The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750-1915.

This book is a historian's history. Judith Coffin's study of the politics of women's work in one of the most vital of French industries contributes to our understanding of society and culture, of labor and legislation, of French politics and economics, and of international movements. Combining the social history of needleworkers with intellectual arguments about gender roles, Coffin draws on a vast and important literature long slighted by historians of labor, economic development, party politics, popular culture and the rise of social science, all of whom can benefit from attention to this book. Utilizing the "torrents" (p. 4) of material produced by contemporary scholars and journalists, politicians and social reformers, government inspectors and industrialists, socialists and social scientists as well as the work of pioneers in women's history, Coffin puts the Parisian garment trades at the center of a web of relationships that link the social question with the woman question, political economy with social economy. The stories she tells about guild relationships and the changing organization of industry, mechanization and the sexual division of labor, women's relationships to work and to family, demonstrate once more the power of gender analysis to reveal cultural meanings.

These are stories which, as Sarah Maza points out, can connect private and public experience to produce new understanding of a dominant discourse.(1) Although women's work in the garment industry began long before it was defined as a "problem," as Coffin shows in her opening chapters on guilds and clandestine production in the eighteenth century, it was the image of the working woman as victim that prevailed and allowed passage of the minimum wage legislation of 1915 that marks the end of her tale. Art and literature, along with political and scientific tracts and treatises and the economics of production, combined to create the "Jenny l'ouvriere" depicted in Coffin's well-chosen visual and verbal illustrations.

Coffin sets the stage with a survey of women's roles in sewing in the pre-revolutionary period, focusing mainly on relationships between women and men in the guilds of tailors, linen drapers, and seamstresses, where trade issues tangled with gender roles, and all were influenced by a changing context of artisanal production. Clandestine work outside guild control, while performed by both sexes, bore special significance for the future of women's work, since industrial homework established important parameters for working women in later eras. Guild rivalries foreshadowed union efforts to restrict women's work in subsequent generations.

Arguing that sewing (unlike spinning) was not always associated with femininity, Coffin debunks the "invented traditionalism" (p. 21) that permeated many debates (and scholarly accounts) of women's work. Not only was home no separate sphere and clothing for family use not typically made there, control of production was long dispersed and contested. Women's work was unskilled only by a definition based in ideology. (One has only to visit the Musee de la mode et du costume in Paris to witness the needleworkers' extraordinary dexterity and genius.) Industrial homework was neither an archaic mode nor a capitalist plot but a way to organize an expanding production that served the needs and desires of many parties. The goals of working women and their roles in labor unrest likewise are subject to revision here, as is the force of feminism to influence debates over women's work.

While the voices of some women were heard, Coffin confirms the dominant importance of male-defined ideas in establishing the frameworks of work and family for working women. No single work was more persuasive than Jules Simon's 1860 book, L'ouvriere, in turning women's work in industry into a "problem" that inspired the interest of generations of poets, politicians, and social scientists. No instrument opened more opportunity for manufacturers, medical men, and purveyors of a new consumer culture to comment on women's roles than the sewing machine. Counterpoint, whether offered by economic liberals or labor leaders who pointed to low wages as the problem, called for more education, or proposed the reorganization of production, availed little. The story of how the sewing machine got a gendered and classless identity, embroidered by Coffin with choice illustrations, is important as a key to larger economic and ideological issues.

The importance of homework in garment making both to family income and to French industry was signaled in the surveys that were published by the Labor Office in the early twentieth century, and that have attracted the attention of social historians over the last decade. Coffin shows how they served a developing profession of social science as well as the "gender politics of sweated labor," which is the focus of the final third of her book. In a felicitous line describing the work of early social scientists, Coffin notes that "the images could have been from La Boheme; investigators now saw them through the lens of Pasteur." (p. 216)

Coffin shows how sweated labor became the nexus of concerns about French competitiveness in an international market, large-scale commerce, consumer culture, fears of depopulation, women's roles, the decline in craft skills, and public health - making the "hell of homework" as one novelist described it (p. 214) highly visible, and the seamstress at her sewing machine "an icon of urban modernity and exhaustion." (p. 218) The problem of working women's low wages was generally "sidestepped," (p. 197) states Coffin, as leaders of labor, industry, political parties, and social reform came together in support of a wartime bill to address "sweated labor" that then (as now) was largely female. The "demonization of industrial homework" (p. 218) was played against an increasingly regulated factory workplace and ultimately resulted in the 1915 legislation. The weaknesses in the bill and its subsequent lack of enforcement suggest that it was not the "critical milestone in social legislation" (p. 229) that Coffin, following contemporary advocates, argues. But she hits the mark in declaring that the bill "can be seen as a revealing example of Third Republic gridlock in gender relations and industrial modernity." (p. 250) It was a sop thrown to political forces that lacked the will to intervene in the "social economy" if that meant challenging the "family economy." In the end, "tradition," even if invented, prevailed.

This is a competent, comprehensive and challenging work. Coffin has provided a richly detailed portrait of an industry that employed more industrial wage-earning women than any other, and included a substantial fraction of all workers in France. Fashion was an industry quintessentially French. For scholars it offers a field replete with opportunity to explore the cultural meanings inherent in institutional structures, popular ideals, political and personal acts. Given the importance of garment making, this history establishes a base for further studies in pursuit of large questions of long duration about politics and economics, domesticity and family, women and men in modern industrial societies.

Marilyn J. Boxer San Francisco State University 

ENDNOTE 

1. Sarah Maza, "Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History," American Historical Review 101, no. 5 (Dec. 1996): 1493-1515, esp. p. 1506.