Anna Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives Macmillan, £3.95.
The gate of a small factory owned by Imperial Tobacco used to be on the plain brick side of St Thomas Street in Bristol. Before its closure in 1974, 130 women rushed through those gates just after seven o'clock each morning.
Every effort was made to snatch a cup of tea or at least a fag before work. But more than likely it was a mad rush to the clocking-in machines, a hasty change into the royal blue overalls, and a defiantly nonchalant walk to the machines or work benches to arrive spot on time.
Starting time was dreaded. Empty hours stretched ahead of a seemingly endless repetition of intricate and soul-destroying so-called 'women's work'.
In the world of the factory, the most minor incident will spread around the workers like wildfire, And no matter how insignificant the matter at hand, no one refrains from throwing in their tuppence worth. Quite simply, anything out of the ordinary provides the mainstay of factory life — the welcome relief from the drudgery of the work.
In 1972, one of those welcome incidents must have been the arrival at this Bristol factory, Churchman's, of a sociologist with management's permission to interview the workforce over a period of three months. This sociologist, Anna Pollert, has just published the fruits of her investigation.
In her study Pollert aimed to go beyond the concerns of other recent works on similar themes. She recognises the validity of exploring the interaction of social class and sexual division in the context of two worlds — 'the predominantly male world of wage labour, and the female world of the home'. But Pollert wanted to emphasise the common ground of wage labour, between men and women, the interaction of female exploitation and oppression, of their experience at work and home. Above all, she was interested in how these social relations are likely to change consciousness.
Her book, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives only partially achieves this aim. There are several reasons for the weakness in her study and she recognises an important limitation early on in the book. 'To begin with,' she notes, 'I was naturally scrutinised with a mixture of hostility, suspicion and curiosity... As my motives became clearer — that I really felt most people who had not worked in a factory had no idea of what it was like, and that this is what I wanted to communicate, suspicions softened to incredulity, some amusement and some sympathy.'
Being an 'outsider' who had come to scrutinise had another disadvantage — in a study designed to gain an insight into the relations between work experience in the factory and outside it, Pollert had no involvement in the home, community and social life of her subjects. 'It was simply not on to suggest we meet for a drink in a pub, the normal "neutral" meeting place for men. And I did not have the gall to invite myself into people's houses for tea, or tag along like a chaperone to dances down in the Locarno or the Heart Beat Club'.
Nevertheless, despite the limitations of being an 'interventionist researcher', as Pollert describes herself, the book does manage to grasp the multi-faceted and often contradictory ideas and concerns of the women interviewed.
One problem is simply the time it takes to get to these meaty chapters! The first third of the book is preparing readers to get on to the 'real stuff'. There are a dozen and one annoyingly brief thumb-nail sketches of every subject remotely connected to the book's themes. We learn in a mere two or three pages about the past and future prospects for the entire tobacco industry; or of the history and structure of the Bristol working class extending from the days of Chartism right up to contemporary times; and so on.
The final two thirds of the book makes it worth a read, Pollert presents an extensive cross section of the views of women, interspersing them with analysis, commentary, and conclusions. By and large she avoids a sentimental, romantic, 'plight of the woman worker' approach. Instead she records the fragmentary and often different ideas women expressed about their immediate home situations, their femininity, their union, their self images, their attitudes to management, and to male workers.
But only in the chapter which deals with a one day strike over pay is there a glimpse of the women's ideas on a range of issues not directly related to the immediate experience. For most of the women the strike — which ended in a sell-out by the union leaders — was one big 'non-event' when they had a day at home. These women rapidly slid back into what one of them called 'the humdrum, day to day nothing'.
The strike took others 'outside of their own machine crew, their own department, their own factory.' It opened up a search for general answers that steered their discussions towards 'broad ideological questions' including the Queen, Parliament, the Labour Party, Enoch Powell's racist views, and so on.
Sadly, however, the book fails to link up the potential for change expressed in often a contradictory way by the women themselves, to the broader goal of a socialist society. Pollert stresses the benefits and necessity of electing a woman to represent them. But the need to build a new leadership from the ranks of women workers ends up as a problem separate from any overall political strategy.
Pollert concludes by pointing towards a fusion between women as an oppressed group in society tied to the family and their role as workers 'in a man's world'. She argues that at work women break out of their isolation and however much they are cut off from men, they still exist in the same world of wage labour, Such an approach entails a clear link between fighting for policies which promote the right of women to work, and those like work-sharing with no loss of pay which began to challenge the way capitalist society is organised.
But rather than mapping out her views on the policies which are vital if the fragmentary and contradictory consciousness in the working class is going to be altered, Pollert seems to leave behind the women workers, to conclude with strategic implications for the women's movement.
No one could deny that active feminists should re-orient their activity towards the workplace and 'away from an exclusive preoccupation with domestic and personal experience'. The fight against the Corrie anti-abortion Bill demonstrated the enormous potential and sentiment which exists among women at work.
But this re-orientation does not stem simply from a general need to win working women to feminist ideas. It is vital because today women workers in their struggles at places like Lee Jeans or Royal Pride are providing a lead not only for the 'man's world of wage labour', but also for the active feminist as well.
At a time when the stakes are so high — when entire industries are under attack, not just the odd department — the road to consistent socialist ideas is doubtless a complex one. But there is no doubt that Pollert's 'fusion' process is occurring among significant numbers of women workers. Because of the depth of the crisis, women are taking their rightful place as leaders of their class. And it is on these women that our vision of the future women's movement — if it is to be of mass proportions — must be based.