Disaggregating the Sexual Division of Labour: A Transatlantic Case Study

This paper attempts to explore the relationships among economic and gender hierarchies by a transatlantic comparison of the assignment of technically similar knitting tasks in the hosiery industry of the English east midlands and southern Ontario in central Canada, to show both the diversity and the commonalities in the processes by which gender divisions are drawn and to suggest the contending el. [...] A workman wrote to the journal of the trade decrying the 'supplanting' of male by female labour in the circular branch and both hosiery manufacturers and technical experts fretted that with women knitters 'a divided interest entered the trade' challenging the 2 honoured male stockinger tradition of the industry.ix By 1900 men with diverse and often conflicting interests in the industry shared a se. [...] Nonetheless the hosiery unions tried to take an 'active role' in the subsequent reformulation of gender divisions in knitting, forwarding men's interests to the detriment of female members.xiii Women did not join the unions in as great numbers as did men, either in the country districts or in the towns in the late nineteenth or the twentieth century. [...] Yet transatlantic differences between the two contexts in the structure of firms, the pattern of labour recruitment and the strength of workers' organisations which meant that by 1950 Ontario conventions concerning the preferred gender of knitters and the appropriate rewards due those with the mechanical knowledge to set up machines were not those current in the east midlands. [...] The structure of the industry and of the labour market, and the state of labour organisation tipped the balance toward male managers in Ontario and male unionists in the midlands.