The Politics of Women's Work

Few issues attracted more attention in the nineteenth century than the problem of women's work, and few industries posed that problem more urgently than the booming garment industry in Paris. The seamstress represented the quintessential working girl , and the sewing machine the icon of modern femininity. The intense speculation and worry that swirled around both helped define many issues of gender and labour that concern us today. Here Judith Coffin presents a fascinating history of the Parisian garment industry, from the unraveling of the guilds in the late 1700s to the first minimum-wage bill in 1915. She explores how issues related to working women took shape and how gender became fundamental to the modern social division of labour and our understanding of it. Combining the social history of women's labour and the intellectual history of nineteenth-century social science and political economy, Coffin sets many questions in their fullest cultural context: What constituted women's work? Did women belong in the industrial labour force? Why was women's work equated with low pay? Should not a woman enjoy status as an enlightened homemaker/consumer? The author examines patterns of consumption as well as production, setting out, for example, the links among the newly invented sewing machine, changes in the labour force, and the development of advertising, with its shifting and often unsettling visual representations of women, labour, and machinery. Throughout, Coffin challenges the conventional categories of work, home, and women's identity.