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

by Judith G. Coffin

Overview

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 labor 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 labor and our understanding of it.

Combining the social history of women's labor 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 labor 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 labor force, and the development of advertising, with its shifting and often unsettling visual representations of women, labor, and machinery. Throughout, Coffin challenges the conventional categories of work, home, and women's identity.

Originally published in 1996.

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ISBN-13:	9781400864324
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #335
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The Politics of Women's Work

The Paris Garment Trades, 1750â?"1915

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By Judith G. Coffin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1996 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03447-8

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CHAPTER 1

WOMEN'S WORK? MEN AND WOMEN, GUILD AND CLANDESTINE PRODUCTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PARIS

More than a woman worker, a seamstress is part of a social and cultural enterprise that we have come to consider distinctively feminine. Making clothing, creating fashion, maintaining wardrobes, and dressing families all seem indissolubly gendered. Yet the image of sewing as a womanly activity is relatively recent. So is the gradual feminization of the needle trades, a trend produced by several related developments in the eighteenth century: the expansion of the clothing trades, protracted battles waged by women's guilds, and the growth of clandestine, non-guild, labor. These developments changed the character of women's work in eighteenth-century Paris and set the stage for nineteenth-century economic developments.

The importance of recounting the eighteenth-century history of the garment trades is not simply to provide a foil for dramatic developments during the century that followed. French historians no longer see the Revolution of 1789–1815 as the critical threshold of social, cultural, and economic change. The eighteenth century brought rapid changes in the production and consumption of clothing, changes that helped to establish Paris as the "grand foyer du travail féminin," or "great center of female labor." Nineteenth-century writers would charge that the recruitment of women into the labor force, the deplorable "industrialization of women," was wrought by rapacious capitalists in their own day. But the feminization of the clothing trades is a longer and less familiar story, one with more female agency than nineteenth-century writers would acknowledge and with fewer decisive normative conceptions of femininity than we might expect. That history is crucial to understanding nineteenth-century debates and processes.

Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle

In the nineteenth century, collections of folklore compiled tales, proverbs, and engravings in ways that evoked a simple world, where the respective talents, responsibilities, and crafts of men and women had always been distinct and complementary. With the sweep and conviction of axioms meant to capture the essential order of the social world and the meaning of life, these images seemed to transform women's work into a metaphorical activity, associated with life cycles and fertility. In Légendes et curiosités des métiers, Paul Sébillot's 1895 compendium of French folklore about the trades, both sewing and spinning figured, characteristically, as "attributes of womanhood" rather than occupations.

The vast majority of "traditional" engravings and stories involve spinning, not sewing, although later the meanings proved easily transferred. Paintings and popular engravings pictured female figures of all kinds with distaffs. Their associations with generational continuity (the thread of life) gave distaffs and spindles symbolic importance in funerary reliefs and courting and marriage rituals. Villagers gave newlywed peasant couples a spindle or distaff. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, aristocratic suitors gave their brides-to-be distaffs embellished with family emblems and religious symbols. Through a nineteenth-century prism these gifts seemed admonitions to household duties and domesticity, but in early modern France they had sacred connotations involving ancestral traditions and religious values. In traditional Gallic wedding ceremonies, the bride's maid carried a ritual distaff and either placed it in the hands of a saint in the chapel or laid it across the top of a wedding chest. In some regions, custom invited the bride actually to spin during the marriage ceremony, proving her competence and, symbolically, her virtue and fecundity, acting out her transition to wife and mother.

Yet these images do not constitute evidence of a timeless association of spinning and sewing with women's duties and the attributes of femininity. They had very different resonances and associations, some ancient, some medieval, and none with any necessary bearing on women's domestic tasks or (even more emphatically) women's role in formal economic activity. The early modern wedding ceremonies evoked fecundity; the distaff as wedding gift referred to ancestral power or lineage; the thread symbolized magical powers. Prescriptive literature recommending needlework as a token of feminine domesticity, or womanly industry (in the early modern sense of diligence) and devotion, seems to have originated with the Counter Reformation's insistence on religious and moral education, when sewing appeared in treatises on female education as "moralizing" work, which taught discipline, patience, and concentration—reinforcing women's sense of their social role and position.

In the nineteenth century, novelists and poets, political economists, and industrialists all summoned these older images of women at the spinning wheel and with needle in hand to show that sewing had always been women's work. Sewing machine advertisers in particular tapped into literature and folklore, reappropriated the spinning imagery, and, brashly playing with historical analogies, presented the "Singer girl" as a modern-day Penelope. This worked-over imagery and invented traditionalism, however, is a poor guide to either the early modern history of the clothing trades or changing definitions of gender. It is not simply that the relationship of prescriptive literature to the organization of either household labor or economic activity is tenuous; in this case the prescriptions themselves are absent or contradictory. Once one leaves behind the familiar gender certainties of the nineteenth century, it is nearly impossible to find any single set of convictions, whether elite or popular, about men's and women's respective economic domains. As we will see, in the eighteenth century, tailors' deeply held convictions about the political-economic order clashed with seamstresses' claims about their entitlements, and Enlightened physiocratic writing contradicted corporate (i.e., guild) logic on the sexual division of labor. The assuredness of nineteenth-century popular lore—especially as distilled in collections like Sébillot's—does not even hint at the complex history of ideas about the sexual division of labor or the long history of fierce disputes between men and women in the garment trades.

Historians often assert that needlework as an industrial occupation for women arose from the sexual division of labor in the household. This, too, is an oversimplification, one that arises from assuming the primacy of household organization in the structure of women's lives and labors. The links between the household division of tasks, craft organization, and, later, the industrial division of labor are less predictable than common wisdom implies.

Guilds and Garments

We assume that before the industrial revolution clothing, at least for ordinary people, was made at home. This is not so. By the eighteenth century, even in France's villages, clothing was inextricable from trade and the cash nexus. As far as regional historians have been able to determine, women knit socks and vests for their families. They also invested as many hours as their social standing permitted embroidering, washing, and storing household linens. These items formed a trousseau, and maintaining them through life's crucial transitions lent them a sacred and ritual character. The rest of the family's clothing, however, was usually made by village tailors. Those who could not afford cloth or tailoring bought secondhand clothing. For the poor as well as for the better off, then, clothing came from the market, and apart from linens and undergarments, making of clothes in rural areas was dominated by men.

In cities, however, and particularly in Paris, the place of women in clothing production was far larger. Indeed, the expansion of female artisanship and wage labor, tightly bound up with the multiplication of trades for increasingly differentiated markets, was among the most distinctive marks of the Parisian economy. Describing these trades is no simple matter. The textile and clothing trades included an extraordinary variety of merchants and craftspersons with overlapping specialties: drapers; mercers or dry goods merchants; those who sold trimmings; those who made accessories; the central guilds of tailors, seamstresses, and linen drapers; those who dyed, bleached, and cleaned; the used clothing dealers; and so on. The number of specialized trades alternately expanded and contracted as more powerful guilds first absorbed weaker ones, and then lost them again, or were forced to yield the rights to produce or sell new fashions to new groups of workers and merchants.

Any effort to tally the numbers employed in the clothing business comes up against two problems: the bewildering number of trades and the unknowns of clandestine production. Next to these difficulties, the absence of reliable general statistics seems a minor issue. Daniel Roche, who has studied the eighteenth-century Parisian economy as carefully as any historian, estimates that at the beginning of the century the clothing trades occupied fifteen thousand masters and mistresses, and about twenty thousand workers. That was approximately twice as many employers and workers as in textiles, and accounted for more than 40 percent of all Parisian employers and workers. Even rough reckonings, then, underscore the weight of this industry in the Parisian economy. In certain districts, especially the central ones around the rues de la Lingerie, Saint-Denis, Saint-Antoine, or Saint-Honoré, clothing overwhelmed all other economic activities.

Paris stood apart from other Old Regime cities. Nowhere else did the fashion industry employ such numbers. Parisian guilds were firmly entrenched and especially disputatious. Parisian guildswomen were particularly outspoken. Above all, Paris was the case that preoccupied economic thinkers and policymakers. Thus the battles between the men's and women's guilds recounted here assumed singular importance in late-eighteenth-century public debate, and, later, in historical memories of the Old Regime.

The Tailors

The tailors' guild believed its domain encompassed all clothing sales and production, and its history is one of incessant battles over that matter. Publicly recognized bodies, the guilds conferred a civic identity on their members and marked them as honorable and creditworthy. The guilds governed the labor market and imposed discipline. Apprenticeship defined skills and regulated their acquisition. The requirements for mastership, enforced by guild officers (jurés) were intended to guarantee standards of quality and production, protecting the buying public against fraud. Guild officers therefore had the right to visit members' workshops and to ferret out "clandestine" production. Finally, by patrolling the boundaries between different trades, they regulated competition.

The most powerful guild tailors were merchants, whose wealth and ties to trade contributed to the community's high profile. In production, the guild ranked master tailors, charged with the cut and drape of the fabric, above those who sewed. As the tailoring trades consolidated in the eighteenth century and women were hired as sewers, the trade became more hierarchical. The tailors' guild staunchly defended this ordering of skill and value. A cutter could ruin an extremely valuable fabric with one stroke of the scissors ("... the slips of a [master] tailors hand are irreparable....). Sewing labor was an "accessory." The combination of expensive material and cheap labor shaped the form of production characteristic of the clothing industry: merchant capital joined to domestic production.

All of the Parisian trades attempted to police clandestine production, but few worried about it more than the tailors' guild. Tailors accused clandestine workers of driving down prices, making cheap imitations of good clothes, and using shoddy materials. The issue was competition, but questions of legal and political identity heightened the economic stakes. As the tailors' guild put it, a non-guild tailor was no more than an "unknown artisan, without estate ... a fickle being, always ready to escape and who will only have to flee the neighborhood in order to escape debt." Clandestine production threatened the "indispensable circulation of trust" basic to the metropolitan economy, merchant capital, and social peace.

The tailors' guild regularly banned women from working in the trade. Yet women's work was more common and visible than such bans suggest. Tailors' wives and daughters were crucial to the business. They could work by their husbands' or fathers' sides, and they could legally make clothing for women and young children. Guild statutes drafted in 1660 tried to clarify policy on women's participation. Tailors were not to employ "clandestine workers, seamstresses or workers from used clothing [fripières}." Such directives were aimed at independent female labor, that is, women who did not belong to guild tailors' families. A widow could continue to practice her husband's trade and to employ apprentices already in training. But the guild strictly limited her rights. Eager to assure continuity and discipline in apprenticeship, the guild blocked the creation of larger enterprises run by women and encouraged widows to remarry within the trade. The political import of the new statutes was unambiguous: however routine women's work might be, it was only acceptable in the context of a patriarchal workshop. Moreover, that work conferred no political rights whatsoever. The guild's stream of injunctions on the subject underscored the point: "no women or girls may have any privileges under any name or pretext whatsoever." The formation of a seamstresses' guild fifteen years later, as we will see, was the next round in the battle between tailors and women, at least those women who would not be their wives.

The patriarchal reasoning behind these guild regulations is clear. Larger questions concerning the logic of corporate thinking about gender and why some trades were "male" and "female" remain unanswered. Some distinctions seem to have been rooted in the household division of labor. Other distinctions arose from the hierarchy of craft. Tools, associated with craft and jealously guarded as trade secrets, were often off limits to anyone but masters. Still other gender distinctions had less obvious meanings. In Paris, for example, all trades that used silk or gold thread as a primary material were given over entirely to women. The women in those trades may well have been members of wealthy merchant families with access to expensive material through their families' trade. Female guilds resulted from prominent families' efforts to extend their control over different sections of trade and production. Finally, some aspects of the gender division of labor were simply accidental. Household organization often departed from principles. Maintaining patriarchal hierarchies could conflict with the efficient deployment of a family's labor and resources, and a woman might assume an unaccustomed role because she was the only one available to do it, because she was temporarily at the head of the household, or because she was less expensive to hire.

No strict logic governed the gender division of labor in the guild world for several reasons. First, guilds upheld "custom" without having to justify it in higher terms. Second, gender and work had meanings that are unfamiliar to us. In the corporate outlook, the political status of women, subsumed in the household, seemed self-evident; women's place in a gendered division of labor did not. Although the household division of tasks may occasionally have figured in establishing certain traditions of work, that division was not, in principle, a point of reference for the guild order. That women performed certain tasks within the household economy was irrelevant outside the context of that household, in a different economic and political world. Such labor did not give women any title to the civic identity and power established by the guilds, which were, fundamentally, units of political power, legitimated as one of the three estates.

In the end, custom, in the sense of the accumulation of precedents and exceptions, reigned, and no principle was definitive. Men's and women's craft and merchant rights were repeatedly redefined in boundary disputes, the outcome of which varied by region. As the corporate order eroded, exceptions to rules multiplied, making the privileges left behind seem increasingly arbitrary and unjust.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Politics of Women's Work by Judith G. Coffin. Copyright © 1996 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ch. 1 Women's Work? Men and Women, Guild and Clandestine Production in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Ch. 2 Machinery, Political Economy, and Women's Work, 1830-1870

Ch. 3 Selling the Sewing Machine: Credit, Advertising, and Republican Modernity, 1870-1900

Ch. 4 The Revival of Homework: Many Routes to Mass Production

Ch. 5 Married Women's Work: Wage Earning, Domesticity, and Work Identity

Ch. 6 Unions and the Politics of Production

Ch. 7 Social Science and the Politics of Consumption

Ch. 8 The Minimum Wage Bill: Work, Wages, and Worth

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index