their
husbands obligation to maintain.44 Similarly, mothers who kept their
daughters at home to mind the baby so that they could contribute to
the family economy risked a summons to appear before the School
Management Committee and in the final instance before the magistrate,
while the introduction of school medical inspection without free
treatment amounted, as one feminist commented, to an injunction to
make bricks without straw.45
In line with their emphasis on welfare provision as a series of
concessions, Brenner and Ramas also find Barretts argument that the
capitalist state props up the family-household system unconvincing and
point to the apparent contradiction between policies that reinforce
womens dependency on men and the increasing trend since World War
II for the state to take responsibility for children and other dependants
(p. 64). But this is to ignore the explicit intentions behind state welfare
policies as they relate to the family, which have consistently aimed to
bolster the bourgeois family ideal. In the early 20th century, it is clear
that the shared concern of employers and policymakers to maintain
work incentives (in addition to anxiety as to the cost of dependants
benefits) made the state singularly reluctant to do anything that might
43

Pat Thane elaborates this argument in The Working Class and State Welfare in Britain,
18801914, Historical Journal 27 (1984).
The evidence comes from Anna Martin, Married Working Women, London 1911. Martin, an active
suffragist, worked with working-class women in a settlement in Rotherhithe prior to World War I.
Although her position as a middle-class observer was obviously problematic, her testimony does seem
plausible in light of the points I have made about working-class marriage.
45 Martin, Married Working Women, pp. 3637.
44

118

undermine the husbands obligation to provide. Thus, no provision was

made for dependants under National Insurance. When the state did
grant dependants benefits after World War I, it did so in such a way as
not to threaten the husbands status as the breadwinner, and to this day,
as Hilary Land has pointed out, has continued to ignore the contributions and entitlements due the working wife.46 The state has also been
extremely ambivalent about stepping in to fill the place of the male
breadwinner in the case of the single mother, whether widowed,
deserted or unmarried. Prior to World War II, unmarried mothers, who
by definition had shown no respect for the bourgeois family ideal,
found it impossible to get relief outside the workhouse, while widows
and deserted wives (after a testing period of one year) were either
granted outdoor relief or left with one child whom they were expected
to work to support, the others being taken into institutional care.47
Because of its desire to promote the bourgeois family form, the state
has found it difficult to decide whether to treat the single mother as a
mother or worker. In the early part of the century, the priority accorded
the parental obligation to maintain tipped the balance towards the
latter, but with the reformulation of family ideology in the wake of
World War II and the emphasis on the mother/child dyad, the balance
tipped in the opposite direction. Under the Thatcher government, the
leaked reports from the Family Policy Group indicate that it may be
shifting again.
Brenner and Ramas rightly point out that greater state provision has
been made for wives, single mothers and children, especially in the
period since World War II, and that the material importance of this
provision, irrespective of the terms on which it has been offered, should
not be underestimated. However, it is not clear that these developments
prove either that there has been a contradictory trend within the
welfare state towards social responsibility for children and other
dependants (p. 64), as opposed to a tendency to reinforce female
dependency on men, or that they were grudgingly given (pp. 65, 66).
I would argue that while there have been substantial policy shifts
regarding mothers and children, the state has nonetheless been consistent in its support for the bourgeois family throughout the twentieth
century. Moreover, the shifts in policy direction must be explained not
so much in terms of grudging concessions as in relation to the
reformulation of family ideology and the differential stress placed on
male and female roles within the family at different historical moments.
It is not possible to elaborate this argument fully here, but in brief, I
would suggest that the early 20th-century politicians and social investigators were concerned above all about working-class mens incentive to
work, and it was considered dangerous for the state to relieve them of
any aspect of their obligation to maintain their families. Their wives
commanded more sympathy as the Domestic Chancellors of the
Exchequer, albeit that they were considered profoundly ignorant of
domestic skills. In the late 1940s, attention shifted entirely to the mother
as the focus of both blame for family failure and hope for future
46

Hilary Land, The Family Wage, Feminist Review, No. 6 (1980).

Pat Thane, Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England, History Workshop
Journal, No. 6 (Autumn 1978).

47

119

improvement; it was now expected that the father would cooperate

voluntarily with the state. In the recent New Right literature faith in
both parents is affirmed and the role of the state in policing the family
is condemned.48
Brenner and Ramas are correct to stress that the material realities of
working peoples lives in the 19th century made the sexual division of
labour whereby women were largely confined to the domestic sphere
both desired and the most practicable. But their analysis does not
account for the persistence of the pattern of sexual divisions. I would
suggest first that in prioritizing the need to theorize the exigencies of
biological reproduction, Brenner and Ramas are in danger of underestimating the extent to which womens economic position is dependent
upon multiple, complex changes in social relationships. Moreover, Sally
Alexander may also be right in proposing that we should employ other
analytical tools, including psychoanalysis, in our explorations of sex and
class. Second, the historical evidence would suggest that gender
ideology is more than a deus ex machina (p. 68) and that it is indeed
created in ideologies of family life as Barrett argues. In their determination to avoid a dual systems approach, Brenner and Ramas fail
adequately to explore the ways in which gender ideology and womens
position are analytically releated. It would seem that the dynamic of this
relationship is in fact crucial to our understanding of why workingclass men and women invest shared experiences (for example, of
marriage and family) with different meanings, and of how and why
both working-class and middle-class prescriptions and ideals regarding
womens role change over time. In the search to identify the material
basis for womens oppression in captialism, the most likely path forward
is to look at the way gender and class are constructed together and this
requires much more preparatory historical work.
48 For example, Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family. An Alternative History of Love and Marriage,
London 1982; Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger, The War Over the Family, London 1983; Rita
Kramer, In Defence of the Family, New York 1983.

*****
Errata:
We apologise for the following errors in the footnotes to Ellen Meiksins
Woods article Marxism and the Course of History in NLR 147:
1. p. 101, line 17 of para 2: there should be a n. 16 after . . . as well as new
needs. Eight lines further on there should be a n. 17 after productive
systems. The existing n. 16 should be deleted.
2. Thereafter, notes 1724 should be renumbered 1824.
3. note 24 should be deleted from the text: note 25 is correct.

120