he position of women in the labour markets of Europe from the middle T ages to the beginning of the twentieth century has been the subject of a substantial and vital research effort in recent years.' In this area of enquiry, as so often in the social sciences, greater certainty surrounds what happened than why it happened. The central problem in the history of women's work is to explain the nature of and changes in the gender division of labour and the persistence of women in the lowest paid, least stable, and most unrewarding occupation^.^ A wealth of detail is presented in recent research An approach supported by, among others, Bennett, 'Feminism', pp. 263-4. There is a large literature on dual labour markets and labour market segmentation but nothing which explicitly treats the subject historically. See for example Sullivan, Marginal workers; Reich, Gordon, and Edwards, 'A theory'; Cain, 'Challenge'. For criticisms and applications to the problems of women's work see Blau and Jusenius, 'Economists' approaches', pp. 190-8; Walby, Paniarchy at work, pp. 80-5. * An assessment of the various forms of labour payments and their change over time is needed. Useful insights are, nevertheless, available. See, for example, Sonenscher, Work and wages; idem, 'Journeymen'; idem, 'Weavers'; idem, 'Work and wages'; Rule, Labouring classes; Hobsbawm, Labouring men, pp. 344-70. In sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, wage earners were generally assumed to be paupers and regarded as unfree; see Hill, 'Pottage for freeborn'. Woodward, 'Wage rates'. ID Sonenscher, 'Work and wages'.*) Brown and Goodman, 'Women and industry'; Poni, 'Proto-industrialization', p. 313; Goodman, 'Tuscan commercial relations', pp. 337-8. 24 Davis, 'Women in the crafts'; Garden, Lyon et les lyonnais, pp. 225-8; Massa, L a 'fabbrica'; Rapp, Industry and economic decline, p. 28. 25 This is partly explained by the absence of guild control over rural industrial production. Historians disagree, however, over the precise nature of gender divisions in rural industrial production. See for example, Berg, Age ofmanufactures, pp. 129-58; Hufton, 'Women and the family'; idem 'Women without men'; Gullickson, 'Sexual division of labor'; idem, Spinners and weavers, pp. 52-3; Snell, 'Agricultural and seasonal unemployment'; Roberts, 'Sickles and scythes', pp. 18-9; Wrigley, 'Men on the land', p. 336; Boxer and Quataert, Connecting spheres, pp. 42-4. These stress the existence of clear divisions. Medick, 'Proto-industrial family economy', pp. 61-3 and Quataert, 'Combining agrarian and industrial livelihood', p. 151 argue for a neutral situation. Much work remains to be done. 30 Tilly, 'Paths of proletarianization'; idem, 'Family, gender and occupations'. 3 1 Schmiechen, Sweated industries. 32 They continued to use the apprenticeship system, but, increasingly, they prevented women gaining access to the newest technology, and thus, commonly, to the best jobs; Rule, 'Property of skill'; Humphries, 'Sexual division of labor'. 33 Richards, 'Women in the British economy...
Business historians have failed to recognize British women's participation in business. Beginning in the eighteenth century, English women overcame a range of socially constructed constraints to assume a more important role in financial and entrepreneurial activi-ties than has been hitherto acknowledged. Women's apparent affinity with the service sector in employment, self-employment, and business enterprise has encouraged a limited view of their activities, relegating them to a separate, female sphere, rather than viewing them as part of the masculine world of rational profit maximization. Several approaches drawing upon social and cultural ideas are proposed to rectify the prevailing blindness toward issues of gender. The eclectic methodological underpinning of British business history offers some hope that the topic of gender can soon be incorporated into the discipline.
This paper explores the processes by which the majority of British men came to wear a suit for most occasions during the first part of the twentieth century. It examines the nature of the product and emphasises the gendered experience of making and buying suits. Using the Leeds tailoring trade as a case study, it concludes that the rise of the suit can be attributed to the gendering of production – whereby the intensification of low–paid female labour sustained profitability – and to the gendering of consumption, in which the masculinity of the shopping environment was crucial.
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