COUNTERHYPOTHESIS:
GENDER AS A DESTABILIZING VARIABLE
Several historians have convincingly demonstrated the intimate relationship between the emerging housing and labor markets of industrialized urban centers and the gendered framework within which these took place. Jeanne Boydston, for example, has argued that the “pastoralization” of housework in the early republic linked the home and the activities increasingly performed exclusively therein to a sacred ideal of motherhood. She provides extensive historical evidence of the internal and metaphorical nature of the meanings of “home” and “work” in the modern urban period. For example, she claims that “the labor and economic value of housework ceased to exist in the culture of [the] antebellum Northeast.
It became work's opposite.” Indeed, the discursive poles of the separation were an object of contestation, as Boydston has pointed out, and thus retained the traces of the other pole: “The language of the ideology of spheres was the language of gender, but its essential dualism was less precisely the opposition of ‘female’ and ‘male’ than it was the opposition of ‘home’ and ‘work,’ an opposition founded on the gendering of the concept of labor.”[51]
The most extensive treatment of the gendered dimensions of the transformations of urban culture has been provided by Elizabeth Blackmar's work on Manhattan in the period between Independence and the Civil War, a period central to Katznelson's historical thesis. She provides detailed evidence to support the argument that what Katznelson interprets as the shared assumptions of urban politics and the patterning of authority and social control in New York and other emerging cities was irreducibly tied to the gendered nature of authority and control:
The nineteenth-century language of housing came to rest on polarized categories—home and workplace, private and public, respectable and immoral, necessity and luxury—that sought to define and fix the cultural value of one of the city's most unstable and tension-worn social institutions….Yet, precisely because rhetorical oppositions deny qualifications and contradictions, they offer a powerful means of affirming shared cultural values in the face of uncertainties and repeated challenges….By the mid-nineteenth century its vocabulary had become a mainstay of the bourgeois language of both class and gender.[52]
The autonomized private order was seen as the basis of the social order more generally, and the ability to control one's dwelling, a domain now set off from the workplace, “emerged as a new measure of persona, independence and respectability.” Parallel to my argument against the conflation of workplace and community in terms of class, she continues, “not the least problem with conventional interpretations of the industrialization of nineteenth-century cities is the tendency to treat housing as a derivative cultural ‘sphere’ or arena of ‘consumption’ that merely reflected rather than helped construct the new material social relations of capitalist society. Far from being ‘removed’ from the marketplace, the home stood at the heart of new property and labor relations.”[53] Like Boydston, Blackmar rejects the view that the physical separation of workplaces and residences is merely an objective feature of urbanizing and industrializing societies and argues that this spatial transformation necessarily entails particular interpretations. What is important is the discursive status given to the activities that, as a result of contentions fought on axes of class and
The cultural construction of housing as a home separated from a workplace did not emerge simply with reference to men's departure to workshops, offices, and stores. Female family members who performed household “duties” were culturally defined against the figures of both “immoral and ungrateful” servants who grudgingly performed “work” and female outworkers who “took away work from men.” Although the points of reference were vastly different for propertied and working-class New Yorkers, the language with which they interpreted housing relations was often the same. Unable to eliminate the tensions of waged employment, keeping boarders, or sweated labor within their domestic quarters, New Yorkers insisted on housing's identity as a home, defined family work as a labor of love, and spoke of domestic relations as they “ought” to be.[54]
Integral to this forged consensus, therefore, was the struggle “internal” to the working class over the gendered distribution of tasks and the relationship between the collective identities of class at the workplace and those enmeshed in the home. Blackmar thus concurs with other feminist historians in claiming that, faced with new historical possibilities, “rather than embrace new concepts of domesticity attached to the dwelling, journeymen sought to preserve the values of artisan housekeeping.”[55]
In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, the content of urban working-class identity created by craft and, later, industrial unions continued to embody gender assumptions, and as a consequence, gender relations persisted as a contributing factor to the bifurcation of identity between workplace and community. The terms in which male garment workers in the 1880s in New York responded to the controversy over home-based work versus shop work demonstrate how union understandings of “class” were very much tied up with assumptions about home, community, and family as the other of “work,” thus defining work in a particular “gendered” way. The somewhat unique case of a union-sponsored cooperative apartment project in New York City in the 1920s also shows how a progressive, socialist union, even when unconventionally embracing housing as part of its organizational mission, was typical in its treatment of the housing realm, at least when it came to gender issues. If we understand “class” here to refer to both Katznelson's class two and class three, to both the organization of labor markets, embracing nonwaged domestic labor as well as waged factory and shop work, and the self-representation or language of the union, expressing certain “masculinist” assumptions, a brief look at the intersection