Constructing Gendered Workplace ‘Types’: The weaver–millworker distinction in Dundee's jute industry, c. 1880–1910

Abstract

Victorian and Edwardian Dundee was labelled a ‘woman's town’ due to the high proportion of women who worked in the city's staple jute industry. In this article, drawing on a range of contemporary sources, I use the work of feminist historians and Foucauldian notions of discourse to interrogate this label and explore why and how working women came to be marked as particularly problematic. Further, in questioning this label, I demonstrate how two specific workplace ‘types’—the weaver and millworker—were identified and constructed in contrast to one another. This article probes the processes through which these two ‘types’ were created, contested and performed in relation to the segregations and working conditions of their respective workplaces, and argues for a markedly spatial interrogation of gender identities and the category ‘working woman’.

La ciudad de Dundee durante las épocas victoriana y eduardiana, se calificó de una ‘puebla de mujeres’ debido al alto nivel de mujeres trabajando en la industria principal de la ciudad, yute. En este artículo, haciendo uso de un rango de fuentes actual, utilizo el trabajo de historiadoras feministas y las nociones de discurso de Foucault para interrogar esta calificación y exploro porqué y cómo las trabajadoras femeninas fueron designadas como particularmente problemáticas. Además, en cuestionando esta calificación, ilustro cómo dos tipos específicos de lugares de trabajo—el tejedor y el molinero—se identificaron y se construyeron como contrarios. Este artículo analiza los procesos en donde se crearon, se refutaron e se interpretaron estos dos ‘tipos’ en relación a las segregaciones y las condiciones de trabajo en sus lugares respectivos de trabajo, y al mismo tiempo se sugiere una interrogación espacial de las identidades de género y la categoría de ‘mujer trabajando”.

Keywords:

• Working women
• Dundee
• discourse
• gendered ‘types’
• jute industry

Keywords:

• Palabras claves: trabajadoras
• Dundee
• discurso
• ‘tipos’ generizados
• la industria de yute

Acknowledgements

This article stems from PhD research undertaken in the School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews. I would like to thank Dan Clayton for his supervision during this time. Particular thanks to reviewers for their full and detailed comments that have encouraged me to focus the claims of the article.

Notes

1. For example, in Lancashire's cotton industry, strong unionisation ensured men retained the job of spinning, gained skilled status and high earnings, and differentiated themselves from other ‘unskilled’ groups (Winstanley, 1996). In Dundee, however, men's employment in both mill and factory work was confined largely to a small number of supervisory roles as limited unionisation and constant pressures to keep costs low impelled women's employment in both spinning and weaving (Gordon, 1991).

2. I draw on a number of existing oral histories conducted by the Dundee Oral History Project (1984), Gordon (1991) and Kay (Odyssey Interviews, 1980). Reflective accounts relate to newspaper articles from the 1920s that reflect on the jute industry and its workforce at the turn of the twentieth century (People's Journal, 14 October 1922).

3. The DYB was published annually from 1878 to give a summary of information provided by the city's Liberal Party-supporting newspaper, the Dundee Advertiser.

4. The Lamb Collection consists of a range of materials including newspaper cuttings from the late nineteenth century.

5. The closest to this moral mapping was the DSU's survey into the city's housing and industrial conditions (1905). Through investigation of four blocks of dwellings, homes were described and occupations noted. Although not explicitly commented on, millworkers were, in the main, located in the poorer class of housing, although a number of instances existed where weavers and millworkers resided next to one another. Further, only as exceptions were dirty conditions commented on in relation to millworkers' homes and clean conditions in relation to those of weavers. This therefore suggests a blurring of the distinction in the residential spaces and conditions between weavers and millworkers.