Her Hands Are Tied: The Effect of Sex-Typing on the Twentieth-Century Working Woman
December 2020
Skills: Literature Review, Writing
Historically, it is evident why women made good weavers. The trade was ingrained into our biology: we are naturally more nurturing, patient, dexterous, and feeble than men. In a time when we had to rely purely on our hands and minds, it was evolutionarily efficient to split labor according to these traits. Flash forward a few millennia and the Industrial Revolution should have shifted this mindset. The boom of mechanical and automatic technology at the time has been said to have distanced humans from our biology because tasks were no longer confined to the limits of our bodies. However, this was not the case for all humans. In reality, labor became faster, jobs more intellectually stimulating, and technology most productive only for men. Twentieth century women could not escape their biological bond to weaving.
The start of the “woman as weaver and weaver as woman” expectation dates back to the invention of the loom. As it is instinctual of women to be the primary caretaker of their children, whatever labor they assumed had to be flexible and safe enough to properly continue their maternal duties. When the loom was invented around 6000 BC, its static nature required community settlement and confined textile work to the domicile, offering a perfect division of labor between men and women: men in the field, completing the brave and dirty work of collecting the fibers and scavenging away from his family; and women at home, preparing fiber, spinning thread, and weaving cloth, always within arm’s reach of her children, able to keep them safe and healthy (Headrick, 14).
The correlation between women and weaving deepened in the Neolithic era across many advanced civilizations. Homer, the great Greek poet, highlighted the necessity for women/weavers to be dexterous: “[Women] weave their webs or, while they sit, twist their swift spindles as their fingers glint like leaves of poplar trees swayed by the wind… As the Phaeacians are the most expert of men in sailing brisk ships over seas, so are their women peerless when they weave” (Headrick, 28). Using metaphorical language, he highlights the magnificence of women’s fingers and their impressive tolerance and understanding of labor, implying that weaving is a complex, painful, and tiresome job. Moreover, in Ming China, textile work governed a woman’s entire life, as it even defined her social relationships and was expected to teach her how to behave respectfully, answering to her husband and his family. Making garments for her parents-in-law “inculcated the fundamental female values of diligence, frugality, order, and self-discipline… [and] the core Confucian value of xiao (filial piety)” (Bray, 44). Cloth’s importance in trade also allowed women to experience economic activity from the “seclusion” and safety of her home, as if economics was too frightening or complicated for women to handle (Bray, 51). Men held power over the weaver even though she was incredibly important to the quality of daily life.
In all senses, the industrial woman continued to weave. First, the industrial woman continued to be incredibly family-oriented, and she sacrificed her health and sanity for her children. The image of the American family in the early twentieth century designed by Ford and the mass media caused women to become obsessively concerned with the prosperity of her family, as they were “expected to demonstrate competence at several tasks that previously had not been in her purview or had not existed at all” (Cowan, 13). An ancient woman constructed cloth at home because it was easy to tend to her children there; a wife of a Ford worker forgot the cloth altogether and directly constructed her family, weaving emotion through every crevice of her house and facilitating loving relationships between all family members. She was consumed with learning psychologically-driven childcare, deeply disinfecting her house, and micromanaging her family’s finances, much like her biological foundation in weaving was a repetitive and obsessive job. Advertisers took advantage of this social shift and preached of such a pristine family reputation that wives even developed incredible guilt and embarrassment if they did not adhere to this new maternal norm (Cowan, 21).
A family-oriented mindset can also be extended to female computers later in the century, who exhibited an affinity for teamwork and compassionate interaction. Instead of the competitive personalities of their male coworkers, who often worked for their own personal benefit, the women came together to discuss how the machines worked and to diagnose and solve their problems (Light, 471). Women tended to care more about the collective, societal benefit than her own individual needs, exhibiting her similarity to her protective weaving ancestors.
The industrial woman also continued to have impressive dexterity, and her fingers were especially precious to the economy. In Ford’s factories, women were assigned to the magneto, top-making, and upholstering departments of vehicle production because the “officials believed that their nimble fingers were well-suited for winding wire and sewing” (Meyer, 140). The assignment to upholstery and sewing is evidently similar to women’s weaving, as they both deal with the manipulation of cloth, but the more important connection here is her work with wires. Women were assigned to work on the magnetos, electrical engines, because of their historical expertise with handling thread—and wires had simply become the contemporary, industrial thread. It was important to set up circuits accurately, as one mistake could risk her electrocution or frying of the entire system. Similarly, when women joined computing, the fact that women’s fingers were “more slender” helped them to more quickly and easily complete repetitive tasks like handling wires, pushing buttons, and recording data, much like the “swiftness” of ancient Greek women’s fingers aided in their spinning of thread (Light, 461).
Moreover, the industrial woman worked jobs that required patience and high tolerances for pain. When the telephone was invented, women tended to operate them because sitting all day, pressing buttons, and constant communication “demanded just that particular… forbearance possessed by the average woman” (Light, 461). Computing required “constant alertness” and “tireless wrists” (Light, 461). Even though dull, repetitive tasks tend to wear down the muscles and joints, negatively impacting health and lifespan, women were expected to deal with it because their bodies looked and behaved like they were designed to do so. In ancient civilizations, the process of weaving was similarly painstaking. Women stayed up throughout the night and wore down their knees and knuckles spinning thread and weaving, sacrificing their health for their trade because it was necessary for the survival of their families (Headrick, 14). In the twentieth century, industrial technology allowed the attachment to biology to no longer be necessary for survival, but it persisted nonetheless.
Not only did industrial women have to endure the physical pain of repetition, but they also had to tolerate the moral injustice, the mental injury, of submitting to their male coworkers. This process happened in a few ways. First, they had to sacrifice their reputation: “scientists described women not as individuals, but rather as a collective, defined by their lab leader… or by their machines” (Light, 459). Even though women were filling positions that men used to hold and were previously considered scientific, the women were not scientists. Publications and photographs of research projects with which women were involved often omitted their names and cropped them out. This is interesting because it highlights how the very association with the female biology rendered the work less important, less stimulating, and less useful, essentially calling women and their work disposable (Light, 471). This is similar to how cloth was historically a form of currency, whereby families relied financially and nutritionally on the mother’s work, yet men still held the title as the head of the family. The weaver, historic or industrial, did not receive any power for her contributions to society.
Men’s control of their participation in the production and economy of technology also related twentieth century women to their weaving descendants. The persistence of an ideal American family with the husband at the head of the house was responsible for this perceived right to control women. Ford believed that wives were irresponsible and unpredictable, “likely to throw up their positions at any time, without notice” (Meyer, 140). As such, Ford considered women youths and therefore did not have to pay them. They reinforced this ideal by manipulating their male workers, saying their profit shares would be revoked if their wives were not at home with their children (Meyer, 141). This was similar to how the taxing and trading of cloth was managed by the men in ancient civilizations—the women worked tirelessly and painfully, all day, every day, constantly piling up cloth but never knowing where it would end up or receiving any praise.
The industrial woman also resembled a weaver via her submission to men because the nature of her job was to mend: to fix and reinforce the male engineer’s work and position in STEM. Much like a weaver or seamstress literally mends holes in cloth, female computers “located burnt-out vacuum tubes, shorted connections, and other nonclerical bugs” in machines (Light, 470). Moreover, a weaver’s cloth kept people warm, much like how women’s repetitive calculations and communications provided the necessary statistical foundation for the “more complicated” research the men conducted—implying the research would not be possible in the first place without the women. Finally, the historical purpose of cloth to differentiate between social classes and “uphold the social order” is similar to women’s acceptance of their own sex-typing, that “designing hardware was a man’s job; programming was a woman’s job… [and] ‘hard’ ways of knowing are men’s domain; ‘soft’ ways of knowing are more feminine” (Light, 469). To challenge the men’s intentions of their integration into STEM would be to risk their existence in it at all—so they had to tolerate a lack of representation in order to make headway for future female scientists.
The persistence of the weaver in the twentieth century is evident. So the question that remains is, why was society so tied to women’s biology but not to men’s? Why is it that innovation was more useful to men than to women? Perhaps it lies in the evolution of the term human, and the “corruption of improvement” outlined by Robert Friedel. Friedel describes a “prevailing belief that there were scientific and technical solutions for almost all human problems” (Friedel, 487). He specifically applied this concept to the wars, explaining how the rapid production of industrial technology contributed to an overconfidence in and overreliance on our ability to innovate and as a result an increase in physical and political violence. I believe this concept can explain the attachment to women’s biology if we translate it to an evocation of an additional area of violence, morality: the obsession with technology illuminates society’s shift in focus from the betterment of ourselves, and from frequent introspection, to the betterment of materials and an increase in greed.
Just as industrial technology distanced men in power from their biology, providing the foundation for a new super-male ego, so too it further distanced society’s empathy for women. Judging by the way women have been treated throughout history, especially as weavers, we are not considered human—the textile-related labor women undertook was even considered slave work in some civilizations. Therefore, women’s problems were never human problems, and scientific and technical solutions could not exist for women. The industrial woman had no chance of becoming industrial.
Works Cited
Bray, Francesca. Technology and Society in Ming China (1368-1644). American Historical Assoc, 2000.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century.” Technology and Culture, vol. 17, no. 1, 1976, p. 1., https://doi.org/10.2307/3103251.
Friedel, Robert Douglas. A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. MIT Press, 2010.
Headrick, Daniel R. Technology: A World History. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Light, Jennifer S. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture, vol. 40, no. 3, July 1999, pp. 455–483., https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1999.0128.
Meyer, Stephen. The Five Dollar Day: Labor, Management, and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1980-1921. State University of New York Press, 1981.