The Women and Men of 1926 — how women and men built patriarchy together

This is no longer a summary of Sue Bruley. What follows is the Patriarchy editorial view.

Bruley found the right phrase: labour contract

In the South Wales coalfield, family organization is visible without much theory.

The man went underground, brought home the main wage, and paid for that role with physical risk. The woman ran the home, children, food, clothing, money, and the daily system built around mine work.

Bruley calls the foundation of marriage a labour contract.

That is a better place to begin a discussion of patriarchy than a simple list of who held formal authority. Before ideology, there was an exchange of work.

The roles differed, but each carried a duty and gave a person a recognized place in the family. Both could be hard.

Male authority came covered in coal dust

Look only at public and household authority and the miner appears to hold the better position. He is the breadwinner. His work sets the rhythm of the home. The union, club, politics, and much of public life are male worlds.

Then Bruley takes us underground.

Men worked low seams lying down, often in water and coal dust. The mine left damaged lungs, broken backs, blindness, accidents, and early physical decline. A man could become unable to work the coalface in his forties and lose earnings and status together.

That was the male side of the bargain.

A history that counts authority and forgets the duty attached to it will make breadwinner status look much cheaper than it was. In this family system, the standing of the provider was tied to the obligation to provide.

Stop the mine and the roles move

The 1926 Lockout created an accidental experiment.

Mine work stopped. Men stopped performing the old daily job. Part of women’s domestic workload disappeared with the cycle of feeding, washing, and maintaining working miners.

Bruley describes this as a weakening of the material basis of the sexual division of labour.

The roles moved quickly. Men cooked, peeled potatoes, served food, carried water, and washed dishes in communal canteens. Women entered committees, miners’ institutes, street politics, and picket lines.

The division of labor turned out to be tied to work more tightly than a purely ideological account would suggest.

Women went public. Men went into the kitchen

This is awkward evidence for a simple story in which men excluded women from public life because men wanted power for its own sake.

When the economic arrangement changed, the border between spheres weakened with it. No mass conversion of every miner’s political beliefs was required. Different work had to be done.

Communal kitchens needed hands, so men cooked and served. The community needed organizers and picketers, so women moved into public action.

This does not prove that the old division was always fair. It does show why the division could persist: it rested on a concrete household economy and a division of necessary work.

The white shirt policed manhood

On the picket line, women’s role in the male system becomes literal.

Women publicly shamed men who returned to work. White shirting attacked the strikebreaker’s masculine standing: an honorable miner held the line with his workmates; a blackleg failed the local test of manhood.

Women were expanding their own political space while enforcing a male code at the same time.

Men were not the only people policing masculinity.

After defeat, women helped preserve male status

Not every man got his old work back after the Lockout. A miner without a mine lost wages, public standing, and a major piece of masculine identity. Unemployment gave him more time for domestic labor, but work coded as female could underline the fact that he was no longer the breadwinner.

Bruley records something that matters greatly to our argument: women helped uphold the male status of unemployed husbands.

She reads this as the preservation of patriarchal values. The fact itself is still striking. Women did not merely wait for men to rebuild the old role. They participated in protecting it.

Both sexes maintained the system

Here our reading departs from the usual one-way account.

The South Wales mining family is difficult to describe as a male regime imposed on women solely for male benefit.

Two people rebuilt it every day.

The man went into the mine and brought home wages. The woman turned those wages into a household and raised the family. Male status required dangerous work. Female authority inside the home required an enormous load of unpaid work.

When the mine stopped, the contract shifted. When men lost status, women helped preserve it.

That is what a system looks like when both sides receive something from it and both sides pay for it.

You cannot edit half the contract

A patriarchal role is a package of duty, status, and decision rights within an area of responsibility.

A man who claims authority while refusing to provide stability or answer for the consequences has broken the bargain.

Power without responsibility is tyranny.

The reverse matters too. If a man keeps the old duties to provide, pay, protect, and answer for outcomes while losing the corresponding right to shape family decisions, the bargain has broken in the other direction.

Responsibility without decision rights is exploitation.

Release one side from an old duty and the reciprocal duty has to be reconsidered as well. An old bill without the old rights is no longer a contract.

Where we part company with Bruley

Bruley reads her evidence through the history of women’s emancipation. Women’s efforts to preserve male status after defeat therefore appear mainly as evidence of the durability of patriarchal practice.

The same evidence carries another implication.

The male role had value to people besides the man himself. Wives and children depended on the mining wage. The community depended on workers, union solidarity, and households capable of functioning after the dispute.

Protecting male status could preserve inequality. It could also preserve a family bargain that had practical value in a world with few stable alternatives for these households.

A one-way model misses that part of the mechanism.

Count the whole contract

Marriage can function as a labour contract between the sexes. To understand authority, first count the work each person is expected to do.

Breadwinner status was purchased with a breadwinner duty. In a mining family, that role could cost health and life.

Roles move when the economy moves. Stop the mine and men and women quickly start doing work their old sex roles had assigned elsewhere.

Women also maintained the male role. White shirting and the protection of unemployed husbands’ status show two different forms of the same participation.

Change the contract as a whole. Reciprocal obligations cannot disappear while old male duties are treated as permanent.

Old duties without old rights are not a contract

The Women and Men of 1926 gives us more than Bruley set out to find.

She wanted to put women back into a history usually told about miners. In doing so, she also shows an older family order being reproduced through the daily exchange of male and female work.

In the South Wales coalfield, patriarchy was built by both sexes. He carried his part of the bargain into the mine. She carried hers through the home. When the bargain stopped working, the roles started moving.

That is how patriarchy should be counted: authority, duties, risk, status, and the right to leave a role when the reciprocal side of the bargain no longer exists.

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