Suchergebnisse

Industrial change in England 1780-1820 -- The Poor Law and the parish apprentice -- Factory apprenticeship : structure, process and legislation -- The supply and distribution of parish apprentices -- Textile enterprise and the parish apprentice -- The costs and benefits of parish apprenticeship -- Parish factory apprenticeship and the nature of work -- The making of a gendered labour force? -- The exploitation of little children -- The voices of the children -- The protection of parish apprentices -- The neglect of parish apprentices -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Bibliography

Business historians have failed to recognize British women's participation in business. Beginning in the eighteenth century, English women overcame a range of socially constructed constraints to assume a more important role in financial and entrepreneurial activi-ties than has been hitherto acknowledged. Women's apparent affinity with the service sector in employment, self-employment, and business enterprise has encouraged a limited view of their activities, relegating them to a separate, female sphere, rather than viewing them as part of the masculine world of rational profit maximization. Several approaches drawing upon social and cultural ideas are proposed to rectify the prevailing blindness toward issues of gender. The eclectic methodological underpinning of British business history offers some hope that the topic of gender can soon be incorporated into the discipline.

This paper explores the processes by which the majority of British men came to wear a suit for most occasions during the first part of the twentieth century. It examines the nature of the product and emphasises the gendered experience of making and buying suits. Using the Leeds tailoring trade as a case study, it concludes that the rise of the suit can be attributed to the gendering of production – whereby the intensification of low–paid female labour sustained profitability – and to the gendering of consumption, in which the masculinity of the shopping environment was crucial.