paradigms & political discourse: labour & social policy in the usa & france before 1914 (wps 16,...

8/4/2019 Paradigms & Political Discourse: Labour & Social Policy in the USA & France Before 1914 (WPS 16, 1988) Jane Jenson.

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Paradigm and Political Discourse:Labour and Social Policy in the USA and France before 1914by Jane JensonPolitical Science

Carlton University, OttawaWorking Paper Series #16

In this paper, Jane Jenson develops a ne w approach to explaining comparative social policy,emphasizing the way in which collective identities become embedded in societal paradigms thatthen structure the development of policy in particular fields. She explores the processes of politicalconflict that lead up to the construction of a societal paradigm by comparing the development offamily policy in France an d America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The courts, labor unions,and professional groups all playa role in the creation of distinctive lines of policy that turn aroundthe notion of working mothers in France and housewives in the United States. Originally presented tothe "Seminar on the State and Capitalism since 1800," this revised version is a pathbreaking piece ofpolitical analysis an d social history. The author wishes to thank Greg Albo, Linda Gordon, PeterHall, Rianne Mahon, Sonya Michel, Mark Neufeld and Sandra Whitworth, as well as all theparticipants in the Seminar. Support for the research came from SSHRCC, grant #410-86-0238 .


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11 y a des millions d'annees que les fleursfabriquent des epines. 11 y a des millionsd'annees que les moutons mangent quand memele s fleurs. . . Et ce n'est pas important laguerre des moutons et des fleurs? Ce n'est.pas plus serieux et plus important que lesadditions d'un gros Monsieur rouge?(Le Petit Prince)

As did the Little Prince, feminists too insist that making sense ofrelations between women and men is crucial to any understanding of socialrelations. They insist because they 'know' it through their lives or viasimple observation of, the world. Yet, this shared knowledge, which hasbeen at the heart of the feminist movement for two decades, has not alwaysproduced agreement about how to account for the experience andobservations. Competing theoretical perspectives explain the existence of

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unequally structured gender relations in vastly different ways. This papermakes one cut into the controversy by proposing a way to conceptualisepolitics' contribution to systems of on-going gender relations incapitalist societies. l The proposed method is applicable to analyses ofother social relations and institutions although this paper limits itselfto examining differences in two kinds of state policies regulating women'sbehaviour in pre-1914 France and the United States, those 'protecting' theconditions under which women participated in certain occupations and thoseproviding maternal and infant protection.

Central to the method is the notion that meaning systems, aroundwhich actors constitute collective identities, are a crucial analyticfocus. For this r e a s o ~ the paper explores the ways in which particulargender identities were embedded in the societal paradigms constructed by


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IIIOne way to think about this mystery is to assert that what appears to

the observer as a stiucture of social relations is not only that but alsoIIIa terrain in which actors constantly act, under constraint to be sure, toImake their own history. From this perspective, we can posit that actorsIare simultaneously subjects of social structures which exist regardless of

subjective understanding of or support for them and acting subjectsiicarrying in their ch9ices the possibilities of social change anditransformation. This notion of the simultaneity of subjectivity impliesIIthat actors are constantly both reproducing and altering structures.IMoreover, there are no privileged positions nor privileged moments. ThisI

said, then, it is necessary to turn to historical analysis to understandthe circumstances under which societal stability or societal

!Itransformation occurs. In analysing this simultaneity of subjectivity, the!world of experience becomes as 'real' as the world of the structures.6 Our

task is to comprehend the link between the two realities. A first step todoing this is to recognise and therefore pay attention to the 'reality' ofthe realm of action and meaning.

The persistence (or even existence) of a social relation depends onboth the practices and the meanings which constitute it. 6 Therefore, thispaper will argue that social relations can sometimes be stabilised - ie,

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be in regulation - despite the contradictions which remain at their heart,because of the particular characterisitics of the set of practices and

Itheir meanings carried by actors in that time and place. Understandingsocial relations in this way we see that history is open-ended because itis the result of politics. Political struggle constitutes the material of

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social relations in or in crisis, and it is, then, in the realm

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of pOlitiCS! where we might begin the search for understandingI,social relations.I,

iThe politics of capitalist democracy involves a process of

the form of

representation, but we need to explore what is being 'represented'. InI,briefest form, representation implies in part the social construction ofIcollective identities. Out of this process comes the mobilisation ofI'interests', which are also, from this perspective, social constructions.ITherefore, the politics of representation necessarily :entails conflictiIbecause it involves disputes over which collective identities will achieveIrepresention. Resolution of basic questions about who the mainIprotagonists are to be, in turn, places broad limits on the issues that

will constitute the stuff of politics. Within that process, actorsIbearing collective identities come into being and attempt to carve out aiconstituency for themselves. In this way we can think of politics as a

process involving the formation of collective identities as much as it!entails conflict among groups and organisations over disputed claims aboutI,who gets what, when, and how.IThe terrain on which actors with different collective identities,

struggle for representation may be termed the universe of politicaldiscourse, which is the space in which socially-constructed identitiesfirst emerge in discursive struggle. I f actors with a i variety of

Icollective identities exist within the universe of political discourse,ithe meanings they give to their practices jostle each other for social,.., .attention and legitimacy. At issue are conflIcts over the representlOn and'Ireproduction of power relations based on difference.l, In any socialIformation a multitude of relationships of difference exist. Age, gender,

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race, workplace activities and language are but a few of the possiblei

differences which might take on social meaning. In most cases, theirecognition of difference is accompanied by an inequality of power. ForIexample, the recognition of childhood is usually accompanied by theIsubordination of children to adults. The recognition of racial difference,!has in the past led' to all the familiar evils of racism. Nevertheless, it

is also obvious that the mere existence - or even the recognition - ofdifference does not lead to congealment of a system of unequal power. Sucha system is socially constructed. Thus, progressive social forces have

Istruggled against th divisive effects of racism and sexism in the name ofi

equality, positing a [universality of human dignity against the inequitiesiof power structured' around some of these types of difference. In this way,IIsexual difference may be permitted to cross all other relationships, suchIthat things 'female' are subordinated to things 'male', or such a processI!of differentiation may be effaced through the political actions of!resistance in the name of equality in difference. Therefore, we must!

always ask which specific differences are politicised and how.I!In discovering the answer to that question, we must also recogniseIthat not all collective identities can gain attention and expand at everyItime because not all actors are equally powerful in their own socialIcontexts. Indeed, actors frequently depend for their influence on theirI,

ability to contributJ to the institutionalisation of meaning systems,Ithrough a societal paradigm.7iA societal paradigm is best defined as a shared set of

interconnected premises which make sense of or give meaning to many socialrelations. Every paradigm contains a view of human nature, a definition of

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basic and proper forms of social relations among equals and among those 10Irelationships of hierarchy, a specification of the relations among socialIiinstitutions as well as a stipulation of the role of such institutions.iThus, a societal paradigm constructed out of political conflict is aImeaning system, making sense of all social relations, as well as a set of\practices. I f a paradigm's set of interconnected preinises comes to beIIwidely shared as the result of a social compromise,1 as such a paradigm canI

be termed 'hegemonic', in Gramsci's sense and one IOf its characteristicsis that it constitutes a kind of explanation of the world at the level ofcommon sense as well as in formal theory.

Societal paradigms are not always hegemonic. Indeed, whether there isan hegemonic paradigm or not is one of the characteristics which ordains

.1whether social relations are in regulation or 10 cnSlS. If an hegemonic\societal paradigm exists, competing collective identities will make littleIIheadway. As contradictions intensify, however, the previously hegemonic

societal paradigm will no longer provide an account of the emergingII

conditions; people will take up competing collective identities becauseIthey seem to make sense of the new situation better than the previouslyparadigmatic ones. Periods of crisis - that is, momehts not in regulation- are likely to be moments of efflorescence in the .universe of political

I discourse, when competing actors, bearing a variety of collectiveIidentities, may successfully struggle to extend the reach of their

representational systems. The collective identities of any new actorswhich appear will depend in part, although never eJclusively, on the

Icontradictions which gave rise to the crisis. If the crisis evolves into aIset of social relations in regulation an hegemonic societal paradigm is

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likely to accompany it and it will likely contain some contribution frominew actors which 'first appeared in the universe of political discourseduring the crisis.s

Since an hegemonic societal paradigm incorporates contenders forIideological and political influence in any social formation via a process

of inclusion and exclusion, only some identities can be constituted (haveIa space) within any !societal paradigm. Yet competing meanings for the sameIIpower relation may ~ o n t i n u e to exist in the universe of politicalIIdiscourse, carried on the practices of actors excluded from the societalIcompromise and whose influence is margina1.9 This marginality existsi

because, once c o n s t i ~ u t e d , the effect of the paradigm is as if a shadowwere cast back into the universe of political discourse, leaving inIdarkness and invisibility any identities which are not included within its

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terms and blurring into invisibility the power relations whose meaningscan not be seized. Those contenders for political and ideological

Iinfluence which are included in the paradigm acquire the possibility ofrecognising themselves (because they have an identity) and, most

IIimportantly, of being recognised by (made visible to) others.The constitution of an hegemonic societal paradigm, within which only

!some collective identities are represented, is the product of politics, iniits broadest sense. This means that any number of institutions - rangingIifrom political parties, trade unions and other social movements to theI

various apparatuses of the state, churches and scientific establishments -iImay be identified as the multiple sites of its constitution. The!implication of this variety is that, as the paradigm enters into crisis,I,

its political expression will differ across social formations and a

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but was, as we can. see with the benefit of hindsight, under construction.!In both countries reformers campaigned to have the state regulate theIIeffects of urbanisatiqn, immigrant labour forces, declining birth rates,iIrestructuring industry, and economic uncertainty. French and American!Ipoliticians and social activists spoke in apocalyptic terms of social

instabilities. The consequence of this ferment was that the universe ofipolitical discourse in both countries was rich in competingIrepresentations of gender and class identities, and debates over the

proper roles for women and workers (as well as immigrants, races, etc)iwere heated. By the first years of the 20th century, social relations hadIbecome more stabilised, and gender and class identities were combined into

paradigmatic definitions which held well into the twentieth century.Out of these two quite similar situations of economic restructuring

came state policies which contained quite dissimilar representations ofsocial relations. In particular, along with more familiar differences in

icharacteristics of class identities, there were variations in thei

gendering effects of the two hegemonic paradigms which eventually tooki,form. In France, gender identities included the possibility - and indeedat times the assumption - of the validity and importance of women's work,

i,both for single and married women. The French state created policies whichireflected this assumption and which facilitated women's performance of the

dual roles of worker and mother. Legislation protecting both working womenIand infants developed within the labour code, reflecting a certaini

societal agreement that if women workers were not exactly the same as men,iwomen were nonetheless workers. In the USA, by contrast, policies did not-- I,

reflect the same assumption about the possibility of combining two roles

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and 'two-channel' addressed men asiworkers and women exclusively as mothers. 10 The rest of this paperIexplicates the grounds for this difference, via an examination of theIhistory of workplace and infant protection in the two countries and by"locating the initiatives in the general process of formation of hegemonicisocietal paradigms at a moment of economic r e s t r u c t u r i ~ g . IIIn both France and the United States, infant mortality and publicIhealth were major social problems connected not only to labour force needs

and national honour but to fears about social instability bore generally.I,By the late 19th century French demographers announced that the rate ofIpopulation growth was dropping dramatically. Concerned groups of all sortsiconsidered depopulation a threat to the nation, particulafly in the event,iof another war with Germany. The American birth rate l11so declined

throughout the 19th century, so that by the 1890s only France's was lower[Gordon, 1976: 48].

By 1900, most European countries had enacted legislation to prohibit,i

women from working in industry for limited periods before and/or afterIgiving birth. France was an exception to this internatiomil trend untilI1913 legislation provided a potential prenatal and a compulsory postnatal

leave for women working in 'all industrial and commercial establishments.'IIMost importantly, a daily allowance to compensate for lost wages was made

available for eight weeks before and after childbirth to ' ~ l l women of"French nationality who habitually work for wages outside the home, whether

. f h . i Ias a worker, an employee, or a domestIc', 1 t elf persona means werei

limited.l l Dispute over this allowance held up the legislafion until 1913,Ibu t it was finally passed after a debate which stressed the needs of the

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state. Until 1945 pa d maternity leaves represented the primary stateieffort to decrease infant mortality rates and improve the health ofInewborns.!In France, the explanation preferred by demographers and other socialIpolicy experts for i ~ f a n t mortality was too hasty return to work of newImothers because of. their poverty, not maternal occupation per se. By theI

1890s, demographers' had found that 45% of infant deaths in the first yearIof life occurred within the first month, and they concluded that leaves of,four to eight weeks would substantially alter mortality rates. Observing

women's continued work during the last part of their pregnancies (thusIIprovoking premature births, underweight newborns, difficult deliveries,

maternal weakness, letc.), and their insistence on returning to workimmediately after delivery (thus leaving their newborns to be fed bottled

imilk, to be cared for by others less careful than the natural mother, andrisking postpartum complications which threatened the health and long-term

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fertility of the mother), agitation for various forms of leaves took placebetween 1886 and 1913, when compulsory paid leaves were finally written

IIinto labour legislation. The emphasis on leaves clearly reflected ai

widely-shared assumption that women's participation in the paid labour!force, even after marriage and during childbearing years, was widespread,Iinevitable, and even desirable. Yet, something had to be done so thatIIwomen could combine both their productive and reproductive activities.iRepresentatives of capital, and both revolutionary and reformist workers'!

organisations mobilised alongside nationalists, social Catholics andIfeminists to demand with different rationales a state policy.12

Although state initiative relied on the development of a programme of

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imaternity leaves, France did have other organisations and programmesIdevoted to infant health. Here too, mUltiple efforts. were made toIreconcile work and childbearing. For example, charitable organisationsIIsought out needy working and unemployed women and provided them withIpayments in exchange for a commitment not to send their babies away foriwet-nursing and to breastfeed [Blake, 1977: 33-34; !hebaud, 1982: 87].13

There were well-baby clinics, associations to make p a y ~ e n t s to mothers who,Inursed for an extended period, and voluntary associations whichiestablished milk stations.14 Nursing stations, creches in factories, andIIstate-provided childcare in the schools from the age of three alsoireflected these concerns.16 Moreover, as the concluding report of the

first International Congress of Gouttes de Lait in Paris in 1905 clearlyiindicated, these reformers understood that the ability to nurse was class-,related. Poor women in the paid labour force were in greatest need of pure

milk for their babies [Blake, 1977: 21].16IThe question of infant health also concerned the reformers who!

advocated regulation of the hours of women's work. In 1'892, fifty yearsiafter enactment of the Factory Acts in Britain, the first laws limitingIthe hours of women's work finally passed the French legislature.17 InIessence, the laws permitted women to work eleven h o u r s ~ including one hourIiof rest, and prohibited night work (between 9 p.m. and a.m). There were,I

of course, exceptions to this prohibition for some kinds of occupations,for some times of year, and for some industries. Moreovlr, the legislation

Iexcluded the family workshop. In 1900 the coverage of the law was extendedIto include men working in the same unit of production and a uniformImaximum of 11 hours was set, with the eventual goal of 10. 18

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Reduction of women's hours of work was always part of a larger demandIiby the labour movement to reduce hours. Beginning in the last decades of!the 19th century trade unions struck over shorter hours and mobilized for

state actions, especially in 1890-91, 1904-06, and 1919, when 8-hourIIlegislation came to France.19 Socialist leaders proposed shorter hours as,

a means of solving many social ills; the campaign was a direct response toi

the effects of economic restructuring and social problems. Thus, an 8-Ihour day was supposed to alleviate structural unemployment, reduce the,psychological and physical impact of intensifying and unskilled work,Ieliminate overproduction, increase time for family life (in particular by

giving the father more time with his family) and result in healthierI!workers [Cross, 1984: 198-99]. But it was not only the labour movementI

which advocated reduced hours. Social Catholics and radical republicans,including employers,also argued that a general reduction of working timewould increase e f f i c i ~ n c y and productivity [McDougall, 1988: 4-5].

A first breach in the opposition to reduced hours came, then, withthe 1892 law regulating women's and children's hours. The grounds used for'protecting' some of the population were that they were the ones without

iIcivil rights, without resources to protect themselves through workplace orIIpolitical action. Argll:ments about lack of civil rights overwhelmed

references to women's physical infirmities - particularly menstruation -!

which also were sometimes cited as a reason making shorter hours desirableI

[McDougall, 1988: 9 and passim]. Also embedded in the discussion was the,notion that shorter hours would enable women to do housework and look

Iafter their children ~ e t t e r . Indeed, in exploring the 'need' for shorter,

hours and no night work, investigators inquired into the effects of long

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days and night work on infant feeding [ M c D o u g a l l ~ 1988: 11-12]. In thisiway, the great concern with natalism linked up the 'protection' of womenIworkers.IIThe need for more time for families to spend together, especiallyIIwith their children, provided the core theme used by both labour movementIactivists and businessmen in this discussion, who saw social peace and

Inational well-being as hostage to long hours whIch. left childrenIIunsupervised, homes disrupted (thus encouraging men to seek solace in theiIcafe), and infants without proper food.2o The goal was always to gain thisIreform for all workers, and granting it to women was claimed as a breach,which would of necessity widen in the future.21 The m ~ n could, and did,

ride to leisure on the skirts of the women.The development of 'protective' legislation in the USA took a quite

,different course. The trade unions did not lead the movement for thelegislative reduction of hours; the craft-dominated American Federation ofLabor (AFL) preferred a collective bargaining strategy. This meant

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bargaining employer by employer and by the late 19th c ~ n t u r y many maleIworkers had negotiated reduced hours. It was those partS of the reformImovement concerned with the social conditions of women, of which feministsIwere a most prominent segment, which insistently advocated legislativeIrestrictions on the hours and occupations women could work. As a result,

protection of women had an uneven history until the landmark case ofIiMuller v. Oregon, decided by the Supreme Court in 1908.22 This caseIprovided the justification, which lasted until the 1970s, for differentialItreatment of women and men workers. Muller accepted the protection ofIwomen workers, in terms of hours and conditions of work, because women

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were different from men, physically and in their social roles.This view of protection emerged in a period when liberalism was at

Iits height in American legal doctrine. Freedom of contract, set out in thesimilarly landmark case of Lochner v. NY in 1905, dominated the Court'sunderstanding of labour relations. Since Lochner found it 'unreasonable'to limit the hours of work of male bakers, the National Consumers League

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and Louis Brandeis, who prepared the arguments in the Muller case, were!forced to argue within the Court's discourse and demonstrate thatIlimitation of w o m e n ~ s hours was, by contrast, 'reasonable'. They did thisiby marshalling statistical and anecdotal material from around the world to

'demonstrate' that long hours and night work were detrimental to women'slong-term health, an argumentation strategy labelled the Brandeis Brief.

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This brief made two simultaneous arguments. One, drawn from the emergingscientific literature on work, claimed a link between fatique, overwork

!and low productivity; short hours were simply more efficient. Another wasthat long hours and night work threatened the health and well-being of the

!'mothers of future generations' [Lehrer, 1987: 20; 34].The Court's opinion particularly stressed the latter, writing into

Muller the notion that there were innate and inherent differences betweenwomen and men which meant that women would always need protection, even if

Iit infringed freedom of contract [Hill, 1979: 253]. However, for men, withtheir different biology and social responsibilities, Lochner held thatperm ss able protection depended upon the strong demonstration ofextraordinary conditions of work. In this case, the requirement of

I'reasonableness' had come to depend on differentiating women and men andthe Court became fixated on the idea.

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The second was programmes, established first by municipalities and theni

extended, to purify' the milk supply available to consumers. Both privatephilanthropists and state officials promoted these efforts [Blake, 1977:13ff; Wertz and Wertz, 1977: 202ff]. In the USA there was, at first, lessemphasis on teaching mothers the importance of breastfeeding than in the

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European movements for infant health:iWhile Americans especially were apt to measure their success by thenumber of bottles of milk which had been distributed, Budin [aleading French specialist active in the infant-care movement], incontrast, tended to measure the success of his Consultation by thenumber of mothers who were breast feeding. [Blake, 1977: 22]

Such efforts 'to educate mothers about breastfeeding depended on amore holistic understanding of the problem, including the needs of mothers

,for care during and after pregnancy. This understanding penetrated,IAmerican debates only in the second decade of the 20th century [Blake,

1977: 36; Meigs, 1977: 9; Wertz and Wertz, 1977: 202]. When the discussioni

did begin it tended to focus on providing proper, 'scientific' medicalcare and teaching women to feed their babies better, whether at the breastor on the bottle.

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As a result, just as in other programmes, like those for Mother'sAid, policies of infant and maternal protection institutionalised twochannels of state w ~ l f a r e , one for working men and one for mothers.25Women who crossed the boundaries - working mothers - found no programmes

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to meet their needs.26 In France, the process of gendering involved anassumption that women worked and that restrictions on hours should apply

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to all workers, whereas in the USA assumptions about gender made working! .

mothers invisible and encouraged state policies which separated the policy!

channels in which women and men's social roles developed. How can we

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I I,understand this cross-national difference in the r e p ~ e s e n t a t i o n s of genderirelations and the gendering effects of state policies? Why did two states

in similar periods of social uncertainty develop quite different policiesIdirected towards working women and mothers?

I .Gendering Effects in the Politics of the Third RepublIcIThe 19th century in France brought economic upheavals. 27 Industrial

production, export growth and the expansion of free waged labour alloccurred under a system of competitive regulation in a 60ntext

IIcharacterised by economic and politicalliberalism.28 But competitiveI,regulation did not endure. By the end of the century political parties,

trade unions, and social movements for reform, including a feministmovement, emerged to provide support for a common political discoursecentred around the general identity of citizen-producer.

The consolidation of a common discourse into an hegemonic paradigmfollowed from a shared analysis of the social and economic instability and

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misery which the French labelled the 'social question'. NumerousIpoliticians, trade unionists, feminists, social theorists, and stateexperts explored the conditions of French society, especially in Paris and

!other cities, and discovered misery, squalour, immorality, starvation,Iprostitution, and infant mortality, all of which pointed towards a severe!social problem. Competitive regulation seemed to be digging its own

grave.29I,Embedded in this discourse of economic and social crisis was aIparticular representation of gender and gender relations. In the discourseI,on the social question 'femmes isolees [single women] represented the

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domain of misery, world of turbulent sexuality, subversive independenceand dangerous insub?rdination. They embodied the city itself' [Scott,1987: 126]. Social observers pointed to the failure of the wage system to

ipay women enough 'to support even themselves; women with children were ini

substantially worse straits. Thus, as poverty itself became gendered,I,

women's poverty represented everyone's poverty. But even more far-reachingwas the notion that, changes in gender relations - as single women moved tothe cities - both caused and represented social and political instability.

Associated with this attention to feminised misery as the crucible ofsocial problems was the fear of depopulation. Concern about saving thechildren of the p o v ~ r t y - s t r i c k e n , which had prompted the development of

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facilities for abandonning children as well as childcare for working women(in the state nursery schools [ecoles maternellesl for example), became anhysteria about national decline after the defeat by Germany and the lossof Alsace-Lorraine.so Here, too, a sense that the social changes of the19th century and especially the ideology of liberalism which had given

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meaning to it were at, the root of the problem informed popular and expertIperceptions of the real decline in population size. Therefore, within the

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concern about depopulation was an analytic link to competitive regulation,which was guaranteeing neither reproduction of the labour force nor a

IIpowerful nation state.31,

By the end of the 19th century politics in the Third Republic hadmade hegemonic a p ~ r a d i g m containing a universalising identity which canbe labelled citizen-producer. Generalisation of this identity involved an

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acceptance of industrial society, but allocating a great deal of authorityto the state. French statism, so powerful since the days of Colbert, took

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, I I l : i : H ! 1 I ' n : ! i ' ' ' : : n i l ; ~ . ". ......!:.... " .. " . ' - j . " ' . 1 1 , . , 1 " ' ! j , ~ , ' , ' :; -fi _

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on new meaning. The new notion of citizenship brought politicsIincorporating new social strata and immigrants and I led to the organisation

of a political form, the political party based on mass mobilisation. A\consequence was consolidation of democratic politics and defeat of

conservative nationalism by the combined republican forces. The DreyfusAffair was symbolically important because at that moment a large segment

IIIof the French petite bourgeoisie, the class which was the linch-pin of theInew politics, detached itself from the clerically-based nationalism whichIIhad so influenced the first decades of the Third Republic.S2 Unions, co-

operatives, and professional societies as well as single-issue movementsaU assumed this new identity.53 An alliance of these g r ~ u p s was expressedin practice as well as made possible by a series of important reforms, inthese crucial decades, which gave some stability to relations both in the

Iworkplace and in the broader society through social policy.s4One important consequence of this socially-constructed paradigm was

that it carried within it mechanisms of gendering which shaped and limitedthe identities which women seeking their own political and socialemancipation - their own access to citizenship in particular - couldmobilise. One result of the specific terms of the d i s c o u r ~ e around the

Isocial question was that social reformers carried with their doctrines anIIunderstanding of gender relations and these ideas were ~ r u c i a l components!

of the reform package.S6 As a symptom of the social u n ~ e r t a i n t y of theIlack of paradigmatic hegemony was that the earlier universe of political

discourse contained a wide range of feminist positions, aU of whichjostled each other in the effort to shape meaning systems and feminist

Ipolitics for the corning century. Nevertheless, feminists ~ h o were

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comfortable with the identity of citizen-producer and who could manipulatethe discourse surrounding it were most influential within the movementsfor social reform.

The feminist movement which was reconstituted after the defeat of the!Commune in 1871 was very pluralistic. One important strand, led by Leon!

Richer and Maria Deraismes, insisted that feminism was 'reasonable,realistic, and centred on the reform of civil rights'. I t demandedequality in order to allow women to fulfil their obligations as wives andmothers, as well as. to receive a better education and exercise an'interesting' profession [Reberioux ~ . , 1976: 133]. Political rights,basically the vote, were not a central goal of this feminism, whichfocussed more on the development of women's civil rights in a societyordered by the Napoleonic Code, according to which the husband wasofficially the patriarchal head of the family unit. Other strands offeminism, closer to the workers' movement, demanded education, betterworking conditions and higher wages for women.

These foci reflected the fact that the most politically influentialfeminism at the t i ~ e was deeply embedded in the politics ofanticlericalism which organised the politics of both the centre and left

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in these years [Offen, 1984: 652]. The strong Free Mason movementI

supported several feminist groups both materially and ideologically whilesocialist feminists depended upon as well conflicted with the anticlericalworkers' movement. I I t was, in large part, their ability to speak to or inthe discourse of their allies which ordered the influence of the multitude

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of strands of feminism present in the universe of political discourse.Those which fit well with the vision of republican men (demanding, for

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Iexample, secular for marriediwomen, or protection of infants for the nation) or socialist men

(demanding, for example, greater unionisation, higher wages, andprotection of all workers) fared the best. Those feminsits for whompolitical rights were a central goal found few allies and were marginal tothe societal paradigm, in which the citizen remain unabashedly male.Hubertine Auclert is the best representative of this strand. Her socialistfeminism advocating complete equality, and thus suffrage too, came to

igrief because republicans of all stripes feared that 'female suffrage wouldI

reinforce the church and thus bring about the political defeat of therepublican forces [Reberioux tl...Al., 1976].36 The effect of this balanceof power within the women's movement was that pre-1914 feminists paid agood deal of attention to the conditions of women's work but less to theirright to vote.

iAs a movement of resistance, then, feminism's fate rested not only onithe actions of women but also on the practices of its political allies and

their understandings of gender relations.37 One of these allies was the!labour movement, which was an active promoter of both protection forworking mothers and of reduced hours for all workers. Skilled workers who

Itended to be men, but included women as well, dominated the labour,movement. The acceptance of limited hours for women was part of a long-

term strategy for reduced hours for everyone, which the labour movementsought.

iIBy the beginning of the twentieth century, the French labour movementIhad moved beyond a simple protectionist position to indude one ofIIrevolutionary syndicalism. Revolutionary syndicalism brought with it the

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dominance of a broader and more egalitarian discourse on women's roleI![Sowerwine, 1983: 412). Committed to a class revolutionary stance, and

confronted with rising rates of female employment and capital's frequentI

preference for w o m ~ n over men, the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT)moved to organize rather than try to block women from participation in thepaid labour force.S8 The Couriau Affair was a crucial turning point forthe labour movement: In this 1913 controversy, the upper levels of the CGTdisciplined the Lyon Printers' Federation fo r denying union membership to

!

a female printer, Emma Couriau, and fo r expelling her husband because herefused to forbid her to seek work and union membership. The dispute was

I

resolved only after the intervention of feminists and the national labour!

movement in a local controversy. The resolution in the direction ofequality and acceptance of working women's rights was tremendouslyinfluential for the whole movement (Sowerwine, 1983; Perrot, 1984: 48;Zylberberg-Hocquard, 1978: Chapter III).

The consequence of the strategic choice made in the Couriau Affairwas far-reaching. The inclusion of women in unions became a political task!of the first order. Confronted with capital's resort to women workers in

I

order to reduce wage! bills, the French unions instituted a strategy ofiemphasizing increases in the salaries of the lowest paid, as well asI

introducing into political discourse the mobilizing demand of equal payIi

for equal work. If employers could no longer pay women less than men,women would not threaten men's jobs. Moreover, unions' mobilizing actionswould solidify the commitment of women to the goals of societaltransformation, which the revolutionary union movement promoted. Thisstrategy of solidarity Idid not divide the working class by gender, and

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..

" I'unions or their political allies did not systematically promote theassumption of the 'unnaturalness' of women's employment. As the debatesaround infant protection and hours legislation revealed, for French unionsand the social reformers close to them, the world imagined was one inwhich women were not necessarily confined to the' home. Rather, theimagined ideal was one in which there was sufficient time for both workand family, for leisure and for homelife.

!,As the political struggle gave shape to an hegemonic societalIparadigm being institutionalised out of the conflict between organised

labour and other economic actors over the social place to be grantedworkers and out of the conflict within the labour movement over the formits organisation would take, a process of gendering was going on. Theeffect of struggle within the labour movement was . hat consequential

ichoices were made about gender relations and these choices hadIimplications fo r the identity which working women might adopt. As well,

within the struggles between labour and capital there was also a struggle,between working women and men about the gender self-presentation that the,' . .developing class would make. The outcome was not gIven 10 advance nor was

the result imposed on women, who were present in' the struggles (althoughnever in equal numbers); it was the result of concrete struggles inconcrete situations.39

But it was not only unions and left-wing parties 'which contributedigendering effects. The doctrine of Solidarism which much influenced theIRadicals and other republicans was another important source. In brief,'Solidarism as social theory stressed the reciprocal rights and duties ofIcitizens and the state. Citizens owed each other and ultimately the state

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organisations did exist which advocated such a reform and therefore,although the identity of independent women did exist within the universeof political discourse, the position could gain no purchase to make itsidentity and its organisation visible or viable.

Instead, the only viable feminism was that which joined the alliance,of radical republicans, coming to that position as a result of support for

freemasonry, or anticlericalism, or the rights of man which continued toexclude women [Rabaut, 1978: Chapter 9; Offen, 1984]. In that alliance,however, the position of women was extremely contradictory. On the onehand, their male colleagues did support emancipatory reforms and someimportant ones were instituted. On the other hand, the social doctrinewhich provided the glue for the elements of the paradigm assigned aseparate and not necessarily equal role to women qua women, elevating thefamily to the status of fundamental social unit.

Therefore, feminists were caught in a dilemma. If they wished toimprove women's situation, which was after all their primary goal, they

were compelled to operate within a paradigm which recognised them. Thismeant that they had to use the prevailing discourse. But, using adiscourse much influenced by the paradigmatic identity of citizen-producer, feminists emphasised women's duties to the nation and helped toinstitutionalise the identity of citizen-producer, accepting that women'smost important product would be children for the patrie."o I t was neverthe case that children were to be the only product of women, however;women would and should work for wages. In that sense the identity ofcitizen-producer could be taken up by women who saw themselves both asworkers and mothers and state policies like infant protection and hours

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legislation sustained this identity. Absent from this configuration,however, was any identity which defined women as different from men basedsimply on sexual difference, not maternity, and which promised themgreater equality, eve.n in difference.

The identity of citizen-producer accomodated women but in limitedways; it had embedded within it a quite particular representation ofgender relations in which women's place was in the family although notnecessarily in the home. Working women, as working men, owed their firstloyalty to the family and through it to the state. Other moreindividualistic collective identities disappeared from view. They had beenpresent as alternatives in the past, however, and they continued to liveon in the shadow world of the universe of political discourse as did morecritical class identities, to be activated later as the contradictions ofthe new mode of regulation intensified. In the meantime, state programmesaddressed women as workers w:ul as mothers, albeit through the family. Manyof the policies for maternal and infant protection were intended tostrengthen the family, rather than to address the needs of women per se,while hours legislation for women was to be the opening wedge for workersgaining greater control over their working conditions. Independent women,as collective actors, were quite invisible and did not emerge from thatshade for decades.

Gendering Effects in the Pre-1914 USAIn France the identity of citizen-producer was in large part

institutionalised by a political process organised through thelegislature, which provided the focus of politics. The lack of workplace

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Irecognition of unions and workers made party politIcs and legislativereforms crucial as the route to reforms. Moreover, the highly centralisedstate, tightly linked to Paris, left little space for regional variationsin political programmes. In the USA the situation was quite different.Federalism and a political ideology of liberalism had encouraged the 19th-century development of what has been termed a 'state of courts andparties', a form which had become by the last decades of the centuryinappropriate to the new economic and social conditions. The state ofcourts and parties was one in which legislatures were less important asorganisers of politics than were the courts, especially the Supreme Court,and political parties [Skowronek, 1982].

At the time the economy was undergoing increasing concentration andindustrial capitalism acquired technological sophistication. By the lastdecade of the 19th century the United States was the world's firstindustrial power and manufacturing was generating more of the nationalincome than agriculture. This new emphasis on manufacturing was

accompanied by massive amounts of immigration, urbanisation, and thedevelopment of a huge mass market. At the same time, labour was scarce andskilled workers commanded high wages and had some workplace power. But thehigh production costs associated with labour processes requiring skilledlabour and the pressures for lower costs coming from an increasingly largedomestic market, led to new production techniques which could allowsubstitution of unskilled workers for skilled ones [Shefter, 1986: I 99ff].

IPolitical and economic uncertainty accompanied these economicdevelopments. In these years an hegemonic societal plradigm did not exist

Iand the universe of political discourse contained a wide variety of

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potential responses the unsettled conditions corning from actorsjostling fo r attention' and power. Out of the restructuring, classconflict, and complexity of those years carne new regulatory andbureaucratic bodies which replaced to some extent courts and politicalparties as the mediators of state-society relations and national-levelbureaucratic state institutions already familiar in Western Europeancountries finally took form in the USA [Skowronek, 1982: Part II,

I

Introduction]. An impasse was broken. But the new institutions which tookform did not fall from heaven; they were produced by political conflictswhich occured within the old institutions of the state of courts andparties. And, the n ~ w was profoundly marked by the old.

The courts, in particular, continued to play a substantial role.While recognising the continent-wide scale of the economic order and theneed for governing authority, the courts had earlier assumed the mantle ofrational policy-makers fo r themselves. In particular,

with constitutional laissez-faire, the Court sought to sharpen theboundaries between the public and private spheres, to provide clearand predictable standards fo r gauging the scope of acceptable stateaction, and to affirm with the certainty of fundamental law theprerogatives of property owners in the marketplace. [Skowronek, 1982:41]

Therefore, any efforts at reform would engage the courts, which hadappropriated for themselves the right to act as economic arbiters. As aresult, all efforts to redesign the state by making it more subject tobureaucratic controls had to pass through the courts and were thereforesubject to its definition of proper state involvement [Skowronek, 1982:166ff].'U

The impact of this requirement of working within the terms of thecourts is very clear in the case of the legislation regulating women's29

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hours of work. As described above, Muller was grounded 10 a discourse,Idifference. founded in biological differences between women and men.

with that argumentation was the Supreme Court willing to by-pass itsstandard of 'freedom of contract'. Similar efforts by the NationalConsumers League or other reformers to introduce further workplaceregulation foundered on the Court's insistence on upholding its definitionof laissez-faire liberalism.

Nevertheless, this was a moment of political ,change, out of whicheventually came a newly strengthened federal government. In the process,large number of actors jockeyed for position to define the future ofAmerican politics and state/society relations. Out of that jostling in amoment of economic and social restructuring came an hegemonic societalparadigm which was doubly bifurcated, around a general identity whichmight be labelled 'soecialised citizenship'. The first dichotomy wasbetween workplace and political identities, as the realms of work andpolitics separated. This was in many ways a classic paradigm of liberaldemocracy, dividing the world functionally so that the economy andpolitics appeared to be separate activities. Economic relations were tooperate on the basis of 'market principles' while political activity fordistribution of goods and services was rationalised as improving themarket at the margin when distortions occured. Thus, the state was to bean inspector, limit monopolies, and provide help for those who could notcompete. In addition, this paradigm incorporated much optimism abouttechnological progress and the mutability of economic' and social

iconditions through the application of science and technology.A second dichotomy divided the political realm, driving a gender

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cleavage deep into the notions of citizenship. Whereas in France in theseyears the fundamental social unit was the family, headed by a man in whomexclusive citizenship rights resided, emerging notions of American women'scitizenship were individualistic but founded on a concept of 'difference'.They transferred into politics and especially new social programmesnotions of female qualities of nurture and maternity which had earliersustained a strict gender divide between private' and 'public' realms. Inthis way, the two channels for state welfare, which conceived as workersas male and women as non-waged mothers, began to take form as feministreformers, in alliance with male reformers, pressed for new state actions.Once the societal paradigm of specialised citizenship was in place, itbecame very difficult for other identities for women or a more egalitarianfeminism to gain political legitimacy. Such positions were driven to themargins of the universe of political discourse.

The feminist movement as a whole contributed important terms to thedoubly-bifurcated paradigm of specialised citizenship. Feminism in theearly twentieth century extended the emphasis of the 19th-century womanmovement on equal rights. In doing so it placed a great deal of stress onprogrammes and practices which would increase women's individuality whilenewly recognising the heterogenity which characterised women's situations[Cott, 1987: 6-7; Chapter 1]. Real differences among women increased withrising rates of labour force participation, expansion of the servicesector, high immigration from diverse countries, and urbanisation and they"'Rmade unsustainable the assumption of a common experience of woman'.Therefore, the theme of variation within a common identity of women

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emerged,2IIn this process feminists made use of a complicated discourse. They

argued, of course, for a common human condition. This was the legacy ofand the founding rock of their liberalism. Out of that argument came theclaim for citizenship rights, especially suffrage. Simultaneously,however, feminists employed a discourse of difference, one whichdescribed, even defined, women as more nurturing, more maternal, more

Icaring than men [Gordon, 1976: 99ff]. The injection of this special femaleperspective into the political world would improve it immensely, they

Iinsisted, and women needed the vote to make such improvements happen. 48Making such claims to citizenship for a specific group, feminists wereidentifying women as an important segment of the American politicalprocess wiatth special talents which had hitherto been excluded but whichdeserved a place.

The gendering effects of the doubly-bifurcated paradigm were thatwomen's identity came to depend on their position as mothers of the future

,generation and as citizens with a different responsibility to thecollectivity than men. Citizenship was gendered, in other words, alongbiological lines. Women were highly visible, both as the proponents ofreform of state welfare programmes and as objects of reform but theiridentity was overdetermined by their potential for maternal nurturing, inboth the private and public realms.

IThe birth control movement was an important source of this discourseabout motherhood as women's vocation. Women reformer,s in the USA had longpaid attention to the question of control over reproduction. Indeed it wasa more widely shared goal than even the suffrage [ G o r d o ~ , 1976: xv]. In

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hegemonic societal paradigm, which defined a somewhat altered role for thestate within the pluralistic politics of contending g r ~ u p s .

This politics was not only deeply influenced by the claims andactions of women, but it was also vilified by its opponents asrepresenting an effeminate form of politics [Baker, 1984: 628; 640]. Atfirst, the very notion of such reform, in which the state rather thanmarket forces or political parties took responsibility for relievingpoverty or other forms of misery was defined as being the equivalent ofthe constitution of 'unmanly' politics. In the end, 'feminised' policiesdid develop, coming out of a privatised sector of philanthrophicorganisations led by women, which provided the models for the first socialprogrammes [Baker, 1984: 634]. American state welfare was more a victoryof women reformers and their allies than of any working-classorganisation.

Progressive reformers were important actors in the consolidation of aIcompromise around the hegemonic societal paradigm at the end of the 19th

century. Progressive reformers shared an optimism about 'progress' andtechnological improvements, which was an important element of the Americanparadigm. Because Progressives believed that simplistic acceptance ofmarket-driven outcomes led to a series of unfortunate albeit unintendedeffects, they demanded greater state regulation. This regulation rangedfrom trust-busting and the empowerment of new regulatory agencies, to thecampaigns for governmental inspection of food-processing. Embedded in thispolitical position was a great deal of faith in technical achievement andtechnocrats acting in the state if necessary. Infant protection, in thisway, developed a programmatic identity which maximised the role of science

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and medicine in producing healthy babies. The widely-distributedsterilised bottle became the symbol of the diffusion of 'scientific'childcare from doctors to middle-class mothers to working-class mothers.""

The National! Consumer's League was a central actor in the Progessivemovement. It sought out the weaknesses in the system, the places where theparticularly needy were being abandoned. Originally, the NCL hadidentified all workers as needing protection from long hours and badworking conditions but the opposition of trade unions and the courts soonturned its focus towards women and children. Subsequently, in makingclaims on behalf of such groups, via practices like the Brandeis Brief,the NCL contributed to rather than challenged the link between women andmaternity and their s ~ p a r a t e n e s s from men.45

Disputes over the length of the working day rocked the Americaneocnomy. However, with the growth of the American Federation of Labor inlast decades of the 19th century workers gained some power in theproduction process and they sought redress for their workplace grievancesand demands almost exclusively through collective bargaining, whileorganising for political action in neighbourhood-based political parties[Shefter, 1986]. Such a privatised regulation of the wage relationinvolved primarily skilled workers or workers whose industrial productioncould be labelled skilled. Because regulation of wage relations for otherkinds of workers was less institutionalised, such workers suffered all theeffects of uncertainty and lack of a living wage. Many such workers werewomen and only in the first decades of the 20th century did theirsituation begin to stabilise, basically through state regulation of hoursand conditions of work, gained through the political struggles of reform

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movements, often led by women.,IThe union movement, dominated by men, feared the effects of female

employment on their own wages. The solution the unions chose was to seek'protective' legislation, which would limit women's labour forceparticipation and simultaneously to bargain hard for the family wage[Lehrer, 1987: 126; 142].46 This support for legislative action was one ofthe few times the AFL departed from its preferred strategy of eschewingpolitical action for workplace bargaining. The low levels of organisationof women workers provided the rationale [Lehrer, 1987: Chapter 7].

Given their understanding of the proper gender division of labour aswell as organised labour's usual focus on workplace struggles, i t ishardly surprising that labour leaders did not playa role in the demandfor infant protection. For them the family remained a 'private' realm, tobe regulated by men and women without union or state guidance. At the sametime, any actions which might encourage more women workers were to beavoided, because, according to the AFL, the unorganised women would onlydrive down men's wages, thus making it more difficult for them to supporttheir wives and children. The logic was tight and it clearly excluded thenotion that women working was a desirable state of affairs.

Some organisation of working women before World War One did, ofcourse, occur. Most important in organising women was the Women's TradeUnion League, composed of middle-class and working-class women whoencouraged unionisation.47 After numerous efforts to set up union localsand affiliate them to the AFL, the WTUL recognised a s ~ r i e s ofobstacles.48 One was that it had difficulty fitting women's work into theskill categories the AFL was willing to recognise, and therefore male-

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dominated unions sometimes rejected applications for affiliation.49 But,at the same time the WTUL's long-standing commitment to the AFL made itimpossible for the organisation to advocate any other form of unionism. Inaddition, the League encountered the same difficulties establishingpermanent unions among a diverse and transient labour force that otherorganisers had described. Therefore, eventually the WTUL began to placeless emphasis on organising women and more on protective legislation. 50Its analysis shifted from one which stressed the commonalities of femaleand male workers expressed through their hoped-for affiliation in the sameunions towards an emphasis on gender differences among workers.

In the USA then, organisations like the AFL and WTUL as well as thedominant streams of feminism contributed to the societal paradigm'sidentity for working women as different from men's. Women, according tomale unionists, were temporary workers whom marriage removed from thelabour force. Their extraordinary workplace weakness derived from theirlack of unionisation, which in turn permitted an exception to the usual

union practice of insisting on making gains in the workplace rather thanthrough legislation.51 For the WTUL women workers were also different frommen, caught up in family and work situations that led to their unusualexploitation. The way to deal with the problem, for the WTUL, was tostress these differences and make demands for protective legislation.

In the paradigm of specialised citizenship, women's needs andcontributions appeared their supposed potential for maternal nurturing,translated into political action. Unmarried working girls were the'mothers of the future' and as such they required protective legislationto safequard their futures. Yet, this resort to the state transgressed the

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I!very rules of separation of work and politics which characterised theAmerican paradigm at the time. 'Real' workers bargained privately innonpartisan unions. Workers who made claims on the state did no more thanto reconfirm their 'otherness' in the terms of the societal paradigm.Moreover, because the paradigm contained no space for their identity asworkers, working 'girls' appeared exceptions (because they were temporaryworkers) while married working women became invisible. Thrust into thepolitical realm in this way, women's identity became overdetermined bytheir biology; it became prey to discursive construction by other actors,like the courts, who saw women simply as mothers.

The feminist movement which had grown out of the 19th century woman'smovement was confounded by the societal paradigm and its identity ofspecialised citizenship. The feminist movement in the early 20th centurybecame entangled in a contradiction within the paradigm. Because work andpolitics was separated and there was little call either by trade unions orreformers for the state to regulate the conditions of work, when feministsagitated for protective legislation for women at work or in maternity,they solidified popular notions of women as mothers, as 'other' thanworkers, as minors. This classing of women as 'wards of the state' putthem in the same category as children, native peoples and others oftenconsidered without the capacity of caring for themselves. Thus, within theterms of the hegemonic societal paradigm, as long as women remained inneed of state protection they could never be full participants in thepolity.

This contradiction confronted the feminist movement with a difficultchoice. If it stressed the special nature of 'femaleness', the result was

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rights for women earlier than in France and women could participate, evenbefore gaining the vote, in the design of American social programmes. Butthe cost of this early victory was the creation of a two-channel welfaresystem, with women's lives limited by the state's willingness to confinethem to a single social role.

ConclusionThis paper has explored the ways the hegemonic societal paradigms

constructed out of the processes of institutionalisation of new socialrelations in France and the USA at the end of the 19th century came tohave particular representations of gender relations and gendering effects.In neither country did the hegemonic paradigm emerge magically or simplyout of political debates. Each developed as a solution to real problemsfaced by economic, social and political institutions which, in resolvingthem, made use of the representations of gender within their own worldviews. One result was that such representations were further strengthenedby being embedded in the policies of emerging state welfare programmes. InFrance, concerns about demographic 'catastrophe' as well as a socialdoctrine of Solidarism provided the impetus for state policies whichsought to accomodate women's work and maternity. In the USA in contrastmiddle-class Progressivism and a feminist movement emphasising women's'nurturing' Qualities acted in a situation in which actors looked to thestate only in exceptional circumstances. The social programmes whichdeveloped in these years reflected such differences.

Throughout this story, all actions for social p ~ o g r a m m e s took placeiwithin a context in which representations of gender '- and the identities

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countries, then, the collective identities available to women differed.The nature of interwar politics, especially feminist politics, was markedby this difference.52 Each provided points of strength and points ofweakness. Operating within the interstices of universes of politicaldiscourse which provided them with differentially limited space formanoeuvre, French and American women continued after 1914 to search forthe route towards emancipation, liberation and equality in difference.

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NOTES1. Because this is fundamentally an historical and, therefore, empiricalmethod, space limitations as well as interest led to a focus on one set ofsocial relations, that of gender. For an application to more traditionalquestions of political economy see Jenson [1989a).2. The theoretical argument in the next few pages is based in part on anelaboration of some of the notions developed within the French regulationapproach. For a presentation of the more 'sociological' versions of theregulation approach see Lipietz [1987a; 1987b; 1987c).3. Since its emergence as a separate science of society in the middle ofthe last century, sociology'S major contribution to our understanding ofsocial relations has been its insight that the social whole is greaterthan simply the sum of its parts. For the sociologist the world withinwhich we live is one of on-going social relations which are never randomnor dependent on actors' appreciation of the need for societal stabilityor their desire for change. Rather, patterned interactions exist throughtime, thereby reproducing society, and it is these which structure thesocial activity of members of any society. Yet, for the same sociologists,actors' participation in these patterns depends somehow on the choicesthey make and thus on their own subjectivity. I t is the meaning of the'somehow' which has both plagued the study of sociology and provided themajor impetus for imagination and innovation. Each generation ofsociologists struggles with the need to reconcile the two sides of thedilemma, by trying to assign the correct theoretical weight to the impactof structures and the contribution of agents in the constitution of theirsociety.

4. Three fallacies, derivative of the failure to recognise thissimultaneity, have plagued recent efforts to address the structure/agencyissue. The first fallacy is obviously to deny the existence of any dilemmaby placing all the weight on one side, arguing that structures createsubjects or that subjects create structures. In the tortured history ofpolitical sociology, advocates of both positions have been hegemonic atdifferent points in time. But this is not the only fallacy. A second is toaccept that there are both structural effects and agency, but then to tryand discover the actors which are capable of recognising the effects ofstructures on their world and 'escaping' from those effects to transformit, thus becoming the agents of historical change. From this perspectivethere are some actors which are capable of imagining change and some whichare destined to be no more than unconscious, albeit perhaps unwilling,supporters of the structures which exist. The third fallacy is committedby those who accept that all actors are capable of being subjects in theirown lives - but only sometimes. In other words, there are momentsof agency and moments of structuralism. The argument being made hererejects all three positions.5. This distinction can be called one between two worlds, the esoteric - theworld of structures - and the exoteric one of everyday life, or Marx's'enchanted world'. For a discussion of the distinction and application to43


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the 'transformation problem' see Lipietz [1985: especially Chapter 1].6. Of course these practices and meanings do not exist in order to sustainthe social relation, nor does their effect depend on an understanding thatparticular practices and meaning have stabilising consequences. The pointstressed here is that social relations consist of both socially-constructedactions and some understanding of that action by actors themselves.7. The choice of the term 'paradigm' is made deliberately. In grammar, aparadigm links different forms of the same root. Thus, it is a way ofordering difference, demonstrating the connection across all forms, whichmight otherwise seem unlinked. The most famous use of the concept'paradigm' in social science is of course by T.S. Kuhn who suggests thatparadigms are historical constructs, whose selection from a range ofpossible paradigms is based on struggle for the allegiance of adherents.They illuminate the world for a limited period of time but change as aresult of revolution once the contradictions which they can no longerabsorb permit other scientists to imagine an alternative and mobilisesupport for that vision [1970: Chapters 1-11].8. The factors behind crisis resolution, if it exists, are wide-rangingand beyond the scope of this paper. Moreover, the contribution of anyparticular set of social relations - whether the wage, consumption,gender, family or whatever social relation - to this resolution can not beasserted in advance. The specifics of the combination is a matter forempirical analysis.9. It is perhaps easiest to see this point by way of an example. As thelater part of the paper argues, the dominant understanding of genderrelations in the pre-1914 USA was based on notions of separate spheres forwomen and men, albeit with shifting boundaries for these spheres. However,an egalitarian feminist strain, carried by independent women and sustainedin part by institutions like women's colleges, existed despite thehegemonic societal paradigm. While this strain was never without someinfluence it was marginal to mainstream politics in these years.10. Barbara Nelson's [1987] analysis of workmen's compensation andmother's aid develops this argument about two-channel welfare programmesin the USA.11. This discussion of the details of infant protection draws frequentlyform McDougall [1983]. The prenatal allowance required a medicalcertificate that continued employment would endanger the mother or unbornchild but no restrictions but need applied to postnatal benefits. Thebaudestimates that in 1919 35% of the new mothers of Paris met the means test,despite the miniscule sum being paid [1982: 88].12. Few participants in the policy debate - the demographic and medicalexperts who collected the data on infant mortality, the women or menworkers, the social reformers who agitated for the payment, thecapitalists who established private programmes and promoted public ones,and the politicians who debated the specifics of the programmes - thought44


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that poor working women could count on a male wage to carry them througheven a limited unpaid maternity leave.13. For example, state efforts to reduce child abandonnment, and thus toraise the birth rate (since so many children left to asylums diedquickly), included a small amount of monetary aid and larger amounts ofmaterial help to poor mothers, whether single or married. Yet the intentof the programme was that women would continue to earn their livings.Thus, in the Department of the Seine (Paris), by the late 1880s, municipalofficials were willing to pay a poor mother the whole cost of a wet nurse(the same amount as the average weekly wage of an unskilled working woman)in order to discourage unmarried mothers from giving up their babies. Therest of the costs of maintaining herself and child were to be earned,however. See Fuchs [1988: 290-94; 304].14. Perhaps the best known of these milk services was the Goutte de Lait,established in 1894, but many maternity hospitals and private charitieshad similar services. The goals were the same: encourage breastfeeding,teach the importance of well-baby consultations, and provide sterilisedartificial feeding when breastfeeding was impossible. As each Goutte deLait said, bottled milk was 'faute de mieux' [Blake, 1977: 9-11].15. The first creches dated from 1844 and expanded rapidly in number inthe 19th century, as places to care for the children of working mothers.The goal was to eliminate 'baby-farming', or the system of wet-nursing inwhich the babies lived with the nurse. The Loi Roussel of 1874 was asimilar effort. [Blake, 1977: 5]. On American wet-nursing, which wasessentially part of the 'servant problem', see Golden [1987].16. I t is important to note that many of these programmes were neutral onquestions of the woman's morality; they were only concerned that she woulduse the public assistance to care for the child. Thus, women who wereunmarried or were involved with a man (or even several sequentially) wereeligible for assistance as long as they demonstrated 'maternal affection'.One important indicator of such affection was willingness to breastfeed[Fuchs, 1987: 297-98]. This focus on the child's welfare and willingnessto condone parental 'immorality' carried through into the post-1945welfare state [Jenson, 1987: 543-44].17. This law also regulated chidren's work, but I will not give thespecifics of those restrictions for reasons of parsimony.18. For a more detailed desciption of the regulations, as they affectedwomen, see Boxer [1986: 46-47]. Her argument is that the result of this'protective' legislation was to marginalise the female labour force byencouraging homework. Since all workers' hours were being reduced overthese years, this 'single factor' explanation is hard to accept.19. For details about this campaign see Cross [1984].

45

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.ry11r. . . . . . . \'f~ \ ! \ " 1 If, .! I iIII

20. Cross' citation from a later union campaign to protect againstencroachments on the 8-hour day can stand for the theme of the wholemovement:... if the eight-hour day was lost, not only would wages decrease butthe worker would "lose dignity", would not "be able to educatehimself or his family, and women would have 'to return to the slaveryof housework after a longer workday'". [1984: 202].

21. Some feminists were the major opponents of this two-stage strategybecause they thought the immediate effect would be to close women out ofhigher-paying jobs [Boxer, 1986: 52-53J.22. The analysis of Muller v. Oregon is from Baer [1978] and Lehrer[1987].23. Between 1910 and 1920, six states did pass legislation limitingwomen's work during pregnancy, but the federal law which would have madethe schemes workable did not pass [Kamerman ~ . , 1983: 33].24. On the appeal to the national need and the wartime importance ofbabies, see Wertz and Wertz [1977: 209] and Meigs [1977: passim].25. In the case of Mothers' Aid pensions, which began in some states by1911, there was a distinct shift in anti-poverty policy away from daynurseries and other programmes which permitted mothers to work towardsprogrammes which foreclosed the category of working mother, reflecting therelative emptiness of that identity set. For more details see Michel[1987].26. The structure of even the educational programmes clearly reflect thissilence around working women. The use of philanthropic or municipal milkstations as the primary mechanism for 'out-reach' for educating newmothers assumed women were free in the daytime to visit the station andpass time following its programmes. Blake describes these programmes indetail [1977: 26ffJ. French programmes not only distributed milk throughsuch stations, but also agitated for the establishment of nursing rooms infactories, as well as creches and organised instructional programmes infactories and in the evenings.27. The description of the economic conditions of 19th century France isbased on Boyer [1979: 104ffJ, unless otherwise noted.28. The development of the labour market was encouraged by the Loi LeChapelier (1791) which forbade all collective action and which establishedthe principle of individual but not collective freedom of producers tosell their products. For a half a century the Loi Le Chapelier deniedwage earners any possibility of collectively defending their own interest[Boyer, 1979: 106]. This law codified an 'atomistic' labour market, thusinstitutionalising a system of competitive regulation. Nevertheless, apurely atomistic or completely 'liberal' labour market did not persist. Bythe end of the century a set of institutions and actors which gave shapeto a more collectively-determined wage relation replaced it.46


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29. In the debates about pauperism and pauperisation in the 19th century,three issues were intertwined: the inescapable growth of wage labour, theinadequacy of workers' wages, and their aleatory character whichmaintained workers in a situation of uncertainty [Hatzfeld, 1971: 25).30. For details about population trends as well as the analysis of theproblem, see Offen [1984).31. The link to industrialization was explicit in the programmes designedto cope with depopulation, especially the payments made to working womento stay at home for a period after the birth of their babies [Jenson,1986: 17-20].32. At this time traditional Catholicism was ejected from the socialcompromise, although social Catholicism, willing to accept the Republic,did join the consensus [Reberioux 1975: 83-87]. The defeated forces couldnot threaten the republican consensus precisely because they representedthe forces of the past excluded from the new paradigm and unable to formany alliance that would allow a competing identity to mobilise politicalresources.33. For the long list of single-issue movements, including the League forthe Rights of Man, the Free Masons, Libre Pensee, and others, seeReberioux [1975: 41ff.].34. Testimony to the stabilisation is found in the synchronisation of wagelevels and cost of living which had developed by the end of the 19thcentury and continued until World War One [Boyer, 1979: 107).35. For example, Emile Zola, whose polemic, J'accuse, began the DreyfusAffair, used his time in exile to write his novel Fecondite. Thiscelebration of the archtypical French family of an artisan-turned-farmerand his fruitful wife and daughters, was part of Zola's multi-facettedeffort to instruct the French population on its duties in the dizzyingcircumstances of social change. Offen [1984: 663] discusses this in moredetail.36. Jenson [1987a] describes in detail the opposition to expanded femalesuffrage in the interwar years. I t was opposition led by the Radicals,but quietly accepted by the Socialists.37. In 19th century France, utopians Saint Simon and Fourier, with theircommitment to the emancipation of women, were ousted in conflict withinthe labour movement by the followers of Proudhon, whose strict genderbased division of labour gave women the famous choice between being'housewives or harlots'. Thus, by mid-century, emancipatory feminism wasoverwhelmed. But Proudhonism lost its hegemony in the latter part of thecentury.38. There was never the same emphasis on the family wage in France as inthe USA, even in the nineteenth century [Perrot, 1976; Questiaux andFournier, 1978). The family wage was advocated by a few union activists,47


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but its definition was quite different in France. The family wage meant afamily income sufficient to support any size family, no matter the numberof children. In other words, it was a concept that made no reference tothe activities or earning potential of women; it was directed towards theneeds of children.39. In Britain the exclusion of women from the workplace occurredearlier, when the trade-union movement became dominated by a discourse ofthe family wage, protection of women and children, and separate spheres[Jenson, 1986: 31].40. They did insist, of course, that women's rights had to be expanded ifthey were to perform their duties and feminists demanded improvements inthe conditions of maternity, women's education and working conditions[Offen, 1984: 652].41. A second limit was the politicisation by parties of the bureaucracy,which weakened the initial design of a merit-based civil service[Skowronek, 1982: 166ff].42. This argument provides the major theme in Cott [1987: Introduction].43. This double discourse clearly characterised the nineteenth centurywoman movement, as Cott describes it [1987: 19-20]. It also extended intopre-1914 feminism. As Cott writes: "By that time [1910] suffragists wereas likely to argue that women deserved the vote because of their sex-because women as a group had relevant benefits to bring and interests todefend in the polity--as to argue that women deserved the vote despitetheir sex." [1987: 29].44. For a discussion of 'scientific motherhood' and its diversion into thediscourse of 'race suicide' see Gordon [1976: 129ff].45. Nancy Cott argues that the link between Progressive politics and thewoman's movement was around the discourse of difference [1987: 21].46. The labour movement was the leader in demands for protectivelegislation for women until 1890. After that middle-class reformersdirected the campaign [Baer, 1978: 33].47. Some organisation of women did derive from the efforts of the AFL,which called for unionisation of women and for equal pay at the same timeas it spoke of the advantages of the wife in the home; the AFL was notblind to the fact that the young women who worked were not married andthat their wages were well below their subsistance needs [Kessler-Harris,1975: 97-98; 1981 91ff.]48. This analysis of the WTUL is primarily from Dye [1975] and Lehrer[1987: Chapter 6].

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49. The difficulties which the WTUL encountered in fitting women's skillsinto the recogni

paradigms & political discourse: labour & social policy in the usa & france before 1914 (wps 16,...

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