INTRODUCTION

In recent years feminist scholars have called for a complete rethinking and revision of the foundations of labour history as a necessary prerequisite for the integration of gender as a core concept into histories of labour and social class. In this attempt one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in male-oriented labour history needs to be identified and made subject to careful rethinking, namely the assumption that the public and the private sphere should be seen in terms of an essentially gendered opposition. Undoubtedly, one of the most powerful images used not only to represent but also to justify the gendering of the public and the private sphere is the image of the male breadwinner family and the male household head as the sole provider for his dependent wife and children. For this reason, the articles in this volume are all firmly at the heart of what may currently be seen as the crucial intersections in the history of labour, gender and social class.

At the same time, the male breadwinner family is the focus of many pressing academic and policy concerns, receiving ample attention from historians and social scientists alike. In a recent review article, Colin Creighton summarized the ongoing historical and sociological debates on the male breadwinner family, calling for integration and synthesis. It is tempting to relate this renewed interest in the male breadwinner family to its apparent demise in most parts of the Western world. Since roughly the 1960s or 1970s most Western countries have experienced a remarkable and substantial rise in female labour force participation. This is undeniably one of the major historical developments of the modern era.

In Western Europe, industrialization brought far-reaching changes in the family-household system by separating the household from the workplace. Factories, especially, took work away from home and eroded the integrity of the household. The spatial separation between the household and the workplace became the foundation for a conceptual separation between the community and the market. Families were separated from trades, consumption from production, women's activities from men's. These separations, often expressed in the generalized formula of a “private-public” divide, have underscored a thoroughgoing gender division of labour far beyond the original divisions supposed to be rooted in biological reproduction. In industrialized Europe, the working-class household's needs could not be met from the combined economic activities of its members: men, women and children. Rather, the daily bread was to be “won” by individual wage earners and clearly the breadwinners were to be men. In contrast, the home became the site of women's reproductive activities devoid of assignable exchange value. Wives’ and daughters’ unpaid work was increasingly underwritten by family ideology and was eventually to be covered by the “family wage” paid to husbands and fathers.

In South Asia this type of household arrangement did not take effect among the working classes in the early phase of industrialization and is still not yet widespread. No clear separation of the household and production was effected: the household's own productive functions proved tenacious and in poor households, especially, women combined consumption, wage earning and reproduction, often simultaneously.

INTRODUCTION

The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited patriarchal relationships and nascent industrial capitalism. Both camps agree, as Creighton has recently put it, about “the outlines of [the] development” of the male breadwinner family. Where they disagree is in “the factors responsible for its origins and expansion”. Why did families move away from an asserted “golden age” of egalitarian sourcing of incomes, which involved husbands, wives and children, to dependence on a male breadwinner who aspired to a family wage? Neoclassical economic historians emphasize the supply conditions, concentrating on income effects from men's earnings, family structure variables and alternatives to women's employment in terms of productive activities in the home. In contrast, dual systems theorists emphasize demand conditions in terms of institutional constraints on women's and children's employment exemplified by the exclusionary strategies of chauvinist trade unions, labour legislation which limited the opportunities of women and children, and the legitimation of men's wage demands by references to their need for a family wage.

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.

In France, conditions of labour supply contrasted sharply with the UK, for it was far more difficult to recruit factory labour in France than in Britain. As a result of the difficulty of recruiting males, many of whom remained in peasant agriculture, female participation in the French labour force grew rapidly at a time when it was declining in England; in France, even a significant number of married women with children worked in factories. Censuses indicate that 24.7 per cent of the total female population of France was economically active in 1866, compared with 27.2 per cent in Great Britain in 1871, and 9.7 per cent in the US in 1870.

In 1989, when Germany became reunified after forty years of separation, no one could overlook the fact that East and West Germany differed greatly with regard to the position of women. The most striking difference of all seemed to lie in the rates of female employment: 91 per cent of all East German women under the age of 60 were counted as being employed, compared to only 55 per cent in West Germany.

These figures give the impression that the male breadwinner system, a solid pillar of the traditional gender hierarchy, had been demolished in the East, whereas in the West it was at best crumbling round the edges. This interpretation also fits neatly into the standard accounts, which stress the differences between the two Germanies. While East German literature celebrated the new gender order by dwelling on women's successful emancipation, West German literature emphasized the view that reinforcing the traditional gendered division of labour was a key element in the reconstruction of society.

Without denying the obvious dissimilarities, we would like to suggest a change of perspective. Shifting the main focus to the question of similarities, we shall trace the history of the male breadwinning experience in East and West Germany, starting in the turmoil of the post-war years. This approach seems to be particularly promising in relation to the 1950s and 1960s, when the common heritage still shaped life in both halves of Germany. This included the powerful ideology of the male breadwinner family where “the husband was expected to be the main, preferably the sole, breadwinner and his wife was to assume responsibility for running the household, preferably on a full-time basis”.

“TO BE A HUSBAND OF A CIGARRERA WAS A PROFESSION”

The organization of production by employers was not indifferent to gender. Labour markets were sexually differentiated, since women and men were considered to be distinct labour forces distinguished by virtue of the differing roles they were supposed to play. The male role was that of the breadwinner, and the fact that this often reflected the reality of the situation should not obscure the point that it was a social construction. Women, on the other hand, were considered as mostly occupied with unpaid domestic work, regardless of whether they were also engaged in work for the market. Breadwinning patterns have been widely debated, particularly with respect to whether the male breadwinner system appeared as a result of industrialization or existed previously as a consequence of a universal system of patriarchy. In parallel with a more cyclical conception of industrialization, recent studies on breadwinner patterns do not support theories based on capitalism or patriarchy but rather support a more historical approach based on the importance of other exogenous factors such as the regional economy, the local labour market and the customs and associations acting upon it, employers’ choices or the legal and institutional framework. The following paper is a case study related to working-class women, the cigarreras, who were the main wage earners in the family. It relates to an industry (tobacco) which operated under a monopoly system, and to a particular region (southern Spain), which was fairly underdeveloped in terms of industry.

Human reproduction is a basic economic activity in every society. It includes activities such as maternal care, childcare, old age provision, poor relief, healthcare, and labour protection. In pre-industrial times, human reproduction was typically a part of kin-based household economies, but since the onset of industrialization two new institutional solutions have developed: the male breadwinning system and the welfare state.

In historical perspective, the male breadwinning system builds on earlier household-based reproductive practices. It constitutes a basically private approach, marked by a female specialization in reproductive activities. According to male breadwinning ideology, men are primarily providers, responsible only for professional and financial aspects of the reproductive process. Married women, by contrast, are supposed to perform most of the work needed to reproduce the population. This work is unpaid and consequently married women are economically dependent on their husbands.

In practice, of course, male breadwinning systems diverge more or less from the strict gender division of labour prescribed by male breadwinner ideology. In particular, married women have often participated in breadwinning activities. More importantly, however, there is no industrialized society in which the male breadwinning system has been capable of carrying out the national reproductive process without public support. Along varying institutional paths, public institutions have intervened to take on responsibility for smaller or larger parts of the national reproductive burden. Welfare states have taken shape.

Welfare states have differed markedly in their attitude to the male breadwinning system, and although all welfare states have modified their adherence to the male breadwinning model in recent decades, important distinctions remain.

Perhaps all developing societies since the Industrial Revolution are fated to undergo Westernization. Japan certainly did. After opening their land under pressure from Perry and Harris in the 1850s, the Japanese adopted Western ways not only in the outer realm of material culture and political forms but also in the inner realm of thought, spirit, and values. Today, Western sociopolitical ideals are so compelling that most Japanese would refuse to live by the pre-1945 imperial ethos. Thus democracy, individual freedom, egalitarianism, pacifism, and the rule of law to uphold basic human rights can be violated only by devious means and over public protest. Yet none of those ideals derived from Japanese or East Asian tradition; all originated in the modern West. Very few present-day Japanese would applaud an act of disembowelment. Fewer still would approve of police torture used to extract confessions. And virtually no one would tolerate a form of slavery whereby a father may sell his daughters into legalized prostitution – while filial piety enjoins them to submit meekly if not cheerfully. However, the Japanese would not have disowned these former folkways without the benefit of Western example, influence, or compulsion. Today, Japanese leftists condemn, and government leaders are obliged to deplore, war crimes and atrocities committed before 1945. But here too, most of those deeds can be deemed “criminal” or “atrocious” only when judged against the ethical standards that Western societies developed. This drastic refashioning of thought and values has not been an easy or straightforward process – many Japanese, often in positions of political authority, have obstructed it.

introduction

Throughout most of Japan's modern history, the West has contributed to its formulation of theories of culture and action. At one level, the image of a monolithic West replaced an earlier interpretation of China as the “other.” In the twentieth century and especially after World War I, Japan's conceptualization of the West affirmed a theory of militant and articulate revolt against the “other,” usually imagined as a collective threat to Japan's national independence and cultural autonomy. The construction of the “other” required that it be portrayed as the mirror image of the indigenous culture. It was this representation of the “other” that clarified for the Japanese the essence of their own culture. This reversing of images was no less true in the Tokugawa period, when an idealized China had constituted the “other,” than in the twentieth century, when a monolithic West did. If the “other” defined what was exceptional in Japanese culture, it also offered a model of excellence against which such distinctiveness could be measured. Just as Tokugawa writers focused on the world of the ancient sages, changing it into an unhistorical abstraction whose values existed only in pure form in Japan, so twentieth-century thinkers imagined a Japan destined to reach new levels of achievements realized by no single Western nation. Through this doubling of images, they shaped a theory of action aimed at maintaining a pure, indigenous cultural synthesis protected from outside elements that might disturb the perceived equilibrium. It was precisely because Japanese saw the urgency of keeping their culture uncontaminated and hence preserving its essence against the threatened external pollution that many felt justified using militant forms of political and cultural action.

In the 1890s, many observers at home and abroad discovered that Japan had finally entered the mainstream of world history and had indeed become a principal actor in that history. As Okuma Shigenobu remarked at the end of the Sino-Japanese War, “Japan is no longer a Japan for Japan, but a Japan for the world.” Although some Japanese viewed the end of their cultural and political isolation as cause for unrestrained self-congratulation, others were ambivalent about its implication for the future. If Japan became more like other modern nations, its material and political development might continue, but only at the expense of social harmony or cultural integrity. As the country moved into a new century, there was uncertainty over the shape of Japan's future.

One vision of the future saw Japan as eternally unique, able to maintain its traditional culture and values even in the midst of rapid economic and political change. This point of view, which we might call the “particularist” or “exceptionalist” perspective, found champions in the Seikyosha writers of the early 1890s, who urged that the nation's cultural essence (kokusui) be preserved in the march toward modernity.’ Given the polychromatic character of Japan's cultural past, however, it was difficult to identify this cultural essence. Unlike China, which boasted of an easily identifiable great tradition, Japan had none. Where, then, were the Seikyosha writers to find the kokusui – in the myths and legends of the Shinto tradition, in the sensibilities of Heian culture, in the harsh ethos of the warrior class, in the boisterous arts of the Tokugawa townsmen, or in the austere puritanism of Tokugawa Confucianism?

The Meiji period bequeathed to modern Japan a powerful conservative tradition that dominated government and society in the twentieth century. Meiji conservatism took shape at the end of the nineteenth century in reaction to the sweeping reforms and Western influence that had held sway in the first two decades of Meiji. Those reforms, which brought to fruition the demands for change that had grown during the late Tokugawa, drew their inspiration from Western ideas and institutions that were the products of the Enlightenment and of the liberal philosophies that accompanied the emergence of commercial capitalism and a bourgeois class dissatisfied with traditional forms of government in Europe. The Meiji ruling group, after initially adopting many of the ideas and institutions of the Enlightenment, subsequently promoted a powerful conservative program in order to sustain its power and the social order on which it rested.

Conservatism, in the sense used here, is not simply a tendency to maintain the status quo. Rather, it is a distinctly modern phenomenon that first developed in the West in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in reaction to the dominant themes of the Enlightenment and to the implications of the French Revolution. Although conservatism had distinctive features in different European countries, owing to their divergent histories and social structures, certain common features became apparent wherever it arose in the West. It is worthwhile to examine our topic in the context of European conservatism, in part because the Japanese conservatives drew inspiration from their European counterparts and in part because comparisons will prove meaningful in understanding the nature of Meiji conservatism.