Women and Gender

Question 1

Haunch - Bourgeoise Society was a “male project”

Answer 1

• Differentiation between public (male) and private (women spaces).
• Political climate was catered by men for men, traditionally excluding women suffrage - criticised working beyond the
  household as mother and wife.
• Separation of spheres is gender ideology than a guide to how society works.
• Reversal of gender roles - women fought in the war, criticized for dressing like men but men acting effeminate was a bigger insult.

Question 2

Examples of Vienna

Answer 2

• Formation of women’s political associations in Vienna - attacked by men for excluding them.
• Prussia and the ‘Charity Associations of Noble Women and Girls’ founded in 1811 in Habsburg lands by the imperial family. Open to higher nobility women, extending their domain to a “greater responsibility for others”.
• Associations of Book Printers and Typesetter Journeymen in Vienna - demanded the removal of female workers, despite employment as their focus, it did not negate gender boundaries.

Question 3

Was 1848 Revolutionary for women?

Answer 3

• Development of political guilds for women’s skills - tension.
• Political society - attempts to break out of gender norms were criticised by society.
• Ideas of freedom of the press increased awareness to the needs of women and discussion of opportunities regarding gender justice and difference - spatial in Germany, America and the UK.
• Organisations = charity-focused and conservative, leads to rise in female figures and revolutionary organisations, focusing on diverse issues like emancipation.

Question 4

Joan Scott: Working Identities - Parisian garment trade

Answer 4

• Basic skills shared between genders but employed the most women.
• Shift between custom made products to the ready-made industry, protesting new commercial and manufacturing practices as part of the working-class movements.
• Controlling competition increased debate on women’s wage-earning activities and family responsibility, appropriate sexual divisions of labour and political rights.

Question 5

Scott: Meeting of workers and employers at Luxembourg Palace

Answer 5

• Tailors found working at the shop to be most efficient, dividing work in an “equitable manner” with the chance to train workers.
• Tailors opposed home-based production as it undermined morality - believed separation would improve the family - e.g miserable workers, including women, in poor conditions for low quality goods.
• Difficult to organise protests due to apieceurs’ dispersal across the country - position “antithetical to collective regulation” but it rejects the shop, collective regulation, skill to the home, competition and lack of skills.

Question 6

Scott: Protests on home-based work

Answer 6

• Attacks on apiecuers and home-based work carried references to women.
• Tailors to the London Exposition of 1862 denied that working at home will improve the life of the children, facing absent parents and impacting women’s ability to “educate and raise” them.
• Tailors wives’ struggled to complete domestic tasks, likely working without compensation which many acknowledged their frustration.
• Attributed work at the shop as skilled, unlike the home, regardless of gender - economic deterioration and deskilling was equated from a move to a female space.
• Reinforced how separation of gendered spaces did not cause a division of labour roles - women beyond the domestic space but homework was not deemed bad

Question 7

Scott: Aims for women

Answer 7

• Pressured the establishment of national workshops of women and increasing daily wages to a franc per shirt.
• Proposed work reorganisation:
  + allow married women to work at home rather than the national workshops, ensuring controlled wages and work load to prevent harm on the household.
  + opening creches and national restaurants to support families and a women’s right to work.
• More representation of women’s interests and needs on the Commission of Women’s National Assembly and the govt.

Question 8

Scott: Demand for Universal Suffrage

Answer 8

• Linked to arguments that women were workers and held property like men.
• different interests and needs were grounds for their inclusion and representation.
• demanded to be “citizeness” due to their motherly duties - hence Gray argued for special meetings by women to define their interests before joining men.
• emerged a collective vision = both genders could enlighten each other and agree on common interests, rather than these two camps of women and men.

Question 9

Workers’ Representation of the family as an alternative to capitalism

Answer 9

• Cabet = directly linked femininity with love and emotional bonds - did not contradict their productivity.
• Capitalism corrupted women - e.g seamstress turning to prostitution, acting as the anthithesis of virginity.
• invokes middle-class idealisation of young womanhood, showing off “bourgeoise hipocrisy and class oppression” - far removed from working-class reality. (110)
• Ideas of a family would provide an “emotional fufilment” and resolve capitalism’s alienating effect.
• Linked to women’s regenerative powers and need to gain influence in socio-political life

Question 10

Marx: Brown H - criticises women’s position in capitalist society

Answer 10

• Criticises Eugene Sue’s commentary on the fictional Paris prostitute Fleur de Marie as a representation of sympathy for the plight of working class women - criticize Catholicism which enforces unachievable morality, as humans cannot ignore their bodily needs.
• Supports upper class women in his essay of Puechet’s work on suicide, finding 3/4 of cases involving female suicide involved cases of abuse and trauma caused men.
• Prioritises need to transform oppressive bourgeoise family structures to improve society - a task revolution did not remove all evils.
• New machinery and less physically demanding labour allowed exploitation of women and children by capital - growing masculinisation of women undermined home life and deterioration of character.
• Women are now important forces for change - measures development of society by women’s position.

Question 11

Example of Marx’s support as discussed by Brown

Answer 11

• Strikes in Preston, England in 1853-54 of the workers’ demand for a wage like men - changing position by seeking to incorporate women into the First International on an equal basis to men.
• Appreciated women’s working demands in the Paris Commune - “the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race”.