Cockburn 1983

Cockburn, Cynthia. Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change. Pluto Press, 1983.

marxist approaches to labor of compositors can't account for the gender dynamics within the industry

apprenticeship in a chapel for a set number of years, male rituals

after industrialization: "Womena nd children, who had characteristically worked and earned within a family context, were increasingly drawn into employment in factories and mines. Here they came under the control of a rival authority -- the capitalist employer. Men felt their masculine familial identity, along with their class identity, threatened by the changes." (20)

new trade societies, the forerunners of trade unions

1793, London compositors formed a committee to represent their interests, the Union Society (Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made such initiatives illegal -- repealed in 1824-5 and they began to develop into trade unions)

"In their own defence the compositors redoubled their efforts to control the labour supply, defining printing unambiguously as a craft, staking exclusive claim of members of the societies to practise it and limiting entry to the societies." (21)

"Histories of printing in the nineteenth century tend to group three separate activities within the term 'the printing trades': bookbinding, paper manufacture and printing itself. Women did establish, and have maintained, a substantial presence in the first two. But from printing they have been notably absent." (23)

in 1851, there were 3500 women in bookbinding, 7000 in 1871 and 14200 by 1891, with appalling pay

"Women filled distinct, segregated occupations within the binderies, mainly folding the printed sheets, collating the sections and doing the preparatory stitching. These tasks were tacitly acknowledge by the journeymen as 'women's work' and it was only after 1840, when a growing demand for books led to mass production and eventually to mechanisation, that demarcation problems arose betweeen men and women in the binderies." (23)

by contrast, no more than 1 in 100 in printing were women; in 1851, only 300 women, only 700 in 1871 and 4500 in 1891, and most not doing compositing but folding and stitching in shops that did that work too

women perceived as having more nimble fingers, doing work that can be picked up quickly (24)