Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914-1939.

By Laura Lee Downs (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. xiv plus 329pp.).

Once the armies of Germany, Britain, and France deadlocked into murderous stalemate on the Western Front in 1915, manufacturers in the belligerent countries hired women in huge numbers to churn out the weapons of war. Men, required as they were for the killing fields of Verdun and the Somme, became scarce for metalwork, and women were seen as suitably fit for the mind-numbing, achingly repetitive work that came with new forms of rationalized production. By 1918 almost 600,000 women were at work in private metalworking firms in Britain; in France women made up 25 percent of the metalworking labor force. This revolutionary change in the labor market endured. Although after the war a great many women lost jobs or left them willingly, a female labor force remained a crucial feature of interwar metal manufacturing, especially in munitions, automaking, and the electrical equipment sector.

In this superb study of the metalworking industries of France and Britain, Laura Lee Downs tells this story in rich detail, while at the same time keeping her sights focused on a central question: why did employers come so readily to enforce a rigid gender division of labor in their industry and then choose to preserve it long after the wartime emergency had ended? Pure capitalist logic, after all, hardly explains why businessmen would relegate low-wage, semi-skilled jobs to women and skilled work to men, since people of each sex were variously endowed with different capacities and, arguably, could be exploited to best advantage as individuals rather than as members of a social category. Taking a swipe at human capital theory, Downs demonstrates that the labor market reflected not simply the logic of economic rationality but also the logic of prevailing ideas about social groups and their proper place in the factory hierarchy. As Downs shows, a gendered division of labor derived in part from labor politics: unionized male metalworkers, especially in Britain, fought to protect skilled work for their members in the face of an enormous expansion of semi-skilled work made possible by rationalization. But the author makes a convincing case that gender stereotypes more generally, and not just the narrow self-interest of craftsmen, proved decisive in inspiring industrialists, government officials, production engineers, and foremen to propagate a vision of rationalized production that trapped women in low-wage, low skilled jobs. Women were seen as a category unto themselves, better constituted "by nature" than men ever could be for monotonous, repetitive tasks that called for fine dexterity and a close attention to detail. As one contemporary French observer remarked admiringly, "women produce metal parts as they do sweaters." (p. 213)

Downs pursues this argument by combining the discursive analysis of the "linguistic turn" with a more experientially-based mode of social analysis. Without proclaiming it as such, she seems to stake out a middle position in the methodological debates that have recently beset social and cultural history. On the one hand, she shows how employers on both sides of the Channel adapted a well-established language of skill differentiation to justify their practices of restricting women to the lower levels of the factory hierarchy. On the other hand, she insists that this strategy for handling women recruits did not come to employers simply as preconceived notions derived in a deterministic way from the discourse they inherited from the past. Rather, employers also felt their way improvisationally in the course of the war, drawing lessons as they went along that confirmed them in their prejudices about male and female workers. Discourse and experience are distinguishable wellsprings of action, in her account, that tend to be mutually reinforcing.

If the "deep structure" of gender inequality was the same in Britain and France, many aspects of employer strategy and women's response were not. Downs does a excellent job teasing out national differences. She finds, for example, that working conditions for women during the war tended to be better in Britain than France, due in large part to the strength of government intervention on the British side of the Channel. She finds, too, that although the British experimented first with the use of middle-class social workers as maternal authority figures on the factory floor, it was the French who embraced "welfare supervision" as a key strategy of social control in the metalworking industry. In a fine piece of comparative analysis Downs explains why. British employers, she argues, dropped factory social work right after the war because it compromised the customary supervisory authority that foremen and skilled craftsmen had long enjoyed in British factories. Employers had felt little need to tamper with this traditional structure of authority, and the unions were strong enough to discourage any such temptation. By contrast, French employers in large enterprises had already come to distrust foremen as their principle vehicle of shopfloor supervision. They viewed production engineers, time-management specialists, and factory "welfare ladies" (surintendantes) as agents for expanding the reach of centralized managerial authority. This role put surintendantes in the contradictory position of ministering to the needs of women workers while enforcing the iron hand of the boss, a difficult game which Downs analyzes skillfully with evidence from the private journals of the social workers themselves.

Downs also makes a strong case for seeing women metalworkers as more active agents in the making of their work worlds than they have customarily been made out to be. She shows women taking to the challenges of mastering their machinery, negotiating their relationships to foremen, bristling under the frustrations of blocked careers and glass ceilings, and in the British case learning the subtle arts of bargaining through output restriction. In an extensive analysis of a key strike in Coventry in 1930, Downs shows women battling successfully, despite the initial hostility of the craft unions, against the imposition of the dreaded Bedaux wage-incentive system. Downs also shows women to have been more "political" than historians have understood, that is, more able to make connections between their workplace grievances and principles of justice in the larger polity. In one of her best chapters Downs analyzes the Paris metalworking strikes of May-June 1917 as a moment when women metalworkers adopted the wartime language of "equality in sacrifice," rather than the more recognizable political vocabulary of prewar syndicalism, to argue for better treatment for themselves at the factory and for their brothers and husbands at the front. This strike, she argues, was every bit as politically challenging to authorities as the more celebrated, and male-dominated, metalworking strikes of 1918.

Downs refrains from drawing broad conclusions about patterns of women's resistance and accommodation in metalworking over the full time span she covers in this book, nor does she take the full measure of the national comparisons she makes so adroitly in the body of the work. A monograph, this book makes one eager to see the author make connections even more boldly than she does. But this is a modest shortcoming in light of what Downs has achieved. Manufacturing Inequality is a model of historical analysis and the book to read on gender and industry in the era of the First World War.

Herrick Chapman

New York University