Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

As historian John Wood Sweet recounts, on October 14, 1793, hundreds of men from New York City's “middling and lower ranks” violently dismantled the bawdy house of Mother Carey. Her perjured testimony had offered evidence for gentleman jurors to acquit a rake charged with raping the stepdaughter of a master harbor pilot, a skilled artisan who believed with the other rioters “that street protests were a legitimate, necessary way to maintain a free government.”1 This plebian protest against justice denied not only responded to the exclusion from formal power of working men during the transitional period of the Early Republic, when the old Dutch families retained influence, but also demonstrated a moral economy of the crowd that enacted its own norms of respectability. A patriarchal order saw rape as a crime between men, damaging a man's property and assaulting his reputation, though the actual victim was a daughter or wife. And according to the crowd's reasoning, working men had every right to avenge a wrong against one of their own by taking matters into their own hands. Moreover, as historians Christine Stansell and Judith Walkowitz found about prostitutes who lived among their neighbors and families, a seduced woman was not necessarily an outcast in these working-class communities—though mores were beginning to change as New York expanded from a village to a metropolis.2Sweet's example of collective action might also illuminate “the relationship between the premodern American political system and the coming of the factory,” the reexamination of which Herbert Gutman called for in his classic 1973 essay, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919.”3 For our purposes, this incident underscores an artisan cultural complexity absent from Gutman's account, focused as he was on those Blue Mondays, ethnic festivals, and leisurely work routines that rejected factory time for more rural rhythms, a way of being that he conflated as premodern and preindustrial. Rereading “Work, Culture, and Society” a half century later and from the standpoint of feminist labor history, I ask, What difference does gender make?It isn't that Gutman ignored women—we read the phrase “working men and women” more than once in his essay. He refers to “the frequent tension between different groups of men and women new to the machine and a changing American society,” “native and immigrant men and women fresh to the factory and the demands imposed upon them by the regularities and disciplines of factory labor,” and “men and women who sell their labor to an employer.”4 But his prototypical hirelings and immigrant laborers were men. Gender, as the language of power and a shaper of identities, was not a category of historical analysis when Gutman wrote his essay,5 so it might be understandable that he missed the gendered dimensions of his own story.Gutman does provide examples whose gendered meanings a sharper analytic can now unlock. He was too good a social historian not to draw attention to the women whose reactions to industrial society he deploys as illustrations of larger themes. Women are present variously as an “Ould Sod” cake hawker, Lowell mill girls, miner's wives, oath-taking shirtwaist strikers, and kosher meat boycotters.6 The mill girls appear more adaptable to factory routines, but they still protested against factory discipline through “ ‘misconduct,’ ‘captiousness,’ ‘disobedience,’ ‘imprudence,’ ‘levity,’ and even ‘mutiny.’ ”7 Blowing on horns and other mouthpieces, the wives of miners blasted the eardrums of men who refused to walk out. For Gutman, oath-swearing girl garment strikers in 1909 exemplify the persistence of religious rituals, while their coreligionist food protesters “did not loot . . . they punished,” with some parading with meat “ ‘aloft on pointed sticks.’ ” The latter defied the market imperatives of industrial capitalism. A century before, hawker Aunt Arlie McVane made capitalism work by furnishing shipyard craftsman the caloric treats for their intermittent bouts of labor. Gutman further pointed out that migrants and immigrants would sustain family and kinship networks. Still, his observations focused on the world beyond the household; others would have to explore the social relations and gender ideologies within. To highlight one lost opportunity, he cites a 1873 poem from Chicago's Workingman's Advocate as a lament against the machine without reading its central metaphor that compares a sewing machine to a wife: “my machine”—a “flesh and blood” version who “can dance—and possibly flirt—/ And make a pudding as well as a shirt.”8 We might add that the working man of 1870 is not the same as the peasant or artisan of 1770, and neither is his wife in the environments of work or home, which suggests that Gutman's broad strokes tended to underestimate behavioral change over time within the US-born laboring class.Though unarticulated in gendered terms, the manhood question haunts “Work, Culture, and Society.” To be dependent was to be like old Europe, Gutman recognizes; artisans feared losing the independence they had fought so hard to achieve. He points to male shoemakers and railmen, quotes from the labor press, and follows such discourse over time. But something is missing. For all his gender equivalencies, he neglects the wage-earning women bemoaning how the lord of the loom, like the lord of the lash, sought to enslave working people. On the eve of the Civil War, Lynn women marched under a banner declaring that “American Ladies” would not be “slaves.”9 In doing so, they were defining themselves against the loss of bodily integrity and exploitation of Black women who actually were chattel slaves. Gutman here is concerned only with “free labor,” despite examples that suggest how workers saw employers threatening the lines between free and not free labor, undermining their manly independence at a time when womanhood, like slavery, signaled dependency—and victimization.Gutman published just as feminist activists were revitalizing the Marxist concept of reproductive labor, a concept that raised questions about the other side of the paycheck, the quotidian labors of life necessary to develop and sustain labor power, socialize the next generation, and maintain or disrupt the social order through the making of people.10 These tasks underwent their own transformation—even while the mismatch between industrial time and family time persisted into the twenty-first century. As historians Dana Frank and Annelise Orleck later emphasized, married women and mothers mobilized as breadgivers—as reproductive laborers, we would say now—and not merely as inheritors of preindustrial mores that Gutman assumed for the bread rioters.11 The old adage “Women's work is never done,” the labor of daily provisioning and care, only begins to capture how the needs of dependents defy the school bell no less than the time clock. Did responsibility for feeding, nursing, clothing, and comforting the household lead some women to remain preindustrial longer than their male counterparts, or did such family labor only thrust caregivers into functioning to a double beat, care time and industrial time, that of the factory and related institutions, which defined meal times and divided day from night, despite calls for care, which could overflow set times? Or was the puncturing of housework by care imperatives a fiction, only a problem of the privileged few and then relegated to servants? Few women could live merely by what feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker called the dailiness of women's lives, but most faced the biological cycles of pregnancy and childbirth.12Of course, we cannot reduce women to domesticity or forget that the home remained a workplace for making products, an extension of the factory, as well as a place for transforming bought items into consumable items, such as flour into bread.13 Daughters were among the first industrial workers, and Gutman culls their reactions to a factory system shared with men. We hear Lucy Larcom on leaving Lowell explaining, “ ‘I am going where I can have more time.’ ”14 Whether men had a rural home to return to is another question.Aunt Arlie actually had much company as commodification reshaped reproductive labor. As early as the 1790s, women in port cities like Baltimore, historian Seth Rockman tells us, sold their services as cleaners, sewers, food preparers, and sex workers primarily to men who had to pay for what other men received for free from wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.15 In ways predating industrial capitalism, women continued to sell sex and to breastfeed for pay; online platforms and gestational surrogacy represent modern versions of commodified reproductive labor.16 Those employing another woman to undertake domestic work exchanged money for labor obscured through a process of pastoralization, as historian Jeanne Boydston documented, that separated the home from the factory.17 In comparing the trajectories of Irish immigrant domestics, Black migrants following emancipation, and Chinese manservants, historian Andrew Urban has now done for household labor what Gutman did for those newly confronted with the factory system: he shows waves of workers having to adjust to control over their labor by others setting their pace as well as their tasks.18 We might include subsequent generations of Mexican, Filipina, and other immigrants who became the paid care and domestic workers at the end of the twentieth century, who had to adjust to new appliances and solvents but undertook jobs not so different than earlier household workers.19Gutman's indebtedness to the new British labor historians, most prominently E. P. Thompson, is apparent in his attention to time-discipline, evocation of moral economy, and emphasis on culture in the making of class.20 Historian Joan Scott famously took Thompson to task in a mid-1980s essay for considering only women textile workers but not women artisans, an omission emblematic of his universalizing understanding of both equality and the language of class. Gutman followed Thompson in not distinguishing women from men in their confrontation with the new systems. Unlike Gutman, Thompson discussed “the domestic sphere” but, Scott argues, did so in a naturalized way as both a preindustrial locus of women's power but “also the place from which politics cannot emanate because it does not provide the experience of exploitation that contains within it the possibility of the collective identity of interest that is class consciousness.”21 It was precisely the realm of reproduction, the home and community, that Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and other socialist feminists viewed, contra Engels, as an incubator of political action for women.22Behind this omission stood the understanding of work held by Thompson, Gutman, and the New Labor History. As Scott beautifully puts it, “Work, in the sense of productive activity, determined class consciousness, whose politics were rationalist; domesticity was outside production. . . . The antitheses were clearly coded as masculine and feminine; class, in other words, was a gendered construction.”23 Perhaps this usually unacknowledged gendered concept of work—and the work ethic Gutman sought to problematize—is why prominent feminists have embraced antiwork politics (as have anarchists and some socialists), however utopian they may seem, which is often the point.In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Kathi Weeks has provided the theoretical foundation for such a position. Like Scott and Boydston before her, she disrupts the naturalization or pastoralization of work and questions its status as a social and political good. Calls for “the refusal of work” she sees as more than a protest against “the extraction of surplus value or the degradation of skills.” These cries also have embraced “the ways that work dominates our lives.”24 The goal then becomes to reduce work enough so there are the resources to live outside of it because, as journalist Sarah Jaffe has shown for contemporary creative industries and caring jobs, “work will not love you back.”25 Organized white workers who marched under the banner of “8 Hours for What We Will” understood this, as did Black men and women who countered the oppression of the Jim Crow South by stealing time for pleasure or, like other laborers, walking away from jobs when they could.26 The National Welfare Rights Organization also embraced this critique by refusing to equate the coerced labor of workfare with work undertaken to maintain households.27 Today, fast food servers, Starbuck baristas, and home health aides join this chorus in protesting time theft and arbitrary schedules, as well as low wages. Like Lucy Larcom, they want to control their time—a problem that the pandemic magnified for parents, especially mothers, left without child care.28 With the rise of remote work for the more privileged, homes have become schools and workshops, resembling the homes of Gutman's artisans.Laboring people's rejection of capitalist organization of work and its imposed work ethic was precisely the problem that Gutman illuminated. His analysis was limited and incomplete—it looked at the factory and not the household and, we could add, wage labor and not slavery. Nonetheless, rereading “Work, Culture, and Society” in light of what commentators call the Great Resignation provides a usable past for refusing work as we know it, reminding us that other worlds are possible.