Gender and the Making of Vineyard Capitalism

Prior to the great agricultural revolution in the Aude, women engaged in a diverse array of economic activities, growing, pre-

paring, and selling food.^[5] Most women worked as wage earners along with other family members or on small family farms. Some combined work as day laborers with their activities on household plots: in the 1851 census in Coursan, ninety-five women were listed as journalières-propriétaires . The domestic activities of small vineyard owners' wives spilled into the public arena when they sold their chickens, rabbits, and eggs in weekly markets in Carcassonne or Narbonne or rented stalls in villages like Cuxac d'Aude, Lézignan, or Coursan. Thus domestic production and associated entrepreneurial activity drew women into the larger world of market relations. Some migrated long distances to harvest so as to bring in cash.^[6] Others worked as seamstresses, laundresses, grocers, dressmakers, and midwives. As revendeuses they purchased fruit and vegetables in bulk and hawked them in local markets, and some sold secondhand goods. The expansion of vineyards also brought women onto estate vineyards as overseers (ramonettes ). Finally, as property owners some (mostly widows) sustained themselves on income from their land as rentiers.^[7]

Around midcentury this kaleidoscope of activity changed. The combination of vineyard expansion and large wheat harvests in the 1850s created a demand for women's labor. In addition, the industrial depression of 1847–1852 and declining employment for women in the rural textile industry brought about a shift from industrial to agricultural work. The vast majority of women in Coursan now worked primarily as day laborers or estate workers (Table 12), sowing grain and harvesting, tending vines and cutting grapes, picking olives, and working vegetable gardens on small family plots, thus combining domestic, productive, and wage-earning activity. As vineyards came to dominate the economy of the Aude, women's position in that economy changed. The separation between public and private, between farm/vineyard and domestic space, became more acute, as did definitions of gender roles.

We have already seen how the agricultural revolution in the Aude brought about a more complex differentiation of vineyard tasks. Although women undoubtedly performed numerous procedures in the vines prior to the development of viticultural capitalism, vineyard "industrialization" led to a more formal

division of labor based on gender. Employers increasingly allocated certain tasks exclusively to men, while reserving others for women. Thus, in the Audois vineyards skilled work was by definition male: men performed all skilled and semiskilled work, such as pruning, cultivating, and winemaking. Most unskilled work was defined as female.

In the twentieth century the idea that men and women have different capabilities for work has led to forms of occupational segregation. For example, the notion that women have "nimble fingers" has been used to justify the employment of women as typists and clerical workers. In the nineteenth century the same

concept justified the employment of women in certain types of vineyard work, such as pinching buds in the spring to encourage the formation of fewer but more resilient flowers or cutting grapes during the harvest. Ironically, vineyard owners did not invoke this idea to allow women to perform other jobs requiring manual dexterity, such as pruning or grafting; these tasks were considered "men's work," in that they required skill and some technical training. As we shall see, this situation sustained men's superior position in the vineyard labor hierarchy and wage structure by allowing them to exercise control over definitions of skill.^[8]

Nonetheless, women performed a wide variety of tasks. Following pruning (performed by men), women gathered the stems and branches that fell to the ground and tied them in five-kilogram bundles to be sold as kindling. Vineyard owners often paid women partly in kind for this work by allowing them to take some portion of the kindling home for use as cooking and heating fuel. But this method of payment also corresponded to a reduced monetary wage. Otherwise women earned a piece rate for gathering wood, which forced them to work fast in order to earn a minimum wage. Women's work also included spreading insecticides and fertilizer and sulphuring the vines to prevent mildew. During sulphuring they carried an eight-liter tank and sprayer on their backs, scarcely an enviable task, since the tank weighed twenty-five kilos when full, and the smell of sulphur lingered in the hair and clothing for hours afterward. At harvesttime women cut the grapes; men then carried the heavy baskets filled with freshly picked fruit to wagons, which they drove to the wine cellar.^[9]

Consistent with their definitions of work and skill as gender-based, contemporaries supported the division of labor in the harvest, and more generally, on the grounds that women's work permitted men to perform "more important" skilled jobs. One vineyard owner gave women the responsibility for certain chemical treatments "so as not to distract the men from their ordinary tasks."^[10] Despite women's essential place in the labor structure of the vineyard, they were seen as merely secondary actors in the drama of production, their work but supplementary to that of men. How ironic, then, that workers later used the gender-based

division of labor to promote solidarity in the labor conflicts that broke out after the turn of the century.

The tension between women's economic contribution and their subordinate role in the economy characterized the social relations of the sexes in other spheres of domestic and community life. Alphonse Daudet provides a telling description in his Letters from My Windmill, where he tells of a lunch with the Provençal poet and founder of the Félibrige,^[11] Frédéric Mistral. Mistral's aged mother arrives from the market and immediately sets about preparing a sumptuous lunch. "In no time at all the table is laid; a beautiful white cloth and two place settings. I know the customs of the house; I know that when Mistral has visitors his mother does not sit at the table with them. . . . The dear old lady speaks only the Provençal tongue, and would not feel at ease talking to Frenchmen. . . . Besides, she is needed in the kitchen."^[12] Similarly, when Léon Jouhaux, leader of the Confédération générale du travail, came to dine at the home of François Cheytion, leader of the vineyard workers' union in Coursan, and his sister, Anastasie Vergnes, who herself participated actively in strikes before and after the First World War, Anastasie and her mother, having served the meal, remained standing in the small kitchen cum living room-dining room while the men ate and discussed union affairs.^[13]

In the rituals of harvest the ambiguity of gender relations again came into view. Apart from the "deplorable promiscuity" that one observer decried, there were practices such as the fardage . Male workers would chase a young female picker (coupeuse ) unfortunate enough to have left a bunch of grapes on the vine and, when they caught her, would crush the grapes on her forehead or, more commonly, buttocks. In some cases a woman who experienced this indignity was able to get her revenge with the aid of friends, by grabbing a male harvester and stuffing his shirt with leaves. In such sexual horseplay men symbolically asserted their power over women in the rural community, and women simultaneously challenged them.^[14]

As in industrial society, assumptions about gender-based differences in the workplace and social life governed women's material condition in the rural Aude. Women's wages in vineyard work (as in most other paid employment) were generally half

and sometimes less than half those of men. In 1862 journalières earned on average 90 centimes a day. (To put that sum into perspective, a kilo of bread cost from 32 to 36 centimes.)^[15] Employers, in calculating wages, made no distinction between the various types of work women performed, except during the harvest, when they paid women more in order to attract harvesters (Table 13). Nor did they take physical effort into account, even though journalières spent much of the day bent over, if they were gathering branches or cutting grapes, or sweating under the weight of the sulphur tank.

In terms of wages, women workers, like men, profited from the expansion of viticulture, as Table 13 shows; by 1882, in the vineyards' golden age, their wages had doubled. Yet while women vineyard workers in the Aude made more than the

average for women agricultural workers nationally, it would have been impossible for one to support a family on her own, or even to sustain herself on her own wages. It is therefore not surprising that few women in the protourban villages of the Narbonnais lived alone.^[16] Nor did women have an opportunity to improve their skills; the gender-based division of labor flatly denied them access to skilled "men's work." In addition, estate vineyard owners saved money not only from the lower wages they paid women, but also by feeding women workers less than men. Whereas men had the right to meat at all meals, women had to make do with cooked beans and whatever meat was left over when the men were through. For the vineyard owner, this practice could mean a small but significant monthly savings, depending on the number of women employed.^[17] Mme. Marie Garrigues, for instance, ramonette on the estate of Canague-Neuve in Capestang, not far from Coursan, received one franc a day per man to feed the male domestiques on the estate, and only fifty centimes a day per woman. A typical "women's meal" consisted of a bowl of vegetable stew, to which a small piece of meat might be parsimoniously added.^[18] In the wage settlements just before World War I, where workers won the right to some wine as part of their daily wage, women generally were allotted half as much wine as men (see below, especially Chapter 7). Of course, the assumption that men and women had different food requirements was not unique to the vineyards; it has been true of peasant and working-class families not just in France but all over the world.^[19] Here as elsewhere, it underscored women's secondary status in both the family and the workplace, and illustrates how the proletarianization of women differed from that of men.