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International Labor and Working-Class History

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2026

Fabrice Bensimon

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Fabrice Bensimon* Affiliation:

Centre d’Histoire du XIXème siècle, Sorbonne Université , France

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Abstract

While many activists in the International shared a common ideological background and some hostility to the way the modern textile industry relied on low-paid female labor, they often differed on how this converted into practical attitudes and policies, depending on national situations, occupational differences, and political leanings. This article first tries to assess how the International discussed female labor centrally, in the congresses, but also in the General Council, using the minutes of the proceedings. It then moves on to a few general points about the attitudes of the British trade unions on women’s work, before focusing on how the question was handled practically at the local level by the London tailors: To do this, it focuses on the way the tailoring trade used both male and female labor. It tries to document the trajectory of Matthew Lawrence, the secretary of the London Operative Tailors, who at the Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) in Lausanne in 1866 argued against a ban on women’s work and who, in April 1867, led a strike of the London tailors, both men and women. The article ends with the debate in France in the labor movement and in the IWMA in the 1860s, when the Proudhonian male breadwinning stance was challenged by feminists and socialists. One example is that of bookbinders in Paris, including Nathalie Le Mel, Eugène Varlin, and Marie Iatskévitch, who opposed any ban on female labor and advocated equal wages.

Keywords

First InternationalInternational Workingmen’s Associationtrade unionwomen’s worktailorsbookbindersFranceBritainKarl MarxEugène VarlinMatthew LawrenceAndré LéoPaule MinckNathalie Le Mel

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Type Special Feature

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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 15

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547926100337 [Opens in a new window]

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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press or the rights holder(s) must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.

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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

On September 7, 1866, in Geneva, the Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) debated “Female and child labour.” Swiss physician Pierre Coullery, from La Chaux-de-Fonds, argued that the International was “struggling for the emancipation of woman as well as man.” He wanted the Association to withdraw women “from street prostitution but also from the prostitution of the workshop.”Footnote 1 French delegates Félix Chemalé, Ernest Fribourg, Blaise Perrachon, and Zéphirin Camélinat also opposed child and female labor in the manufactures, arguing that it “must be strongly denounced as one of the most active causes of the degeneration of the human race and one of the most powerful demoralising agents used by the capitalist class.”Footnote 2 Henri Tolain agreed, and a majority of the congress voted against women’s work. But there was no consensus. London trade unionist Matthew Lawrence replied to the French delegates about “the march of society.” “The fact exists,” he stated, “and it would be a folly to try and condemn women’s work in general; but what we can do is protest vehemently against the exploitation of women as it is done by the capitalist class.”Footnote 3 Two delegates from Paris, Eugène Varlin and Antoine Bourdon, introduced an amendment which reiterated the case put forward by Lawrence: “The woman needing to work so has to live in an honourable way: we must strive to improve her work and not to suppress it.”Footnote 4 However, despite Varlin’s and Bourdon’s arguments, their text was rejected, and that of Chemalé et al. was adopted—we do not know the exact breakdown of the vote.

The debate in Geneva, and on other occasions, reminds us that, while many activists in the International shared some hostility to the way the modern textile industry could rely on low-paid female labor, depending on national situations, occupational differences, and political leanings, they often differed on how this should translate into practical attitudes and policies. This article first tries to assess how the International discussed female labor centrally, in the congresses but also in the General Council (GC). It then moves on to a few general points about the attitudes of the British trade unions to women’s work, before focusing on how the question was handled practically at the local level by the London tailors. It ends with a section on how women’s work was viewed in Paris, especially among the bookbinders.

The stances of the congresses and General Council

The debate held at the Geneva congress in September 1866 resurfaced a year later. The congress held in Lausanne in September 1867 included similar arguments by those who subscribed to a male breadwinning ideal, and an address against women’s work was adopted, at the initiative of the Belgian delegates. In fact, two reports were presented: the “majority report” (on behalf of Alphonse Vandenhouten, Léon Fontaine, and César De Paepe) argued against women’s work in manufacturing, on several grounds: the fact that the “wage of the woman was compensated by the loss in wage of the man”; that it was “a real loss for the family”; that it “tended to perpetuate ignorance,” as mothers who worked 12 hours a day “could not teach their children”; that it led to a “degeneracy of the race,” as mothers could not breastfeed or were exhausted; that “the laws of nature” implied that “every woman [was] bound to be a wife and therefore a housekeeper, then a mother.” The report even discussed the distinct case of widows, the case of young, childless widows, that of childless married women, and the case of single women who would never marry—a “monstrosity” according to the report, which argued that none of these categories of women should work. The report concluded on the fact that the emancipation of women involved removing them from manufacturing so as to be homekeepers, from prostitution so as to be wives and mothers, from ignorance and superstition so as to be educators. The minority report (P. Eslens, Eugène Hins, and Paul Robin) replied to these different points and blamed the masters and employers for the low wages women earned or for the “immorality of the workshops”—a common trope at the time. It argued for the joint struggle of male and female workers for the emancipation of labor in the same associations. The minutes of the congress, however, do not mention whether a vote was held on either report. Relying on a medical report, Chemalé argued against women working with sewing machines.Footnote 5 However, in the following years, women’s sections were set up in several countries, and many women were involved in the strike wave of the period 1868–1870.

The international congresses of the IWMA each gathered a few dozen men and, as far as we know, no woman. However, among the 100 or so members of the GC during its existence, 2 women sat at some stage: Harriet Law (1831–1897) and Marie Huleck née Marie-Louise David. The GC discussed the issue of female labor on several occasions. In August 1866, preparing for the Geneva congress, Marx wrote “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council”Footnote 6 in which he emphasized the importance of limiting the working day to 8 hours “to adult persons, male or female, the latter, however, to be rigorously excluded from all nightwork whatever, and all sort of work hurtful to the delicacy of the sex, or exposing their bodies to poisonous and otherwise deleterious agencies.”Footnote 7 In the paragraph on child labor, Marx differentiated between age groups (9–12, 13–15, 16–17) but not between boys and girls, nor between male and female teenagers. After the congress, on October 2, 1866, Dupont read “a report on the state of industry [in Vienne, south of Lyon] especially referring to the hard lot of the factory women in that place’s branches of industry.” In Vienne, some 25,000 women, i.e., a third of the local population, worked in the cloth factories.Footnote 8 Hermann Jung asked whether it would be “allowed to form a section exclusively of women. The unanimous resolution was that it was permissible.”Footnote 9 In this town, the IWMA branch was in many respects the “Société agricole et industrielle de Beauregard” whose main figure was Henri Couturier, a Fourierist.Footnote 10 On December 11 of the same year, a letter from Varlin mentioned bookbinders, both men and women joining the IWMA in Paris.Footnote 11 When on April 23, 1867, ninety block-printers (xylographes) went on strike in London “against the introduction of the cheap labour of women and asked for pecuniary assistance as their trade was very much depressed,” the GC suggested that the London Trades Council should be petitioned for assistance instead.

On July 28, 1868, Marx opened a discussion on “The influence of machinery in the hands of capitalists,” arguing that “The woman has thus become an active agent in our social production. […]. I do not say that it is wrong that women and children should participate in our social production,” he contended, adding nevertheless that they were “slaves of capital.”Footnote 12 Interestingly, in the discussion that went on at the following meeting, on August 4, Harriet Law argued that “machinery had made women less dependent on men than they were before and would ultimately emancipate them from domestic slavery.”Footnote 13 A week later, Marx argued that “the state must interfere on behalf of the women and children; and a restriction of their hours led, in most instances, to a reduction of the working time of the men.”Footnote 14

A year later, on July 13, 1869, the GC received the adhesion of the “Ovalistes” (silk winders) made up of “about 750 women and upwards of 300 men.” Since June, some 2,000 female “ovalistes” had been on strike in Lyon in France. This was the first known strike of women workers in the country. The strike committee, in which eleven of the nineteen members were men, decided to apply on behalf of the strikers for membership of the IWMA, but the strikers were asked if they wanted to be members after the committee had applied. Both GC members Hermann Jung, a clockmaker, and Johann Eccarius, a tailor, approved, and the aid was agreed. This was obviously the first time an association of working women had joined the International.Footnote 15 Interestingly, Harriet Law, seconded by Milner and Lessner, suggested the matter be brought before the Female Suffrage Association, which was also agreed.Footnote 16 Following the debate on the Second Reform Bill in 1867, when an amendment for women’s suffrage was introduced by John Stuart Mill at Westminster, a nascent suffrage movement was in the making. In the GC, Marx successfully proposed that Philomène Rozan (1842–1921), the strike leader of the Ovalistes, receive “special credentials” to go to the Congress of the International in Basel, although the local section of the IWMA ensured that the position went to Bakunin rather than to a woman.Footnote 17

In the report that Marx wrote in August 1869 on behalf of the GC for the Basel congress, he laid emphasis on the strike of the Ovalistes in Lyon, and he added that “as before at Rouen, the female workers played a noble and prominent part in the movement.”Footnote 18 In the following weeks, several strikes involved women. It was reported, probably by Marx, who was returning from Germany, that the International Bookbinders’ Union of Leipzig had decided to admit female members.Footnote 19 On November 2, it was announced that the Swiss jewel-makers were “endeavouring to establish a union for the female polishers and chain-makers.”Footnote 20

Two years later, Marx, Jung, and Engels, while preparing the conference of the IWMA in London in September 1871, even argued for the “formation of working women’s sections”Footnote 21 and the GC “recommend[ed] the formation of female branches among the working class,” the only caveat being that “this resolution [should] not at all interfere with the existence or formation of branches composed of both sexes.”Footnote 22 This resolution was moved by Marx and was adopted by the conference.

In a nutshell, while it was the strike movements of working women in several countries that led the GC to be specifically interested in organizing them, there was no explicit opposition to women’s work voiced at the London conference and in the GC, unlike in the 1866 and 1867 congresses. While most of the delegates of the Geneva and Lausanne congresses were active in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, many members of the GC were either British trade-unionists, or they were continental artisans who lived and worked in London. To try and understand why and how those in Britain, along with Marx, differed from those who argued in congresses against women’s work, we can try and narrow the lens with a focus on some of the protagonists, first in London and then in Paris.

The British trade unions and women’s work

In Britain, there were still many sectors of craftsmanship which were not open to women, like the watch and clock makers, blacksmiths and silversmiths, carpenters and joiners, goldsmiths and jewelers, printers and correctors, etc. However, in many small businesses, women replaced their husbands when they were ill or away, or they helped them on a daily basis, or carried on with the business when their husbands died. And in the larger firms, while it was taken for granted by most employers that it was men who should be hired to do skilled work, with mechanization, the increasing division of labor, and the concentration of more and more workers in factories, there was increasing pressure to accept women. In textile, women accounted for a significant share of the workforce as cheap labor. In Britain, the 1861 census listed 543,417 men (45 percent) and 640,103 women (55 percent) in textile, including, for instance, 104,404 men (32 percent) and 219,539 women (68 percent) in weaving. Manufacturers attempted to change the labor process by introducing new machines or manufacturing new products and hiring women rather than men to do the work. In fact, female labor had become so common that there was little opposition to it, except in a few sectors like the mines where it had been banned by Parliament in 1842. And even in the coal mines, women were still employed overground, as “pit brow women.” They would successfully fight against an attempted ban on their work in the 1880s.

At the same time, in the textile factories, men and women seldom carried out the same jobs. In cotton spinning, the mechanics and mule spinners of the large machines were men, while power loom weaving was open to both men and women. In the linen industry, carding, overseeing, and machine mending were male preserves, while spinning was very much a low-paid female occupation. In lace, which had been a female stronghold for two centuries, mechanization from the 1810s had led to men operating the large Leavers machines, while women and children did all the low-paid preparation work, the winding of the bobbins, the embroidery, the finishing of the work.Footnote 23

By the 1860s, in textile, women usually earned 40–50 percent of men’s wages, sometimes less, seldom more. Wage earning and family relations were intricately intertwined, and female labor was marked by life cycles, as women usually worked from age 12 to 14 and for about 10 years. When they married and had children, they often withdrew from the labor market, though many went on with homework. After children had grown up, some married women resumed factory work. But there were many exceptions to this pattern, for instance in cotton weaving where many married women with young children were employed. And those who were hostile to women’s work usually targeted married women and mothers, rather than the single young women.

No systematic study of women’s strikes has been done for this period, but it is obvious there were some, or that some women were involved in mixed sex strikes. They sometimes proved less willing than men to give in to employer pressure. For instance, in 1872 there was a major strike in Leeds in the linen industry for the 9-hour day: female workers were the backbone of the union and remained on the picket line while the men, primarily overlookers, were bought off by employers and broke the strike.Footnote 24 When some men returned to work, a Mrs Newsome, aged 59, was arrested for clapping her hands and calling some of the workers who had returned to work “black sheep.”Footnote 25

Several trade-union leaders, including those who were involved in the IWMA, came from the traditional sectors of craftsmanship and considered that women were mothers first and workers second, if at all. The Bee-Hive (1861–1876), a weekly newspaper published by the trade unions of London and the organ of the IWMA for a while, wrote in 1873: “The woman who should be most honoured, most loved in this world, is she who brings up a dozen children loving one another thoroughly.”Footnote 26 However, there were some women in mixed unions, and some women also set up their own unions. For instance, in Leicestershire in December 1874, Mrs Mason organized the women homeworkers in the Seamers and Stitchers Union, and soon gathered 3,000 of them in Leicester and surrounding villages. Ann Ellis was the founder and main spokesperson of the Dewsbury and District Heavy Woollen Weavers Association in Yorkshire. And in 1874, Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Protective and Provident League.

The tailors of London and the 1867 strike

To come back to the IWMA, can we know more about Matthew Lawrence, the trade unionist who, at the Lausanne congress, argued that women’s work was “the march of society,” and that it should be improved, not opposed? Little is known about Lawrence, except that he was the secretary of the London Operative Tailors, which numbered 7,000 members in 1866. We can therefore try and understand the debate on women’s work with a focus on the garment industry. It seems that Lawrence was close to Johann Eccarius (1818–1889), a Thurigian tailor himself, a communist, and one of the founders of the International in 1864. Eccarius was a member of the GC from 1864 to 1872, and its general secretary from 1867 to 1871.Footnote 27 Among the tailors, the methods of production were changing, with the rapid rise of the “slop-shops” that were denounced. The work was very hard, and tailors complained about their sufferings, due to their being “cramped up in an unnatural position all day long.”Footnote 28 Their wages were very low. It was around this time that sub-contractors began to make their appearance. By the 1860s, there were now “houses of call” where masters could send their foremen to find “twenty or thirty men, and pick from them just such as suited them.”Footnote 29 Another recent change was the introduction of sewing machines, which masters used so as to reduce drastically the wages of the tailors. These machines also “made ordinary women seamstresses and seamstresses tailors, and so doing hastened the transformation of what had once been the task of every woman into a professional activity,” as David Landes noted.Footnote 30 However, by the mid-1860s, sewing machines were making slower progress than they were in the USA. Until 1867, when Singer built a factory in Glasgow, there was still no large producer in the country.

Alongside textile production, dress had become a very large sector, with nearly a million workers, including 557,516 women (59 percent) and 392,205 men (41 percent) according to the 1861 census. 63,681 of them worked in cloth-making in London, by far the largest area in the trade. While 19,128 (30 percent) of them were men, 44,549 (70 percent) were women. Among these 44,549 women, 23,579 (52 percent) were single, 14,177 (32 percent) were married, and 5,327 (16 percent) were widowed.Footnote 31 Among the “in-workers,” in workshops often located in the West End of London, many were men. But part of the work was done by the “out-workers,” in “sweated” workshops, especially in the East End, where many women, some of them married, worked from home. These women could work more than 20 hours a day, especially during the social season between April and June, and they “scarcely enjoyed any protection” against the “selfishness” of employers, as was denounced.Footnote 32 In these homes, “fever and diseases were never absent.”Footnote 33 Twenty years after Thomas Hood had written his “Song of the Shirt” (1843), the overexploited seamstress had become a well-identified public figure for journalists, writers, and artists (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

G.F. Watts, Song of the Shirt, 1850. Oil on canvas, 144.8 × 127 cm. © Watts Gallery—Artists’ Village—Guildford.

Figure 2.

“Lucy in the Dressmaker’s Workroom, at the West-End of London,” The British Workman, September 1, 1858.

Eccarius told the GC that among the 12,000 women employed in tailoring in London, “3,000 […] never worked less than 14, frequently 16 or 18 hours a day, occasionally all night, for 7 s. to 10s. a week,” i.e., a third of men’s wages.Footnote 34 In 1863, the death of seamstress Mary Anne Walkley caused public outcry: the investigation showed her death was caused by apoplexy “greatly accelerated by working long hours in a crowded workroom, and sleeping in a close, badly ventilated bedroom”Footnote 35 (see Figure 3). When in 1867, in his chapter of Capital on the working day, Marx dealt with “Branches of English industry without legal limits to exploitation,” he gave the example of Walkley, this 20-year-old milliner, who “had worked without intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them.”Footnote 36

Figure 3.

“The Haunted Lady, or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass,” Punch, July 4, 1863.

The high proportion of women in the garment industry made them indispensable in the case of strike action. By February 1867, the London Operative Tailors’ Association boasted 24,000 members, probably an overstated figure.Footnote 37 Matthew Lawrence was the secretary, while George Drewitt [or Druritt?] was president. A large struggle was in the making. In April, a strike broke out for wages, which were 7 pence per hour, i.e., one and a half pounds a week. More exactly, the strike focused on an “adjustment of the time allowed for the making the various description of garments,” as the time allotted was too short, which resulted in a loss of wages.Footnote 38 The demands of the strikers amounted to a 25 percent rise in wages.Footnote 39 Ninety workshops were targeted, the press reported:

The men appointed on pickets are required to watch the several places of business of which the masters refuse to accede to the claims of the men, and their conduct is characterised by most unmistakeable assiduity and vigilance.Footnote 40

For the strikers, a major issue was the participation of the out-workers: if the master-tailors managed to contract the work to the out-workers, many of them women, the in-workers would easily be defeated. In other words, if the men were to be successful, the active participation of the women was critical. The tailors managed to get many out-workers on board, and a large bulk of the strikers was indeed women. On May 2, an indoor meeting of the out-workers was held in a room, and it was reported that “the hall, which [accommodated] a thousand persons, was closely packed, at least four hundred women being present, and the numbers unable to obtain admittance more than equalled those inside.”Footnote 41 The female out-workers were urged by the leaders to join the society. When a few days later, “an open-air meeting was held in Trafalgar Square,” with some 9,000 attending, “a remarkable feature […] was the presence of a considerable number of women who “appeared heartily to approve of the various speeches and resolutions approved.”Footnote 42 A certain Miss Carroll, the “Leader of the Tailoresses of London,” occupied a seat at the Tailors’ Executive, which met at 38 King Street. A strategy of the master-tailors could then be to import tailors from abroad. But the well-connected London strikers were supported by several branches of the IWMA. Eccarius worked to prevent strike-breakers being brought in from Germany. Lawrence was involved in the International, and he was in close contact with the tailors in Paris, who also went out on strike, with ramifications in the provinces.Footnote 43 The Times noted that “there has never been a strike simultaneously declared in France and England until now,” something which was reported as far away as Tasmania.Footnote 44

Women had been involved in the strike, which only ended in October, and in the trade union, and they therefore belonged to the IWMA. However, sources are scarce about their role. The names that were mentioned were those of men and, as we have seen, no female member attended a congress of the International, although some women were present in the stands as spectators. At the same time, their words were seldom reported, and we are left with questions and no answers on the reasons for this absence. However, the tailors’ strike showed that, in the struggle, women could be regarded as indispensable partners.

How did the situation in France compare with that in Britain? As is well known, both countries were not just two neighboring, comparable industrial nations. Paris and London had also been the birthplaces of the IWMA, where activists confronted their views. Moving from one country to the next, and from one city to the other, could therefore provide a useful comparison with what we have seen in the London clothing sector.

The debate in France and the Paris bookbinders

In France, women were also very present in textile. As in Britain, there were strict gender divisions at work, with women being confined to the low-paid, presumably low-skilled jobs of the sectors where they could find work. However, French businesses were far more small-scale, family-sized, and the industrialization of textile was lagging behind that of Britain.Footnote 45 In other words, the separation between home and the workplace was less advanced. In Paris the “collective fabric” was the rule, with thousands of small workshops with just a few workers, rather than larger manufactures as in Britain.

Admittedly, there were not many women among the members of the French sections of the International. For the only branch for which a list of members in the last months of the Second Empire has survived, the Panthéon section in Paris, the 82 members numbered 9 women, i.e., 11 percent of the total.Footnote 46 However, Nathalie Le Mel in Paris and Virginie Barbet in Lyon were influential local activists, and others are also well-known, like Victorine Brocher in Paris. The case of co-ops like the Marmite restaurants is addressed in Caroline Fayolle’s article.Footnote 47 From what we know, when the first Marmite restaurant opened, the cook was the wife of binder Delacour, before a male cook was hired.

The staunch opposition of Proudhon and his followers to the emancipation of women and to their employment is well-known.Footnote 48 Proudhon’s opposition to women’s work seems to have come from his ideas about marriage and the family: he considered that in the family workshops, wives could work under the supervision of their husbands, and that women’s emancipation from the home threatened family production.Footnote 49 The battle Proudhon and his followers waged against feminism became somehow obsessive. One of the first strikes organized during Napoleon III’s Second Empire was that of the printers against women’s work in 1862, and most of the strike leaders were Proudhonians.Footnote 50 But their male breadwinning stance was challenged by some female members of the IWMA, more vocally than it was in Britain in some ways. This was particularly obvious during a series of public meetings that were held in Paris between July and November 1868, in rooms called the Vaux-Hall and the Redoute.Footnote 51 These meetings were organized in the context of a rise in the number of strikes and workers’ societies and of a strengthening of the opposition to the Second Empire. While women accounted for a large minority of the attendants, several among them, like André Léo, Paule Minck, Miss Breuil, or Miss Bosquet, spoke out against the Proudhonists. [Amélie?] Bosquet denounced the common myth surrounding the direct link between factory work and prostitution, insisting instead that there was a connection between the “femininity” wanted by men and prostitution. She also advocated women’s right to work and criticized men’s self-interest when they opposed it, asserting “He does not want women to get into his work because he fears competition.”Footnote 52 Randier, another woman, was also critical of the isolation of the housewife, arguing that “We don’t want a kennel for Madonnas. […] Nothing is possible in the current social condition.”Footnote 53

In these meetings, socialist and feminist writer André Léo (Léodile Champseix, 1824–1900) spoke from the hustings and read a manifesto which she had signed with eighteen other women, denouncing the degrading conditions in which women lived. She had set up a Société de la revendication des Droits de la Femme (Society demanding the rights of woman, 1868–1870).Footnote 54 She opposed any ban on women’s work and argued that while working women were indeed destitute and underpaid, the answer to this was to fight for better working conditions. Feminist and socialist journalist Paule Minck (1839–1901) also stood for women’s right to work.Footnote 55 Minck had set up a feminist “Société fraternelle de l’ouvrière” (Fraternal society for the working woman).Footnote 56 She debunked the arguments of Proudhonists and conservative thinkers, replying for instance to those who argued that work deteriorated the health and condition of women:

Do so that women’s wages are raised, compare them with the produce that comes out of their work, and increase them according to the necessities of life. Then, there will be neither excess work, nor a loss of forces, fatally leading to corruption, etiolation and even death.Footnote 57

Minck also argued for equal pay for men and women, on top of advocating women’s political and civic emancipation, and their access to primary, secondary, technical, and university education.Footnote 58 Feminism was on the rise, not long before some women’s rights organizations were established, including the Association pour le Droit des femmes (1870), while the feminist weekly Le Droit des femmes was published from 1869, involving André Léo or Amélie Bosquet as well as Marie Deraismes or Julie Daubié.

Where did the men who attended the meetings stand? It seems they were divided into two groups. The first was made up of followers of Proudhon, known as the “Gravilliers,” after the name of the street where the IWMA was based in Paris. They opposed women’s work, contending that it ruined family life. “We owe help and protection to the woman, and she owes us obedience and faithfulness,” Eugène Tartaret argued.Footnote 59 Like Proudhon, Henri Tolain connected prostitution and factory work, in a clear reference to Britain: “Prostitution is on the rise in industrial nations where the woman has gone down into the workshop. Woman’s health is getting bad, and workshops are producing hysteria.”Footnote 60 Chemalé, who had argued against women’s work in Geneva in 1866, was ironical: “Let women be women before they are men!”Footnote 61 The other group was made up of various tendencies that supported women’s right to work. Some were liberal economists. Others were co-operators and left-wing Proudhonists, who advocated the association of men and women in co-operation, and some were even revolutionary communists for whom the problem of low-paid women’s work was one of capitalist exploitation.

Eugène Varlin and Antoine Bourdon were among those who did not dissociate the question of women’s employment from that of education. Varlin was a major figure both of the workers’ societies and of the IWMA in Paris. Interestingly, he was a bookbinder, a trade which numbered 3,000–4,000 workers in Paris in the 1860s, and where the debate on women’s work existed. Like the London tailors, the Paris bookbinders included many women, about two-thirds of the craft, like the activist and future Communard Nathalie Le Mel.Footnote 62 The better-paid jobs were often male preserves, but men and women worked together and increasingly shared similar class interests. While the printers happened to go on strike to keep women out of their trade, this was not an option among bookbinders. They did not oppose women’s employment, and they argued that women should earn equal pay—elsewhere, women’s wages did not exceed 40 percent of men’s wages. In 1864, when a strike occurred in the trade, one of the leaders alongside Varlin was the Russian worker and activist Marie Iatskévitch (1840–1917).Footnote 63

Beyond national and trade differences, diverging political leanings prevailed on the issue of women’s work. Like Lawrence and Eccarius in London, Varlin and his close friend Bourdon were socialists. An engraver, Bourdon was the editorial secretary of the Fourierist newspaper La Tribune ouvrière (1865–1866).Footnote 64 Fourierism was important among the founders of the IWMA in France, and Bourdon argued for equality between men and women.Footnote 65 We have seen what Bourdon and Varlin said in Geneva in 1866. Though Varlin did not attend the Lausanne congress, he clearly explained his views in October 1867:

Mr Varlin, a bookbinder, believes a woman should work and be paid for her work. He believes that those who are refusing to grant her the right to work, want to place her for ever dependent on man. Nobody has the right to refuse her the right to be truly free. She must suffice to herself, and as her needs are as great as ours, she must be paid as we are. Be the work done by a man, be it done by a woman: for the same production, there should be the same wages. By this means, the woman will not weigh on man’s wage, and her labour will make her free.Footnote 66

Such divides with opponents to women’s work remained unsettled.

Conclusion

Evidence is scarce on the women workers who were involved in the IWMA, at least in Britain and France. Other case studies, on Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the USA, may give different results. Divergence on women’s work partly reflected national differences and trade differences. As we have seen, in sectors like tailoring in Britain, barring entry to women was not an option: women were numerically dominant in the trade. In France, the case against women’s work was more present in the ranks of the International and, maybe as a result, the case for was also more vocal than in Britain. On both sides of the Channel, political differences were also crucial, between on the one hand a commitment to the preservation of the male breadwinning ideal by many British trade unionists and French Proudhonists, and on the other hand a more inclusive understanding of the working class as including women, a view held by socialists and collectivists on both sides of the Channel. Faced with the increasing participation of women in manufacturing output, two conflicting conceptions of the family, of work and of struggle had emerged and developed, between the respectable Victorian notion of the male breadwinner and the socialist aim of the emancipation of the “human race.”