This book dodges between the two cases of sex discrimination and of race discrimination, sometimes seeming to read as if they were the same, but that is only because what is being addressed is the policy of equality of opportunity. Equal opportunities policies are not, of course, restricted to women and black people. The equal opportunities revolution has expanded outwards to take in new questions, such as sexual orientation, disability, and more. Those questions are given less weight in the treatment here, because it is largely historical, looking at the way that the ideas, campaigns, policies, and practices changed over the years. In driving those changes, the questions of sex and of race discrimination simply carried more weight. No moral judgment is intended in the priority given, only to tell the story.
The words we use about race are often awkward, and rightly so, since there really are no good grounds for sifting people out according to their colour. The words date quickly because they carry an unstated stigma. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in America in 1909 and has fought for black Americans ever since — but few today would be happy with the choice of its title. C. L. R. James wrote many essays in support of ‘negroes’, where today we would say black people. In the 1970s some radical Asians called themselves ‘black’, and the radical Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis even served as president of the Essex University Black Students Society. The collective ‘black’ for all those who are not white, though, is not always right. British Asians are often differentiated from black Britons, and called Asians, or sometimes brown. Black would have done as a collective noun for all those who are not white in the 1970s, but less so today. In the text I have used ‘black’ as the generic word where the meaning is clear, sometimes ‘black and Asian’, ‘black and brown’, or the negative ‘not white’ — knowing that none of these are satisfactory. The American ‘people of colour’ strikes many as too close to ‘coloured’, and sounds demeaning, and ‘black and minority ethnic’, while accurate, strikes me too much as policy-makers’ jargon. I have not changed terms in quotations, to keep the historical record. No words will ever satisfy, because the naming fixes what is fluid. Geneticists tell us that there is no biological foundation to the concept of race, fixing as it does on minor heritable features of skin colour and hair, and point out that the genetic variation within ‘races’ is greater than between them. Still the fetish concept of race is a social fact in that people treat it as if it were real, and so in their actions it becomes real. I hope that people will not get caught up too much in the language used here, which will no doubt be out-of-date already.
— ONE —
The Old Order
Between 1850 and 1950 British industry dominated the world. The factories that fed Britain’s success were for the most part worked by white men. Most of what was traded was made by white men. Between 1850 and 1880 11,000 miles of railway track were laid mostly by white men. In 1850 men smelted 2.25 million tons of pig iron, rising to 7.75 million tons by 1880. In 1850 men forged 49,000 tons of steel rising to 1.44 million tons in 1880. And men dug 49 million tons of coal in 1850, rising to 147 million in 1880. The number of engineers doubled between 1851 and 1881, and carried on growing so that there were 1.1 million engineers in 1935, almost all of them white men.1 Throughout that time Britain was making between 10% and 15% of all manufactured goods in the world, with greater output per worker than any country, bar the United States.
Britain’s take-off was based primarily on industrial labour in factories, and, through two key changes, that labour was overwhelmingly the work of men. The first change was the move from domestic production to factory production. Seventeenth-century spinning and weaving was done indoors, like furniture-making and most other handicrafts. The factory system separated domestic work from wage labour under a different roof. Many of these early factories, though, had women working alongside men, and children too. The second change, which was driven by a moral revulsion at the exploitation of women and children in dangerous work, was a series of laws, clauses in the Factory Acts that restricted women’s work (Mines and Collieries Act, 1842; Factory Acts of 1844, 1878, 1891, and 1895).
In the census of 1911 there were 13,662,200 men aged over ten years, and 14,857,113 women. Of those 84% of men and 32% of women were in work. More pointedly just 10% of married women (around half the total of all women) were in work.2
The men’s labour in British factories depended on other work done elsewhere. There was the work done by women, mostly in the home — cooking, washing, cleaning, caring for children — that all added up to the raising and sustenance of the working men. Also, industrialising Britain gobbled up raw materials that were grown and harvested and mined by black and Asian people. Sugar, rubber, tin, and oil from the colonies fed the industrial revolution, as the profits of the slave trade and empire yielded the seed money that grew it. But in the second half of the nineteenth century the factory system was the primary source of its profits (profits that averaged around 25%).3 The most important relationship, and the one that dominated social and political life in Britain, was that between the wage-earning class and the propertied classes. Those workers at that time were overwhelmingly male and white — factors that would influence the culture and organisation of the working classes that emerged between 1850 and 1950.
The forward march of labour
The growth of organised labour was bound up with a sharply gendered division of labour, first and foremost between paid factory work and unpaid domestic work; it was also based upon a demarcation of British industrial workers from toilers in the Empire, and from largely unorganised Irish labourers.
Today we might be tempted to call the centrality of white men to the factory system ‘privilege’ — though that is not really the word to use for the lives they led. Explaining that these industrial workers were the source of their employers’ profits, Karl Marx said that ‘to be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’.4 The hours worked in those days were long, generally more than 50 a week. The primitive extent of mechanisation also made working life dangerous, arduous, and dirty. The status of the nineteenth-century factory hand was low, and he was often dominated by his master, under threat of instant dismissal, subject to fines for misdemeanours.
In the earlier nineteenth century skilled craftsmen tried to control the work process by limiting the number of people in the trade, limiting membership of their associations, and so bidding up their wages. Women were not the main target — all rivals in the labour market were — but the strategy did institutionalise discrimination in employment. In South East England at that time, as many as 34% of all apprentices were women. But in 1796 the Spitalfields silk weavers excluded women from skilled work; in 1779 the journeymen bookbinders excluded women from their guild; the Cotton Spinners Union excluded women in 1829; and in 1834 London tailors struck work to force women out of the trade.5 These defensive measures also sharply differentiated the skilled from the unskilled, the craftsmen from the labourers. It was a division that could take on a racial aspect: ‘Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians’, Marx wrote: ‘The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.’6
Working-class organisation
The radical United Kingdom Alliance of Organised Trades formed in Sheffield in 1866 and the more moderate Trades Union Congress held its conference in Manchester in 1868. The establishment vilified the radicals as dynamiters, and rewarded the respectable head of the working-class household — but not his wife — with the vote in 1867. That year Lord Derby set up a Royal Commission on Trade Unions, and in a law of 1871 stopped them being classed as a conspiracy, and lifted the unions’ liability for employers’ losses in a dispute. The measure was meant to encourage responsible trade unionism, and it did.
The end of the Combination Acts was a thing that pulled in one way a
nd another. On the one hand it made it possible for many more people to join unions. On the other hand, legalisation bedded down the more conservative side of working-class identity. They had offices and officers, standing agreements with employers, legal status, and a hearing in Royal Commissions. All of these cemented the more conservative outlook of organised labour. They laid a basis for a patriotic love of England, its parliament, and even its monarchy. Karl Marx wrote in 1883 that the English workers were participating in the country’s success, and
are naturally the tail of the ‘great Liberal Party,’ which for its part pays them small attentions, recognises trade unions and strikes as legitimate factors, has relinquished the fight for an unlimited working day and has given the mass of better placed workers the vote.7
Labour Force Survey, ONS — the dip in the middle is due to the recession between the two world wars
Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo Torres make the point that the vote and the chance of reform ‘was the British state’s policy tool through which racial proximity and distance were institutionalised’.8The workers’ patriotic identification with England and its institutions left them open to chauvinistic divisions, in particular against the Irish. ‘He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker’, Marx wrote of the English worker:
In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.9
Legitimacy did not only entrench conservative attitudes towards the Irish, it also kindled a more patrician idea of the family.
State intervention and the shaping of the working-class family
As we have seen, successive employment laws tended to differentiate men’s and women’s work, limiting the hours that women worked, and barring them from more dangerous trades. The debate over the regulation of factory life turned on gender. ‘The public debate about enacting protective labour legislation in England’, says researcher Carolyn Malone, was all about the ‘idea that women’s work outside the home was dangerous to society and required state intervention’. She cites Peter Gaskell’s book The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), where he warns that ‘crowding together of numbers of the young in both sexes in factories, is a prolific source of moral delinquency’. Gaskell lauded ‘the moral obligations of father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter’ and warned against the breaking up of these family ties; the consequent abolition of the domestic circle, and the perversion of all the social obligations which should exist between parent and child under the factory system. These warnings against women’s work often turned on the harm to children — as they often do today. So Thomas Maudsley, of the nine-hour bill campaign, thought that ‘prolonged absence from home of the wife and mother caused an enormous amount of infant mortality and it must cause the elder children to be more or less neglected’. To him women’s work ‘deadened the sense of parental responsibility’.10 True as this was, women did not object to the protective laws, because the work conditions were exploitative and arduous. One factory inspector noted that ‘no instances have come to my knowledge of adult women having expressed any regret at their rights being interfered with’.11
A more profound influence of the division of labour between the sexes than the formal bars on women working in mines and other dangerous trades, or the limitation on women’s working hours, was the consequence of full-time, compulsory schooling for under-11s. Already in 1833 factories were forbidden from employing children under nine. The provision of free education under the Forster Act (1870) and the limit on children’s working hours were without doubt a great step forward.
As great an advance as it was for society and the law to enforce the protection of children, the impact upon women was that it greatly increased the need for childcare, as one of the main tasks of housework. MP Charles Buxton, supporting Forster’s education act, warned that ‘No feeling of tenderness for the parents would deter him for one minute from adopting compulsion’. He added that ‘Society was suffering grievously from their shameful apathy with regard to the education of their children’.12 A Board School in Upper Holloway minuted that ‘parents say they would be glad to send, but their girls’ services were needed at home’. Later, truant officers took older children who did much of the caring for their younger brothers and sisters away from their homes and back to school.13 There were campaigns, too, to police deviant sexual behaviour. The largely middle-class Social Purity Movement campaigned against prostitution and for ‘fallen women’. Henry Labouchère’s amendment to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act outlawed ‘gross indecency’, and led to the imprisonment of thousands of homosexuals.
All of these interventions brought with them officials to police the newly created nuclear family — there were 250 NSPCC ‘cruelty men’, empowered under an act of 1889, truant officers, health visitors, and social workers, all making sure that an orderly home was being kept. This way women’s domestic role was vigorously enforced.
The family wage as ideal and reality
In 1877 the Secretary to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, the same Henry Broadhurst we met earlier, told the Congress that it was the duty of male trade unionists ‘as men and husbands to use their utmost efforts to bring about a condition of things, where their wives should be in the proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world’. As a delegate of the Mason’s Union, Broadhurst perhaps had one foot in the old protectionism of the craft unions. But his views were echoed later by Tom Mann, the Dockers’ leader and champion of the ‘New Unionism’, who gave evidence to the Royal Commission of Labour in 1894 that he was ‘very loth to see mothers of families working in factories at all’, adding that he considered their employment to have ‘nearly always had a very prejudicial effect on the wages of the male worker’.14 Trade union leader and Liberal MP John Burns’ speech in the Dock Workers’ strike in 1889 was largely an appeal to the men to conduct themselves respectably, and not to beat their wives or drink.15
The ideal of the respectable male breadwinner had become established. Tory MP Charles Newdegate argued against votes for women, drawing on the case of those unions that had put in place rules against women. He told Parliament ‘the rightful head of the family claims for himself priority in labour as the chief breadwinner’, adding, ‘If that be selfishness, it is selfishness for the family’. Another MP, the rather radical Liberal Edward Pickersgill of Bethnal Green, appealed to the idea of the breadwinner to defend his constituents’ incomes, saying he ‘wanted to impress upon the conscience of the House that there were thousands of his constituents, bread-winners, earning wages in many cases not more than 20s. per week’. Arguing against the founding of a women’s college, the Liberal MP Stuart Rendel said that ‘after all, the men are the breadwinners, and must have the prior consideration’.16 In 1909 William Beveridge set out the meaning of the breadwinner role that had been set down in the later nineteenth century, saying that ‘society is built on labour’, and ‘its ideal unit is the household of man, wife and children maintained by the earnings of the first alone’. The liberal administrator added that ‘the wife, so long at least as she is bringing up children, should have no other task’.
In spite of these claims, it was not typical for any working-class family to survive on one wage alone. Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries estimated that male wage earnings as a share of all family income had risen from 55% in 1830 to 81% in 1865. Economist Arthur Bowley worked out that in 1911 — when the division of labour was most sharply based on gender — only 41% of working-class families were dependent on a man’s wage alone, and that on average the man’s wage made up just 70% of family income.17 What the family wage model did was not to exclude women entirely from paid work, but rather pushed them down the scale into less well-paid, less organised and less secure wor
k. Substantially work inside the home had become women’s work; while outside the home paid work was segregated on gender lines, with women in the role of the ‘reserve army of labour’, that employers could draw upon more or less as the business cycle demanded. For those at the lower end of the income scale, the male breadwinner ideal fell apart, and poorer families took what work they could.
The marriage bar
The idea of the family wage was in Edwardian England hardened up into a custom that was in effect a marriage bar — ‘the prohibition on married women’s employment which ensured that jobs, especially white-collar jobs, were reserved for men’. The Fabian Society’s Chiozza Money, in 1905, wrote that ‘the nation must set its face against the employment of married women, and gradually expand the period of legal prohibition’. To his mind ‘there is only one proper sphere of work for the married woman and that is her own home’. Catherine Hakim says that ‘strong social norms’ against women working were ‘sometimes institutionalised in company rules and policies’, as for example the BBC’s marriage bar, introduced in 1935. The marriage bar for teachers was not abandoned until 1945, and those in the civil service and the post office were not removed until 1954.18
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 3