Re: Women & Industrialization (was Re: capitalist patriarchy)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman wrote:

>Yoshie, I was looking at my notes and I found:
>
>Humphries, Jane. 1991. "The Sexual Division of Labor and Social Control: An
>Interpretation." Review of Radical Political Economics, 23: 3 and 4 (Fall and
>Winter): pp. 269-96.
>277: The need to monitor female sexual behavior made families
>reluctant to allow
>women to work away from home in unknown and unsupervised settings.
>
>I don't have the article at hand.  It is at school.  I think that I
>recall in this
>context that the elite were offended about the sexual temptations presented by
>women in mines, partially because they worked bent over.  Maybe some
>else recalls.

Thanks for the reference.  The wish to monitor female sexual
behavior, couched in the language of "protecting their morality," was
also expressed by management (as well as parents & reformers), and
surveillance of women's sexual behaviors, especially in the form of
putting women workers in dormitories, went hand in hand with
management control of workers and prevention of strikes supported by
workers' communities:

*****   ...Imprisoned in Dormitories

With recruits coming from distant places, company dormitories became
common features of silk establishments.  Dormitories kept workers
from going elsewhere to work or running home, but they also enabled
managers to extract longer hours from workers who no longer had to be
allotted time to commute home and prepare meals there.  Under strict
discipline, dormitory inmates could be controlled so thoroughly that
nearly all their energies were spent on thread production.  Sumiya
Mikio's blunt assessment is accurate: "The dormitory system was
originally developed to the convenience of employees from distant
places, but it now functioned virtually as detention houses." [14]
Solidly constructed and equipped with heavy metal screens,
dormitories were surrounded by eight-foot fences or connected to the
adjacent plant by a bridge high above ground.  Sometimes fences were
crowned with broken glass, sharpened bamboo spears, barbed wire, and
other forbidding objects to discourage runaways.  Management claimed
that workers were locked in after hours "to protect their morals."
[15]  However, that claim rings hollow.  The women and girls endured
sexual abuse at the hands of male managers and supervisors as well as
male workers. [16]

[14]  Sumiya, _Social Impact of Industrialization in Japan_. Tokyo:
Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, 1963, p. 86.
[15]  Noshomu-sho, _Shokko jijo [Factory Workers' Conditions]_.  Vol.
4 of _Seikatsu koten sosho [Classics of Everyday Life].  Tokyo:
Koseikan, 1971, p. 303.
[16]  Sexual abuse is discussed later in this chapter, but strong
evidence of it appears in many sources, including _Shokko jijo_.
Sakura Takuji, a male employee in silk mills during the 1920s,
offered a chilling eyewitness account of sexual harassment in the
silk mills and dormitories continuing far beyond the Meiji period.
See his _Joko gyakutai shi (A history of the ill-treatment of female
silk-factory workers) (1927; Nagano City, 1981), esp. 163-68)

(E. Patricia Tsurumi, _Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of
Meiji Japan_, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1990: p. 67)
*****

Tsurumi theorizes that the increasing practice of putting women in
dormitories (beginning in the 1890s) was an employer response to
militant strikes of women workers in the earlier phase of mills
employing local workers.  Employers preferred "women without
supportive local connections" (Tsurumi 57).  BTW, the first known
factory strike in Japan was the 1885-86 strike by women reelers in
Kofu (Tsurumi 52-55).

As for the strike in Kofu, the following work looks interesting:

*****   ABSTRACT: Ph. D. Dissertation

TITLE: REBELS, GAMBLERS, AND SILK: Agencies and Structures of the
Japan-US Silk Network, 1858-1890

AUTHOR: Elson E. Boles, Sociology, Ph. D. Candidate, State University
of New York, Binghamton
eeb@xxxxxxxxx
DEFENSE: 11 April, 1997

ABSTRACT:

In 1884, Meiji Japan's largest armed peasant uprising, involving
3000-7000, erupted in Saitama prefecture. The nature of the incident
has been passionately debated among Japanese historians. The
orthodoxy sees it as the climax of the Liberty Movement; revisionists
argue it was the last and greatest millenarian peasant uprising....

...The rebellion occurred as part of the Japan-US silk network's
formation, 1860-84. The division of labor's emergence saw the decline
of Chichibu petty sericulturists, the rise of new filatures in Japan,
and high-technology silk weaving factories in the US. The
interrelated class-patriarchal changes among the network's sectors
engendered new forms of resistance, including the first known factory
strikes in Japan, by women reelers in Kofu (1885-86), and strikes by
silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey (1886-90).

Meiji silk export development programs during the 1870s nurtured the
network's formation. But Meiji state policy was less a product of
Western ideas, as previously thought, than the reconstitution of
earlier "domain development" strategies of Satsuma and Choshu han.
Indeed, these domains seized power in 1868 on the basis of successful
export-oriented accumulation 1750-1860, and then extend their
strategies on a national scale after the Restoration.

The retrenchment phase of modernization, 1880-86, triggered peasant
debt deferral movements across Japan and repression of gamblers and
political activists led to new inter-class alliances. This work
explains, for the first time, how activists recruited bakuto and
indebted peasants to form revolutionary armies, why the latter
joined, and the "incidents of violence" that followed.

Narrowing in on Chichibu with primary resources, we detail how local
bakuto [gamblers] joined the Liberty Party and fused their party
status with gambler-style chivalry. Villagers accepted redeemed
bakuto as righteous leaders, reinvented millenarianism, and followed
bakuto leaders in a revolt against corrupt officials and land
expropriating creditors.

As the last millenarian uprising in Japan, the uprising marks the
terminus of Japan's incorporation into the modern world-system; the
Liberty Movement, struggles by gamblers, and the Kofu and Paterson
strikes, signify Japan's systemic transformation as part of the
world-system.   *****

Yoshie