Gender and deindustrialization: Perspectives from European case studies

This special feature brings together a selection of current research addressing the relationship between deindustrialization and gender. The phenomenon of deindustrialization is usually defined, in economic terms, by a falling proportion of industrial employment as a share of total employment.Footnote ¹ This trend developed unevenly and at different rates but became apparent in much of North America and Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ² Conceived more broadly, the process of deindustrialization has been, in the words of Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcote, “socially complicated, historically deep, geographically diverse and politically perplexing,” with effects that “rippled through all aspects of society.”Footnote ³ As a growing body of research now demonstrates, it has been a process with profound implications in terms of class and gender.

The long-term social and political implications of deindustrialization have attracted renewed public attention since the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of populist nationalist movements, marked by the 2016 victories of Donald Trump, the pro-Brexit movement in the UK, and far-right electoral gains across continental Europe. But a resurgence of scholarly interest was already apparent, at least in North America, by the early 2000s, driven in no small part by historians turning their attention to a phenomenon that had hitherto been analyzed by political economists and other social scientists.Footnote ⁴ Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison’s Deindustrialization of America (1982), which told a story of corporate disinvestment and its impact on communities, is often cited retrospectively as a founding text for the field.Footnote ⁵ In the British context, there had been early attempts by economists to consider the implications of falling industrial employment for the national economy and a more geographical literature on regional disparities developed in the 1980s.Footnote ⁶ By the mid-1980s, there was broad agreement from sympathetic scholars on both sides of the Atlantic that the process of deindustrialization differed fundamentally from periods of cyclical recession.Footnote ⁷ More recently, the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of “deindustrialization studies” has been dominated by “bottom-up” studies of working-class people and places whose experiences have in many ways been defined by the disappearance of major sources of industrial employment. Thus, a substantial body of work has emerged from anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and literary scholars, as well as historians, much of it informed by oral history or ethnographic methods.Footnote ⁸ Such studies have paid particular attention to working-class experiences of plant closure, the lasting impact of such closures on neighborhoods, towns and regions, and to memory, cultural representations and (de-)industrial heritage. While a number of edited collections and journal issues have already served to stake out the field, this is the first to focus specifically on gender.Footnote ⁹

As Clarke and McIvor et al. observe in their historiographical essay in this volume, research on deindustrialization has increasingly engaged with the gendered impacts of socioeconomic rupture, illuminating, in particular, the implications of the loss of industrial jobs and related social practices for working-class masculinities. The collapse of employment in sectors such as mining, steel, shipbuilding, and automobile manufacturing attacked the very foundations of class and gender identities in communities where normative masculinities were fundamentally tied up with occupational identities, notions of “hard work,” and men’s presumed role as “providers” for women and children.Footnote ¹⁰ Considerable attention has thus focused on men as “displaced workers,” a term first coined in the USA for those whose jobs had been cut or relocated due to industrial restructuring. But scholars have also registered the profound effects of deindustrialization on other social groups, exploring family relationships and the outlook of a generation of young men who grew up in the shadow of masculinities shaped by industrial cultures, but without access to the secure forms of employment those industries once offered.Footnote ¹¹

Women have tended to figure in this literature primarily in their capacity as wives or partners of displaced workers—resisting or managing the impact of deindustrialization on their families and wider communities.Footnote ¹² And while some studies of male-dominated sectors have attended to the voices of women in those workplaces, industries such as the textile sector, where women made up a more significant proportion of the workforce, remained rather peripheral in the development of deindustrialization research.Footnote ¹³ This relative neglect is striking, given that there is a well-established literature on women’s industrial labor in the twentieth century, and feminist labor history has done much since the 1980s to recognize and rectify the extent to which women’s work had been “ignored” by scholars in that field.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite this, the field of deindustrialization studies developed similarly to “traditional” labor history: male workers and male-dominated heavy industries remained the primary center of interest and central protagonists in the story.

It is only in the last few years that deindustrialization scholars have begun to address more fully the experiences of women as industrial workers.Footnote ¹⁵ While the loss of jobs in male-dominated industries that were seen as symbols of national prosperity loomed large from the 1980s, the impact of global trade liberalization since the 1990s has focused greater attention in the past decade on sectors which employed women in significant numbers—the garment industry, light engineering, and the manufacture of electrical goods. In the UK, the closure of the Burberry manufacturing plant in the Rhondda Valleys in 2007 illustrated that even renowned, high-value, and long-established brands had minimal attachment to place in the pursuit of lower costs.Footnote ¹⁶ In France, a series of high-profile factory closures in the 1990s and 2000s provoked a public debate about off-shoring which, combined with the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have acted as a stimulus to a wave of research on deindustrialization that takes greater account of women, gender and sectors beyond heavy industry.Footnote ¹⁷ In the rather different political context of the former Yugoslavia, the closure of large swathes of the textile sector in the 1990s and 2000s, following the collapse of socialism and the Yugoslav Wars, likewise provided the impetus for new research.Footnote ¹⁸

As these examples suggest, the geographical focus of deindustrialization research has shifted significantly over this period: At the turn of the twenty-first century, the agenda was being set by North American scholars and European research was sparse; this situation has been reversed, as interest in the field in the USA has receded while there has been a significant growth in European-focused work. The articles in this collection reflect this trend.

This special feature has its origins in a research networking project entitled “After the Factory: Women, Gender and Deindustrialization in European Perspective,” funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The collection includes contributions from the fields of history, sociology, and memory studies, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of deindustrialization studies as a field. The articles gathered in this issue take deindustrialization as a vantage point from which to reflect further on working-class masculinities and communities shaped by industry, while crucially expanding the field of enquiry to take greater account of women’s role as industrial workers through a necessary integration of predominantly feminine workspaces. They address issues such as class, gender, and work-based identities; women’s participation in collective action to defend jobs, and the gendered memory of deindustrialization.

Tim Strangleman’s contribution revisits the literature on masculinity in crisis, with a particular focus on the UK, arguing that the understanding of working-class masculinity that has underpinned much of this work is one-dimensional. What tends to be foregrounded in these studies is a “hard” masculinity that valorizes physical effort and the ability to endure dirty and/or dangerous conditions, as well as the solidarities forged in such conditions. A significant body of evidence has built up on the ways in which this version of masculinity, usually associated with all-male working environments in heavy industry, is destabilized by the loss of such employment and the destruction of such workplaces. In contrast, drawing on autobiographical reflection and evidence from biographical accounts from (former) industrial workers, Strangleman offers a more multi-faceted portrait of working-class masculinities, emphasizing the ethics of care that often characterized relations among male workers of different generations. He points to the quasi-familial forms of socialization of young workers in trades that were entered via apprenticeships and the roles of “father” and “grandfather” figures in workplaces that fostered a culture of long service.

If scholars have contributed to the persistence of a reductive idea of working-class masculinity, this is not without wider cultural and political significance. Indeed, such representations have also predominated in some of the best known—and best-loved—British cultural representations of deindustrializing communities. As Andy Clark notes in his contribution, films such as The Full Monty, Brassed Off, and Billy Elliott have occupied a prominent place in British public memory of deindustrialization. In each of these, white working-class masculinities, built on the values of hard physical labor and the ideal of the male provider, rooted in strong occupational cultures and male-dominated trade unionism, are destabilized as communities are hit by industrial closures. While these films convey a sense of loss, they also suggest that the end of the old world of industry opens the way to something better: as gender boundaries are renegotiated, men rediscover sexual potency and explore long-repressed same-sex attraction (The Full Monty), leave a depressed northern town to find fulfilment in a profession hitherto considered effeminate (Billy Elliot) or even accept that women can join the previously male space of the colliery brass band (Brassed Off).Footnote ¹⁹ All three films play to a certain nostalgia for industrial community (none more so than Brassed Off). Yet there is no mistaking the redemptive arc of their gender narratives: deindustrialization is ultimately framed as a form of modernization. Such cultural scripts are characteristic of the “New Labour” years in the UK, particularly under Tony Blair’s government from 1997, when the politics and culture of the “old” labor movement were to be left behind in favor of a neo-liberal, post-industrial vision of the country’s future. In a similar vein, to perpetuate a one-dimensional view of working-class masculinity, as Strangleman suggests, is arguably to reinforce narratives that serve to devalue working-class culture and communities, by positioning industrial working-class masculinity as something that can unambiguously be consigned to the past.

Strangleman remarks that deindustrialization “reveals taken for granted knowledge about work, place, community and the social.” In their article on the final years of the French domestic appliance company, Moulinex, Jackie Clarke and Fanny Gallot consider what is revealed when restructuring forces women workers to transfer to another factory in order to stay in work. Such constrained mobility is a common feature of restructuring processes but one that has attracted less attention than job loss and unemployment. Offering a gender perspective on this phenomenon, the authors trace the ways in which women’s identities as industrial workers were constructed at Moulinex, the experiences of dislocation and adaptation that accompanied moves to new factories and the difficulties of reconciling mobility with women’s disproportionate share of unpaid caring work. Clarke and Gallot highlight the significance of the semi-rural location of most Moulinex factories and the forms of identity fostered by the company’s strategy of regional dispersal of production sites, before showing how place-based identities, gender, and age intersect in the construction of women’s narratives of mobility. The article illustrates how attending to manufacturing sectors hitherto relatively neglected in deindustrialization research and to women in industry, also opens up new geographies for the field, beyond those regions that were highly dependent on geographically concentrated heavy industries such as coal and steel.Footnote ²⁰

Another aspect of industrial restructuring that has attracted little systematic attention is the question of gender discrimination, direct or indirect, as companies downsized their workforce. This question arises notably in manufacturing sectors with a mixed workforce, where women were often employed in lower skilled and lower paid roles. In her comparative analysis of developments at the French watchmaker Lip in Besançon and the Fiat automobile company in Turin, Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, Anna Frisone documents the mechanisms by which discrimination against women often developed “in disguise.” Lower-skilled jobs were targeted for redundancy at Lip with a disproportionate effect on women, while at Fiat there were attempts to push women out through bullying or by moving them to heavier work, as employers also counted on the strain of the double burden of waged and unwaged work to erode numbers of women on the payroll. At both Fiat and Lip, there was significant mobilization of women in struggles over job losses, accompanied by an explicitly feminist reflection on women’s situation.Footnote ²¹ At the time, these struggles were not understood in terms of deindustrialization, as the concept was not yet widely used in France and Italy. Yet in retrospect they can be seen in the context of a more long-term downward trend in industrial employment in Western Europe that broadly coincided with the expansion of women’s labor market participation. While women were active in struggles to save jobs at Fiat and Lip, participation in collective struggles became more difficult to maintain once they had been made redundant or laid off, despite efforts in the Italian case to mobilize those who were subject to supposedly temporary lay-offs which ultimately became permanent.

In the current state of research, it is difficult to know what lasting impact involvement in these struggles had on the women concerned and we have only limited knowledge of how this generation of women experienced unemployment. Frisone charts two contrasting biographies: that of Alessandra Mecozzi, who continued to work as a trade union official trying to mobilize the unemployed, drawing on her experience of feminist labor organizing in the 1970s, and that of Monique Piton who found herself jobless, homeless, and isolated, after fighting a losing battle to save her job and those of other women at Lip. Piton’s experience as a single woman who lost the key sources of her identity and social status when she lost her job also serves as a counterpoint to the prevailing view that unemployment presents less of a challenge to women’s sense of self than it does to men’s, due to the importance placed on unwaged caring labor in the gender socialization of women. Not all women were wives and mothers.

Andy Clark’s article also draws on interviews with women involved in militant resistance campaigns. Clark draws attention to the mechanisms by which the memory of industrial closures, and of collective mobilization against restructuring plans, have developed along gendered lines. He points to dominant narratives that imagine a very constrained repertoire of working-class gender roles, casting men as providers and protagonists and women as supporters and carers. While these norms were strong in many working-class communities, they were not unaffected by the diffuse cultural influence of feminism and the high level of women’s labor market participation by the 1980s.Footnote ²² Clark’s work on three successful factory occupations led by women workers in Scotland in the early 1980s tells a different story, centering women’s role as wage-earners, their political agency and capacity for collective action.Footnote ²³ Yet the effect of the “cultural circuit” of memory has, he shows, served to downplay the significance and connectedness of these women’s action even in their own memories. This is a product of a popular retelling of the story of deindustrialization and resistance as essentially a story about men and masculinity; however, this public memory has arguably also been reinforced by the academic focus on male-dominated industries and neglect of women’s experiences.

This special feature shows how scholars of gender and deindustrialization are examining the long-term impact of industrial restructuring and closure in an increasingly wide range of sectors and geographies. It invites us to think afresh about gender, work-based identities, and industrial workplace cultures in the deindustrializing context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The historical transformation wrought by deindustrialization, and the associated ruptures in the lives of individuals and communities, provide a vantage point from which to evaluate what Strangleman calls “the world we have lost.” Such ruptures also make visible some of the ways in which women forged identities as industrial workers and wage-earners at a time of increasing female labor market participation, and how they then navigated the threat or reality of unemployment. Given the significant growth in women’s paid employment in the second half of the twentieth century, women’s role as producers and wage-earners merits more prominent consideration within deindustrialization studies, if our aim is to capture and understand the full range of experience. Indeed, in the face of public discourses that are often simplistic and stigmatizing, a more nuanced understanding of working-class masculinities and femininities is of broader social as well as academic value.

Several lines of future enquiry emerge in this collection. As Clarke and McIvor et al. note in their historiographical review, questions of race and migration have remained somewhat marginal to studies of deindustrialization. This special feature does little to substantially address this neglect, but it does point to recent and emerging work which has the potential to reshape the conversation around race, class and gender. Other ways of expanding the research agenda become apparent as we glimpse the lives of women forced to manage the complexities of relocation, directing our attention to the ways in which deindustrialization affects the conditions of social reproduction. As Gábor Scheiring and Anne-Marie Jeannet have observed, deindustrialization “reshapes social cohesion and the division of labor both inside and outside of the family.”Footnote ²⁴ To open up these questions is also to decenter the industrial workplace itself as the locus of deindustrialization and as a primary site of investigation. At the same time, Clark and Frisone’s discussions of women’s collective action to save industrial jobs raise questions about the impact of such struggles in differing local or national contexts, and about the wider role of deindustrialization in reshaping gendered political subjectivities in the late twentieth century. Finally, in view of the questions raised here about public narratives of deindustrialization and their implications, there is clearly much work still to be done by historians and heritage professionals to reconsider which industries and whose experiences are being remembered, and which stories told, in museums, public history programs, and commemorative spaces.