Rural industry and uneven development: The significance of gender in the Irish Linen industry

Abstract

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The 'proto-industrialization' thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognize the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialization and deindustrialization.

1. Gender and Uneven Working -Class Formation in the Irish Linen Industry

“…vi.See Gray (1993a) for an extended version of this argument. Kriedte et al (1993: 223-224) have recently observed that "the connection between the work-process and the family as the reproductive unit turns out to be more complex than was assumed by the original model."…”

Marx on the Reciprocal Interconnections between the Soil and the Human Body: Ireland and Its Colonialised Metabolic Rifts

“…(Marx 1971:59-60) In the absence of improvements typical of the Agricultural Revolution, as was occurring in Britain (which Marx called the Irish version a caricature [Marx 1971:134]), agricultural production depended more on the "natural fertility" of the soil. There were few exceptions to this, save perhaps the prosperous linen districts of Ulster where spinning and weaving gave rise to stronger regional inequalities in output intensity (Gray 1993(Gray , 2006, and where the presence of "Ulster Custom" ensured a degree of compensation to tenants for capital improvement (Dowling 1999). As such, when it came to commodity production, the emergence of the metabolic rift was more intensified in the Irish context, as soil improvements were effectively eliminated under the rackrenting regime.…”

As relações de gênero na produção capitalista do espaço de trabalho

“…Os estudos de Jane Gray (1993) sobre a indústria irlandesa do linho em meados do século XVIII, por exemplo, indicam que houve ali um crescimento baseado na desigualdade entre unidades domésticas rurais de fiação e unidades domésticas rurais de tecelagem, localizadas, respectivamente, nas regiões oeste e leste da província de Ulster. A fiação, realizada por mulheres e crianças nos interstícios do trabalho diário e muito mal remunerada, concentrava-se em distritos onde ainda havia terras comuns para a agricultura de subsistência (Gray, 1993). A tecelagem, realizada por homens em ritmo industrial e por uma remuneração mais alta, localizava-se em distrito onde as antigas terras comuns já haviam sido cercadas.…”