Women Workers in the Second World War

Summerfield, Penny

doi:10.1177/030981687700100103

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…However, resistance to work discipline may also use these stereotypical assumptions. Such a process was identified by Summerfield (1977) who argued that women workers during World War Two used sexism as a means of resistance to factory discipline. She suggests that where male supervisors assumed that women could not work hard or well because they were women, the women took advantage to play out the stereotype.…”

Section: Racialized Job Hierarchies and Workplace Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Feminist Trade Union Agenda? The Continued Significance of Class, Gender and Race

Munro

2001

Gender Work & Organization

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During the 1990s attempts to identify a feminist trade union agenda have focused on both the content and process of such a potential agenda. In a period in which trade unions have changed significantly, the general national agenda appears to be changing, acknowledging issues of importance to women. UNISON, Britain's largest trade union, has enshrined proportionality and fair representation in its constitution, developing national initiatives aimed at improving opportunities in work and in the union for women, black workers, manual workers, disabled workers, etc. who traditionally have been less well represented. Many issues affecting women generally have moved to centre stage, yet issues affecting women ancillary workers seem as excluded as ever. Through a study of cleaners in the National Health Service this article argues that workplace interests reflect wider social divisions, but in a variety of patterns depending on the social organization of work. Despite the widening trade union agenda, particular interests Ð more specifically the workplace interests of working-class women and black women Ð continue to be neglected.

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Section: Racialized Job Hierarchies and Workplace Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Feminist Trade Union Agenda? The Continued Significance of Class, Gender and Race

Munro

2001

Gender Work & Organization

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“…4. For example, the deployment of women during wartime to perform many jobs for which they had previously been deemed unsuitable, and their subsequent removal, was often facilitated by trade union agreements (Summerfield 1989;Glucksmann 1990). 5.…”

Section: Final Version Accepted 22 December 1999mentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism Facing Industrial Relations in Britain

Wajcman

2000

Brit J Industrial Rel

128

105

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This is an opportune time to renegotiate the boundaries between industrial relations theory and feminist analysis in Britain. Such a bargain would involve going beyond an agreement to add 'women's issues' to the research agenda, to a recognition of the gendered character of employment relations and of work itself. The formal institutions involved, namely, management, trade unions and the state, cannot be treated as gender-neutral. Further, the very way industrial relations scholars define what is 'inside' the industrial relations system and what is 'outside' reflects masculine priorities and privilege. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2000.

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“…6 The working-class housewife, however, remains at best a shadowy presence in this literature, despite some useful leads concerning individual attitudes. 7 Their agency is also underplayed by those social historians who have explored wartime austerity, including the effects on ordinary consumers of rationing and the black market. 8 For sure, recovering the experience of a protean category that has left no straightforward archival trace presents the historian with major problems, though there can be no doubt about the importance of a group that constituted the majority of adult women, about 55 per cent or 8.75 million in 1943 when mobilisation was at its height.…”

Section: Peter Gurneymentioning

confidence: 99%

Redefining ‘the woman with the basket’: The Women's Co‐operative Guild and the Politics of Consumption in Britain during the Second World War

Gurney¹

2019

Gender & History

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Over recent decades, historians of gender have transformed our understanding of the impact of total war on British society. Feminist scholars in particular have been drawn to this field of research because, as Margaret and Patrice Higonnet suggested in an influential essay, war 'crystallizes contradictions between ideology and actual experience'. 1 Mass mobilisation necessitated by total war blurred boundaries between military and home fronts and between men and women. Dominant conceptions of gender roles were put under intense pressure, making possible greater awareness of their constructed and hence malleable nature. 2 Understandably, women who experienced the most dramatic change have attracted the most scholarly attention; women in uniform, for example, who threatened to destabilise definitions of gender that conceived of the soldier as the epitome of masculinity. 3 Women conscripted into the paid labour force were often called upon to perform the physically demanding or skilled tasks that historically had been bound up with ideas of masculinity, and these too have been subjected to detailed investigation. 4 Running through both these historiographical strands is an interest in memory; little wonder as the full range of women's experience has been marginalised if not effaced from public memory. Oral historians have addressed this lacuna by attending to women's own narratives of their experience of industrial and military mobilisation. 5 Knowledge of the way in which war shaped the activities and ideology of feminist groups and women's voluntary organisations, which sought to expand female notions of citizenship particularly during the Second World War, has also been significantly elucidated by studies of bodies such as the Women's Institute (WI), the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS) and Townswomen's Guilds. 6 The working-class housewife, however, remains at best a shadowy presence in this literature, despite some useful leads concerning individual attitudes. 7 Their agency is also underplayed by those social historians who have explored wartime austerity, including the effects on ordinary consumers of rationing and the black market. 8 For sure, recovering the experience of a protean category that has left no straightforward

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Women Workers in the Second World War

Cited by 18 publications

References 1 publication

A Feminist Trade Union Agenda? The Continued Significance of Class, Gender and Race

A Feminist Trade Union Agenda? The Continued Significance of Class, Gender and Race

Feminism Facing Industrial Relations in Britain

Redefining ‘the woman with the basket’: The Women's Co‐operative Guild and the Politics of Consumption in Britain during the Second World War

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