No Way To Make A Living » gender

Five Daughters and the Unknown Punters

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:53:50 +0000

Five Daughters (BBC 1, 25^th, 26^th, 27^th April) told the stories of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholas, who were murdered in Ipswich in 2006. It was based on testimony of those involved. The five women were sex workers (or ‘Vice Girls’ to readers of some newspapers) working on the streets to fund drug addiction. Teela Sanders (2005) shows how women working in the indoor sex market aim to get a regular clientele as a way to manage risk, both the obvious risk to personal safely, but also the risk of not having any customers, and so not making any money. A punter’s appearance, age and ethnicity are used to indicate trustworthiness, as is their compliance with instructions (2005: 57–70). In Five Daughters, once news of the first two murders is out, the women working the streets whisper to each other: regulars only. It makes sense. Less risk.

In the show customers (‘punters’) are shadowy figures: one walks into a café, later we see one of the sex workers being punched from inside a car. Steven Wright, the man eventually sentenced for all 5 murders is almost disembodied in the show; we see his car prowling, then we see his hands on the wheel, and eventually his face, his body, his voice emerge. This relative invisibility makes it easy not to consider who are the punters. If we did, we’d see that they are very ordinary men, they are men you know.

The other punter who appears in Five Daughters is Tom Stephens, the initial suspect. He lurks with flowers at the edge of a police cordon, later we see him driving away with one of the women, hoping to protect her from the unknown threat. The real Tom Stephens was interviewed by the Sunday Mirror:

Michael Duffy (interviewer from Sunday Mirror): You seem a smart, well-educated man. How is it that you can spend time with these people? How is it that you can find common ground with them?

Tom Stephens: I’m sad and lonely. I made compromises on my morals to go down (to the red light area) the first time, so I suppose getting involved with them isn’t a huge leap.

Michael Duffy, Sunday Mirror, 17/12/2006

Duffy and Stephens conspire to deny that punters play any part in the moral denigration that they easily ascribe to the prostitutes. For Duffy ‘these people’ are the inverse of smart and well-educated, they are abject. Stephens knows the red light district is a damned place, but it holds such an attraction for him. In this way, neither recognises what customers contribute to the moral status of those who sell sex. In my research into Punternet, a website where men write customer service reviews of commercial sex, this is quite common. Men speak of brothels as good when they are clean, safe and discreet and of prostitutes as good when they offer gifts beyond the formal contract. And they speak of each other as potential harmers, who could damage ‘good’ girls if they don’t treat them right. It’s never them who cause harm.

Wacquant says this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise us, it is “unexceptional” to say we all live in a moral world (Wacquant, 2002: 1472). Public discussions of prostitution tend to circulate a sterile debate between ‘free choice’ and ‘trafficked’ exploitation in a way which negates the complexity of prostitution by presenting it primarily as a question of worker’s agency. Addressing prostitution is impossible without addressing customers, and addressing customers requires understanding of how they constitute the market as moral and negotiate their own roles and identities within that.

References

Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullompton: Willan.
Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography’. American Journal of Sociology, 107(6) 1468–1532.

Congratulations on getting married, now you have to leave your job

Scott Taylor — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:00:12 +0000

Researching women and work can be really puzzling. There is a series of things I genuinely don’t understand: how it feels to earn your living in a workplace where you are the only woman or in a small minority; what it’s like frequently finding yourself the only person of your sex in workplace contexts; the emotions generated by spending lots of time in ‘between men’ cultures, where conversations tend to focus on masculine activities or are conducted according to masculine norms. In doing academic work I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of women and work, by making sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered inequality part of students’ lives and understandings through my teaching, along with doing some research into why women leave prestigious professions like law to go into more satisfying work[1]. More recently, whenever possible, I’ve been making small changes and differences in my own workplace and working practice (but not through positive discrimination, dear me no, that would be illegal in the UK). But it doesn’t seem to make much difference, academic work… imagine that… or anything I do in my own working context, business schools… wonder why…

I think I started to understand women and work a little better when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Library in east London with my partner – it’s in a lovely building in Old Castle St, E1 (a converted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a backstreet within sight and sound of the City, but definitely not on the main drag. A location that seems unpleasantly appropriate, given the cultural hostility to women in the UK financial industries – reading Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture is one of the most disturbing introductions to gendered discrimination or inequality in that milieu. All business school students should read it… anyway, I like that the library is within reach of everyone working in the Gherkin and the other various glass and steel phallic symbols around there.

Being in the library is a lovely sensory experience – quiet, calm, pleasant. (I’m thinking here ‘the way libraries used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for thinking. The impression from reading pieces on this website is that academics interested in the experience of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizzing an innocent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pettinger getting lost and starting to think about work and sound ,Tim Strangleman walking around galleries thinking about organizational death. The experience I had in the library that day was similar.

The exhibition was a corker — called Office Politics: Women in the Workplace 1860–2004, it was a brilliantly put together mixture of furniture (with desks designed specifically to ensure women’s modesty and protect men’s marriages – as an antidote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to position women in relation to work, organization, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the marriage bar.

You’ve probably heard of the marriage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organizations that women had to leave on getting married. No question, no debate, no exceptions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got married, not long before I was born. Well within living memory. In some organizations you could come back as a temporary employee without any benefits or security (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a barrier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The Foreign Office was especially reluctant to remove it, waiting until the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1970s sort of outlawed its implementation. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and reproductive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a colleague from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I started to do some digging in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, an archive that’s been called a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a systematic dataset. One diary lodged there, written between 1938 and 1944, tells a wonderful story of a woman working in the civil service. She fell in love with a married man, became pregnant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resignation under the marriage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reasonable basis that she wasn’t married but pregnant, and there was no rule about pregnant women having to leave. Rational argument for a bureaucratic setting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and continued to work for the Civil Service, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and family – her children are currently editing her diaries for publication, when they can find time — they’re both senior academics, at Imperial College and Oxford). Another diarist, who stayed single and therefore kept her job, was brave enough to call herself a ‘Feminist’ (with a capital F) in her workplace in 1940s Glasgow. (Weirdly, this diarist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bottom of – strange feeling to read her diary, as she describes sitting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from reading her diary, because she prods her colleagues all the time about their views on women and work – making trouble, causing conflict, challenging, then writing it all up. She would have made a good academic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glasgow University, first in the engineering faculty, then as an industrial psychologist of all things. Whereas his sister seems to have spent her working life as a clerk, writing wonderful diaries and being a Feminist.

We’re not entirely sure where this research is heading, but it does feel like it’s taking us into interesting areas empirically and theoretically. We’re finding that women writing about their experience of work responded to the marriage bar in very different ways. Some argued for it, telling workmates that it was unethical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn independently; others were strongly opposed, wanting to maintain financial and social independence from husbands. The women report very different responses from their male colleagues, from extremely conservative to relatively radical. Above all, reading the diaries has given us a healthy respect for the variety of human experience and response to regulation. In short, as ever, we’re finding that a societal and organizational desire to impose a norm, to create a divide according to biological sex, was continually contested, circumvented, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actually had to leave work because they got married. So if you know of any friends or relatives with this experience who would be willing to tell their stories, please contact either me or Emma Jeanes.

[1] Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Gendering in the holistic milieu: A critical realist analysis of homeopathic work’, Gender, Work & Organization, 17(4).

Alan Sillitoe and other Nottingham Lads

Lynne Pettinger — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:19:08 +0000

I know a few Nottingham lads, mostly living in London these days. My friends had granddads who worked in one of the big Nottingham light industries: for Players, Boots or Raleigh, unless they were unlucky and had to go down the mines. I’ve had a lot of fights with my Nottingham friends about the cultural identity of the midlands. Being from Yorkshire means I look down on the light industries; the midlands are not northern enough, they just aspire to be (see Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice). My friends reckon that the shared coalmining heritage, as the picture suggests, brings Nottingham into the north, and that just begs the answer “scabs” (see GB84 by David Peace for a fictionalised account of the miners’ strike for more).

Alan Sillitoe[i], who died today, makes the case for Nottingham being psychogeographically northern better than anyone else. The world of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday morning already discussed on the site, is what my friends’ granddads had when they were back from the war: they were skilled on the production line, got a good pay packet and tipped it up to their mothers, and then to the wife, getting 5 shillings back for fags and booze.

In ‘Mr Raynor the school teacher’, one of the short stories that are part of ‘the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ collection[ii], there are hints as to the changing relations of power in post-war Nottingham: the incipient decline in authority and the rise in women’s employment concomitant with increasing sexualisation in the public sphere. Mr Raynor’s class don’t mind how his attention drifts from teaching, they’re not committed to school. Mr Raynor is one of the few almost-sympathetic authority figures in Sillitoe’s early work; sympathetic because he isn’t quite in control (as the student Bullivant, with his “Teddy boy ideas” susses out). It’s an open secret that Mr Raynor likes to watch the girls working at the department store across the road from his school. The shopgirls come and go; work for them just fills in a space between leaving school and getting married (or getting pregnant). He has his favourites amongst them and the story focuses on his memory of the best:

As she walked she had carried her whole body in a sublime movement conducive to the attraction of every part of it, so that he was even aware of heels inside her shoes and finger-tips buried perhaps beneath a bolt of opulent cloth.
Sillitoe, 2007: 69

The shop worker here is as much the object of consumption as the bolts of cloth and the suits she sells. As the class misbehaves and distracts him, Mr Raynor tries hard to hold onto the image of the nameless girl, who is both the cause of his distraction and the thing that keeps him going through the daily grind. The voyeuristic gaze isn’t enough, though by the time the (married) Mr Raynor has plucked up the courage to talk to his favourite, she’s stepping out with a young man and he’s missed his chance. And then, this emancipated, sexy young woman, earning her living at the coalface of the new consumer society, becomes a woman punished: she’s killed by her young man. Mr Raynor mourns her, but his life continues its cycle of keeping just enough control of the classroom to leave time for more daydreaming.

References

Maconie, S. (2007) Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. Ebury Press.
Peace, D. (2005) GB84. Faber and Faber.
Sillitoe, A. (2007 [1959]) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Harper Perennial.

[i] I saw Alan Sillitoe at the Essex Book Festival in 2008. He gave a charming talk about his writing, tolerated all the questions being about his early work very patiently, and ended by demonstrating his hobby: morse code. It was a splendid vision of his private passion.

[ii] The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner itself speaks to the chip on every rebel or awkward sod’s shoulder.

Choosing Well

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:45:55 +0000

H&M, the Scandinavian fast fashion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employees of a knitwear factory in Bangladesh which is subcontracted by H&M to make those cute stripy jumpers, and that really useful little black cardy.

My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say anything to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buying anything here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try anything on (I think she might go back without me; and I will confess to her now I was wearing something I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was persuaded so well by her arguments against reading Bangladeshi working women as cultural dopes, stepping blindly into exploitative paid work whilst carrying the burden of housework and facing down challenges to their reputations as good women. Kabeer’s incorporation of how culture is “woven into the content of desire itself” (2000: 328) is persuasive. Women chose paid work outside the home and still counted as good, they liked working in a clean place for good wages far more than labouring in a field, and took pleasure in contributing to meeting their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the garment workers agency and voice. They are not an innately malleable, grateful, reserve army of nimble fingered knitters; they are not victims of a disorganized capitalism where feminism and neoliberalism combine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the normalisation of the dual income family working for low wages in insecure employment marks a failure of feminism, for (without realising it) privileging choice no matter what.

When War on Want describe sickening factory conditions and I read of these injuries and deaths, this is damage, and Fraser’s is the line that persuades me. As I don’t want my consumption practices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because political pressure on H&M makes them choose a new subcontractor (one less famous for its working conditions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleeding, liberal, western heart. This is damage too. I’m not adding much to an unanswerable debate other than easing my own conscience by playing out the tensions: strong conclusions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

References

Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56.
Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.

Bodywork

Dawn Lyon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:58:56 +0000

‘Christy, Southwest Airlines’ — Brian Finke

I was looking for images of ‘bodywork’ recently for a seminar discussion with students and came across Brian Finke’s collection on Flight Attendants (see: http://www.brianfinke.com/). I was drawn to this photograph because of the circularity of the different forms of labour it reveals. Bodywork as the work of maintaining a body in the right shape for the job (Shilling, 1993) – also a form of ‘aesthetic labour’ (Witz et al, 2003) — is clear, quite literally, in the pre-defined form of the eyebrow. At the same time, bodywork in Wolkowitz’s (2002) elaboration of the term, where one person’s body is the site of another’s person’s labour, is shown in the hands undertaking the shaping of the eyebrow. But this looks like something that’s happening (or staged as happening) between colleagues. So it also suggests a moment at work infused with intimacy, a back-stage time of informal preparation and relationship, before the aircraft interior itself becomes a formal workspace and the performance really begins.

References
Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Witz, A, C Warhurst, D Nickson (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization’ Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolkowitz, C. (2002) ‘The social relations of body work’, Work, Employment and Society 16(3): 497–510.

A short exchange with Miriam Glucksmann about ‘Women on the Line’

Miriam Glucksmann — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:45:02 +0000

In 1982, Miriam Glucksmann published a book about the experience of women working ‘on the line’ at a factory in West London which produced speedometers for cars. She had left her higher education teaching job to work in this factory, not with the intention of producing an ethnography, nor with any illusions of ‘joining the working class’, but as something which arose from her involvement in feminist and socialist politics. When she later decided to write about and publish her account, she was obliged for legal reasons to do so under a pseudonym, Ruth Cavendish. Last year, Routledge decided to republish Women on the Line, with a new introduction, and this time, under Glucksmann’s real name. Here Miriam Glucksmann responds to some questions posed by Dawn Lyon about the original book and its republication in 2009.

Women on the Line is often described as a seminal ethnography of 1980s British sociology of work. Its republication in 2009 has attracted considerable interest, especially in the US. How would you describe the reception of the original publication of the book?

The enforced pseudonym and anonymity the first time round meant that I got very little sense of its reception. I couldn’t give any talks or publicise it at all. People wrote to Routledge asking to be put in contact with Ruth Cavendish, and they forwarded everything to me but of course I wasn’t able to reply to anything! Yet for many years afterwards I often met people who knew me, and were familiar with Women on the Line, but were unaware of the connection between us. It kept on happening right up to the appearance of the new edition published under my own name. My sense is that the book was quite widely read both in the UK and abroad, and by feminist and other activists as well as academics over the next few years, especially given the greater interest in studying and campaigning around work during the 1980s.

In terms of ‘method’, although your working at the factory was not intended as research, what do you think about the approach of ‘knowing by doing’ as a way of understanding work, in your case, quite literally working on the line – especially in a context in which the interview has come to dominate qualitative research?

Knowing by doing was certainly crucial, in the sense that my understanding of what was going on in the factory and how it affected the women would have been impossible without experiencing it myself. The ‘doing’ included not only the work itself, but also the numerous interactions with the women around me. The chatting that this involved ranged far wider than what would normally be covered in an interview, and of course I wasn’t determining the course of the conversation either. However, the interpretive ‘knowing’ part of it relied also on my pre-existing knowledge and analytical frames, and all the ‘doing’ was necessarily filtered through and mediated by what was already in my head, and my political preoccupations and questions in doing the job in the first place.

There are more photographs in the republished version of the book than in the original. Can you comment on the place of images in representations of work, and on the relationship between the written and the visual in this book.

I would have liked to include far more photos than the publishers would allow, and in colour. The black and white ones don’t really do justice to the situation and don’t come over nearly as well as the colour ones on the cover. I hope it makes a difference to readers being able to see what some of my work-mates looked like, especially those whose life stories are recounted. Similarly the spatial and physical layout of the shopfloor, and some examples of machinery should help to bring the narrative to life. There are so very few images available of the faces of women doing this kind of work (like the one of Alice who is looking straight at me taking her photo) so the more we can collect the better, especially when the women are engaged in the process rather than being objectified as ‘women workers’. However, these photos were taken during the strike/lockout, so everyone is looking more relaxed and happier than they would have done if they had actually been working!

The covers of the two editions are different. What is the story of them?

Cover of original publication, 1982

I have always disliked the cover of the first edition because it is so misleading. So many of the women came from the Caribbean or Indian subcontinent, yet the picture suggests white women only. The first version was even worse as they were all given long blonde hair. I objected and asked for black or Asian women to be represented. The concession was to give one of them curly hair, but I think she still looks white. Routledge wouldn’t budge further. The portrayal of the line was also misleading showing the women facing it rather than at right angles to it, so contradicting my description of how the spatial layout affected social and physical interaction.

Cover of republication, 2009

So of course I am much happier with the cover of the new edition, which I chose and which uses two of my own photos taken in the factory back in 1977. I was surprised how well the original negatives scanned in especially as it was only a little instamatic camera. In fact these are much better quality than the original prints. So that’s a lesson to keep old negs in a safe place! Now we have older black women on the cover, as well as a very young Irish worker, suggesting the age and ethnic composition, and you can see the line, and all the clutter. The ‘product’ is also clearly visible, and of course this would not have been possible in the 1982 edition.

Mr Walker, It’s All Over: Gender Politics in Office Songs

Lynne Pettinger — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:20:12 +0000

Nowaytomakealiving.net is named after a mishearing of the Dolly Parton song 9 to 5, one of a small number of songs about office work. 9 to 5 is the theme song to the 1980 film, where Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda seek revenge on a sexist boss who harasses them and steals their ideas. Gender politics, the constraint of living within industrialised organisational time, solidarity in the workplace and the unfulfilments of work (‘There’s a better life, and you think about it don’t you?’) are all themes in the film, which the song hints at (here sung with the surprising assistance of adults dressed as disney characters).

The narrator in Billie Jo Spears’ 1969 country song Mr Walker it’s all Over could have done with some female colleagues like Dolly, Lily and Jane. ‘I don’t like the New York Secretary’s life’, and who can blame her, when it’s too full of men, from the company president on down, with hands ‘reaching out to grab the things that I consider mine’. So she’s heading back to Garden City, Kansas, because ‘the boy next door don’t know it but come June he’s gonna gain himself a wife’. A late-1960s experiment with women working in the big city is here doomed to failure, and an earlier femininity is reasserted.

Step into the Office Baby by Belle and Sebastian is also about office politics and sexual harassment. Here, the roles are reversed, as we might expect in a post-feminist world. She says

We need to talk
Step into my office, baby
I want to give you the job
A chance of overtime
Say my place at nine

He, though, isn’t sure. He’s ‘a slave to work’, he’s ‘only living when I walk amongst office staff’. And he’s not sure that he wants the sort of overtime she has in mind.

She wants him to sharpen up, be a man, complete with retro phallic necktie.

I've got to change my ways
Dress for business every day
A sharp suit and a kipper tie
A big arrow pointing to my fly

It’s not just the inversion of heteronormative expectations that’s notable in the contrast between Mr Walker and Step into the Office, it’s the meaning of private sphere. In 1969, she could escape back home, where her mom and her man will save her. In 2003, he has nowhere to hide: his own place isn’t a sanctuary from work, but a place where work is in his head ‘in bed by nine, my thoughts composed’, and he succumbs to the office affair, goes to her place to ‘take down her little red dress’. The office is no escape from sexual politics.

Who is Responsible for the Photocopier?

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:24:32 +0000

The nurse tells the receptionist there’s no toner left in the photocopier. The receptionist asks admin who says she doesn’t know, she’ll ask Michelle, but she knows that Carol’s good with the photocopier. The receptionist calls Michelle, but Michelle’s not there until the afternoon and the receptionist is due to leave at 12.30, so the message needs passing on. Who knows where Carol’s got to? No-one can sort it, no-one feels like they’re good with machines. They are nurses, not technicians after all.