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The Rhetoric and Iconography of Reform: Women Coal Miners in Belgium, 1840–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Patricia J. Hilden
Patricia J. Hilden
Affiliation:
Emory University
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Extract

Reflecting on the development of industrial capitalism in Europe, Antonio Gramsci wrote:

It is worth drawing attention to the way in which industrialists…have been concerned with the sexual affairs of their employees and with their family arrangements in general. One should not be misled…by the ‘puritanical’ appearance assumed by this concern. The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 1991 , pp. 411 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the prison notebooks, ed. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (New York, 1971), pp. 296–7Google Scholar.

2 Outram, Dorinda, ‘Le langage mâle de la vertu: women and the discourse of the French revolution’, in Burke, Peter and Porter, Roy (eds.), The social history of language (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 120–35Google Scholar.

3 Dejardin, quoted in Chalmers, E. B., Lucie Dejardin: Hiercheuse et deputée socialiste (Huy, 1952), P. 16Google Scholar. Pirenne's, Henri words are found in his Histoire de Belgique, VII (Brussels, 1923), 123Google Scholar. Good general descriptions of bourgeois family life in the nineteenth century are found in Poster, Mark, Critical theory of the family (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, and Poovey, Mary, The proper lady and the woman writer (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar.

4 Among representative samples of the masculinity of coal are Orwell's, GeorgeThe road to Wigan pier (Harmondsworth, 1972), esp. pp. 20–1Google Scholar, where Orwell employs heavily sexual language to describe the ‘fillers’ at work in a British coal mine. These men, who, in Orwell's words, arouse ‘a pang of envy for their toughness’ were doing the work done in Belgium by the hiercheuses and chargeuses. See also Campbell's, BeatrixReturn to Wigan pier: poverty and politics in the eighties (London, 1984)Google Scholar. John, Angela, in By the sweat of their brow: women workers at Victorian coal mines (London, 1984)Google Scholar, tells the story of Britain's coal mining women (usually called ‘girls’ or ‘lasses’) and their expulsion from the pits in the middle of the nineteenth century. Women in tin mining in Cornwallalso encountered a heavily gendered stereotype which effectively masked their work from public view. See Burke, Gill, ‘The decline of the independent bal maiden: the impact of change in the Cornish mining industry’, in John, Angela (ed.), Unequal opportunities: women's employment in England, 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 179–206Google Scholar. One further example of the extent to which the British generally began to think of miners solely as men is an 1869 translation of a Belgian book by the Belgian L. Simonin. The British version of the work, Underground life, or mines and miners, ‘translated and adapted to the present state of British mining’, by Bristow, H. W. (New York, 1869)Google Scholar, features one drawing of a group of Belgian miners, taken from a photograph. In the drawing are both male and female miners, the latter dressed in their hiercheuses uniforms with hats that show them to have been Charleroi miners. The caption reads, ‘Pitmen and their wives’ (emphasis mine).

5 See Gales, Kathleen and Marks, P. H., ‘Twentieth-century trends in the work of women in England and Wales’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series A, CXXXVII, 1 (1974), 60–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One might note here that in France, few women ever worked underground in coal, despite Zola's portrait of them in Germinal. See Trempé, Rolande, Les mineurs de Carmaux: 1848–1914 (Paris, 1971), pp. 133ffGoogle Scholar. Trempé notes that many other industrializing nations followed Britain's lead in restricting women's mine work to the surface. These included Germany (1878–1881), Austria (1884), France (1874), Sweden (1891), and two of the states of the US, in 1879 and 1883.

6 The term ‘hiercheur’ or ‘hiercheuse’ originally referred only to male or female workers whose job it was to push coal wagons in and around coal mines. The term dates from the eighteenth century. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, the term came to include all women working underground, as well as those who worked transporting the coal on the surface. See Trésor de la langue française: dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960), IX (Paris, 1981), 775Google Scholar.

7 On the POB's commitment to mass art education, see Debrock, Walter, ‘De Kinderen van het proletariaat en de kunst’, in Brepoels, Jaal et al. (eds.), Eewige dilemma's: honderd jaar socialistische partij (Louvain, 1985), esp. p. 235Google Scholar. See also Aron, Paul, Les Ecrivains belges et le socialisme (1880–1913) (Brussels, 1985)Google Scholar. Louis Pierard, himself a socialist, published many studies of painters and of art in this period with the socialist party press, Editions labor. See also De Arbeid in de kunst van Meunier tot Permeke, Stad Antwerpen, 26 april–juni, 1952, Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Antwerp, 1952)Google Scholar.

8 A discussion of the pre-Raphaelite view of lower class women is found in Nochlin, Linda, ‘Lost and found: once more the fallen woman’, in Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary (eds.), Feminism and art history: questioning the litany (New York, 1982), pp. 221–46Google Scholar. Among Belgian artists who depicted mother-saints and ‘fallen women’ were some who also painted the hiercheuses. Meunier's ‘Maternité’, for example, commissioned by the Belgian government as part of his Monument du Travail, is one example of the former. His ‘Mater Dolorosa’ is another. Felicien Rops and his student Armand Rassenfosse were frequently drawn to portray the latter. The best study of the manipulation of the female figure in the creation of national identity is Agulhon's, MauriceMarianne into battle: Republican imagery and symbolism in France, 1789–1880 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

9 See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and his world (Bloomington, 1984), p. 21)Google Scholar, and Harrison, Jane, Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, and Epilegomena to the study of Greek religion and Themis (New York, 1962)Google Scholar. See also Hilden, Patricia J., ‘Women in Hellenistic religion: a study of the cults of Demeter, Dionysus and Isis’, unpublished paper, 03, 1975Google Scholar.

10 Boulger, Demetrius C., Belgian life in town and country (New York and London, 1904), p. 262Google Scholar.

11 These figures are a composite of those found in Eléments d' enquête sur le rôle de la femme dans l'industrie, les oeuvres, les arts and les sciences en Belgique (Brussels, 1897)Google Scholar, and Belgique, Royaume de, Travail, Office du, Revue du Travail (Brussels, 1896), pp. 1130–2; pp. 1092–3Google Scholar, and Rutten, Le Père G. -C., Nos Grèves houilleres et l' action socialiste (Brusseles, 1900), p. 21Google Scholar, Kuborn, Hyack, Rapports sur l' enquéte faite au nom de l' Académie royale de médecine de Belgique par la commission chargée d' étudier la question de l' emploi des femmes dans les travaux des mines (Brussels, 1864), p.14Google Scholar; Marichal, Henri, L'Ouvrier mineur en Belgique: ce qu'il est, ce qu'il doit être (Paris, 1869), pp. 12, 20Google Scholar; de Belgique, Royaume, de l'lntérieur, Ministère, Enquête sur la condition des classes ouvrières et sur le travail des enfants, vol. II (Brussels, 1846)Google Scholar; L'Ouvrier mineur, jan-mars 1905, juin 1906, juillet 1906, sept. 1906, dec. 1906, sept.–oct. 1907.

12 Throughout the nineteenth century mine owners and mining engineers repeatedly complained about the indiscipline of their work force, despite the argument of Hubert Watelet that by 1841 the Borain mine workers had succeeded in creating a disciplined proletariat. See Watelet, , Une Industrialisation sans développement. Le Bassin de Mons et le charbonnage du Grand-Hornu du milieu du XVIIIe au milieu du XIXe siécle (Ottawa, 1980), pp. 270, 365–6Google Scholar. It is true that the social relations of coal production were generally those of industrial capitalism, but the proletariat's discipline was less than perfectly established. See complaints in Revue du Travail throughout the 1890s.

13 See Hiley, Michael, Victorian working women (Boston, 1980), p. 100Google Scholar.

14 These boteresses were famous all over Belgium, but particularly in their home city of Liège, where today several public sculptures feature them, and where the Musée de la vie wallonne sells tiny plaster figures of boteresses. Lemonnier, Camille, in La Belgique (Paris, 1888)Google Scholar described these women in language similar to that used in the rhetoric about women miners. ‘La créature hommasse et parcheminée, la puissante et musculeuse femelle virilisée par vie’ p. 651. One popular saying of the time maintained ‘One good Fleming is worth two Walloons, but one boteresse is worth two Flemings’. Other local occupations included that of an ambulant merchant (the option chosen by Lucie Dejardin's mother, in preference to returning to the mines where she had worked as a young woman). Other work in mining regions is described in Dehousse, Françoise et al. , Leonard Defrance: L'oeuvre peinte (Liège, 1985)Google Scholar.

15 Quoted in Royaume de Belgique, Enquête…1846, p. 423.

16 Ibid. p. 427.

17 These walled convents existed (and continue to exist) all over Flanders, where they provided a retreat from the world for women whose families were wealthy enough to build them a house or apartment in one of them.

18 DrPeetermans, , in Enquête…1846, p. 158Google Scholar.

19 This usage was not uncommon. An 1872 work by Alexandre Dumas fils was titled L'Homme-Femme. It dealt with the oppression of women in marriage. In the same period, various German sexual pathologists, including Krafft-Ebbing and Magnus Hirschfeld, coined the term ‘das Mann-Weib’ to refer to the ‘masculine’ lesbian. See Schwarz, Gudrun, ‘Viragos’ in male theory in nineteenth-century Germany, in Friedlander, Judith et al. , Women in culture and politics: a century of change (Bloomington, 1986), pp.128–43Google Scholar. I am grateful to Timothy J. Reiss for these references.

20 Quoted in Enquête…1846, pp. 260–1.

21 Many French-speaking Belgians were familiar with the work of the eighteenth-century Frenchman, Cabanis, whose book, On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of men, ed. Mora, George (Baltimore, 1981)Google Scholar, contains these words: ‘Man must be strong, audacious, enterprising, and woman weak, shy, secretive. Such is the law of nature’, p. 234. Michelet's widely-quoted remarks began: ‘L'Ouvrière, mot impie, sordide…’ See La Femme (Paris, n.d.), p. 22.

22 Simone de Beauvoir remarked on the persistence of these ideas into the twentieth century in her 1949 book, The second sex. In it, she wrote: ‘I can only suppose that in such misty minds there still float shreds of the old philosophy of the Middle Ages which taught that the cosmos is an exact reflection of a microcosm – the egg is imagined to be a little female, the woman a giant egg’. See the edition trans, by Parshley, H. M. (New York, 1974) p. 15Google Scholar.

23 On the subject of what he has termed the ‘spermatic economy’ in nineteenth-century America, see Barker-Benfield's, G. J.The horrors of the half-known life: male attitudes toward women and sexuality in nineteenth-century America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

24 Kuborn, Hyack, Rapport sur l' enquête faite au nom de l' Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique par la commission chargée d' étudier la question de l' emploi des femmes dans les travaux soxterrains des mines (Brussels, 1868), p. 81Google Scholar.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid. pp. 8–9.

27 Ibid. and p. 46.

28 See Bay, Edna, ‘The royal women of Abomey’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Boston University, 1977Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr Bay for this information.

29 Kuborn, , Rapport, p. 46Google Scholar. In Larousse de la langue Française: lexis, ed. Mevel, Jean-Pierre et al. (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar, ‘virago’ is defined as ‘a woman of masculine allure’. See also Burke, Gill, ‘Independent bal maiden’, and Moses, Claire, French feminism in the nineteenth century (Albany, New York, 1984), pp. 123–26Google Scholar.

30 Ibid. pp. 46–7. Marchienne and Chatelineau were the sites of two of the biggest and most violent mining strikes.

31 Marichal, H., L' Ouvrier mineur, p. 36Google Scholar. (It is interesting to compare these words with Marichal's view of male workers. Of them he wrote: ‘by his nature left to himself, the Belgian ouvrier has a simple composition, and far from finding him inclined to disorder, one might rather reproach him for his insouciance, his indifference to everything that is of public interest’.

32 Vleminckx, M. Le Docteur. Lettre a l' Académie Royale de Médecine à l' occasion de la publication de l' enquête ordonné par M. le Ministre des travaux publics sur la situation des ouvriers dans les mines et les usines métallurgiques de la Belgique, 26 mars 1870, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

33 See note 29 above.

34 Quoted in Van Bastelaer, D.-A., La Question du travail des femmes et des enfants dans les houillères en présence de la statistique officielle. Discours prononcé dans la séance du 6 novembre 1969 de l' Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique pendant la discussion du rapport de M. Kuborn (Bruxelles, 1869), pp. 30, 32Google Scholar.

35 Many historians have taken up this subject, including Chevalier, Louis, in Labouring classes and dangerous classes in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century (London, 1973)Google Scholar. The Belgians, however, were less prone to this fear of industrial workers, and less prone to conflate them with the criminal or dangerous classes. Part of the reason lay in the fact that it was rural, agricultural Flanders, rather than industrial Wallonia that produced the vagabondage elsewhere associated with the urban poor. In other words, there was no equivalent in industrial Belgium to ‘outcast London’. There was, on the other hand, a very substantial ‘outcast Flanders’. On this see Ducpetiaux's, EdouardMémoire sur le paupérisme dans les Flandres (Bruxelles, 1850)Google Scholar.

38 Discussions of such fears are found in Theweleit, Klaus, Male fantasies, 1: Women, floods, bodies, history (Minneapolis, 1987), 201ffGoogle Scholar. and Lederer, Wolfgang, The fear of women (New York, 1968), pp. 44ffGoogle Scholar.

37 The first and most prominent of Belgium's social scientists included Edouard Ducpétiaux (whose studies began to appear during Belgium's ‘hungry forties’) and A. Quêtelet, who was one of Belgium's first demographers, whose work also began to appear in the 1840s.

38 Wouters, C. et Deneubourg, P., Réflexions sur le travail des femmes dans les mines (Mons, 1870), p. 22Google Scholar. (This book opens with the promise, ‘la vérité, rien que la vérité!’)

39 Schoenfeld, Martin, Nouvelles recherches sur l' étal sanitaire, moral et social des houilleurs pendant la période actuelle de salubrité des mines en Belgique. Discours et études sur le travail desfilles dans les charbonnages (Charleroi, 1870), p. 22Google Scholar.

40 Ibid. pp. 79, 73, 72.

41 Ibid. p. 53. His statements of women's right to equality are very similar to those of the French socialist leader, Jules Guesde, speaking at a workers' congress in the 1870s. Guesde's words are quoted in Hilden, , Working women and socialist politics in France: a regional study, 1880–1914 (Oxford, 1986), p. 177Google Scholar.

42 L' Ami du peuple, (ADP) 21 Sept. 1873. (I owe this reference to Enrique Garcia.)

43 L' Union des charbonnages, mines, et usines métallurgiques de la province de Liège, no. 1: du travail des femmes dans les mines. Rapport présenté par une commission spéciale et approuvé par le comité permanent de l' union des charbonnages…de la province de Liége…séance du 10 mars 1869 (Liège, 1869)Google Scholar.

44 Ibid. p. 24.

45 Ibid. p. 14.

46 Hugo, Victor, Dumas, Alexandre et al. , Guide Touriste en Belgique (Bruxelles, 1845)Google Scholar.

47 L' Union des charbonnages…, p. 6.

48 The socialist leader Jules Destrée summed up developments in this period: ‘the workman,’ he wrote, ‘took his place in art and was recognized as the equal of the ancient gods’. Quoted in Cammaerts, Emile, The treasure house of Belgium: her land and people, her art and literature (London, 1924), p. 118Google Scholar.

49 Le Blond, Marice, in Bazalgette, Bouyer et al. , Constantin Meunier et son oeuvre (Paris, 1955), p. 76Google Scholar.

50 Meunier's work is discussed in Behets, Armand, Constantin Meunier: L'homme, l'artiste, et l'oeuvre (Brussels, 1942)Google Scholar; Christophe, Lucine, Constantin Meunier, (Antwerp, 1947)Google Scholar; Pierard, Louis, Constantin Meunier, (Brussels, 1937)Google Scholar. Many of Meunier's drawings, paintings and sculptures are collected in the Musée Constantin Meunier in Ixelles, Belgium.

51 A photograph of this figure is found in Bazalgette et al., Meunier, n.p. I would like to thank Drs Bonna Wescoat and Irena Grudzinska-Gross for their interpretations of Meunier's work.

52 Another important factor in shaping Belgian public opinion was the reaction to women industrial workers elsewhere prevalent in Europe. As both socialism and unions internationalized into Europe-wide federations, the views of miners from more misogynistic countries, particularly Germany and Austria, began to circulate amongst Belgian mining leaders. A close reading of the Belgian miners' federation paper, L' Ouvrier Mineur from 1903 to 1914 shows quite clearly the differences between the attitudes of Belgian miners and those of their European co-workers. The latter were rabid and persistent in their denunciation of Belgians for allowing women to work in mining. Some speeches implied that the Belgian men were ‘weak’ because they appeared not to mind women working with them. Most of these speeches were reported, but without comment. Marcel van der Linden has written about this process of internationalization from a rather different perspective in ‘The national integration of European working classes, 1871–1914’ in International Review of Social History, XXXII (1988), 285–311Google Scholar.

53 For many of these pictures I am grateful to the Institut de la patrimoine artislique, Brussels. Many are also found in Art et société en Belgique: 1848–1914, catalogue of an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi, 11 Oct.-23 Nov. 1980. In this exhibition, pictures of bourgeois life are strikingly absent. It is also interesting to note that the cathedral of St. Bavo in the textile city of Ghent has one stained glass window dedicated to women textile workers. It depicts women's work in the mills.

54 Eléments d' enquête sur le rôle de la femme dans l' industrie, les oeuvres, les arts, et les sciences en Belgique (Brussels, 1897)Google Scholar.

55 Again, these insights come from Dr Bonna Wescoat.

56 I am extremely grateful both to Mme Nadine Dubois at the Musée de la vie Wallonne in Liége, as well as to Mme Veronique Vercheval at the Musée de la photographie in Mont-sur-Marchienne (Charleroi). In both places I received a good deal of help finding information about Gustave Marissiaux. I also owe thanks to Prof. Jacques Dubois of the Université de Liège, for his unfailing advice and help. See also La Photographie en Wailonie, des origines à 1940, Wallonne, Musée de la vie, Liège, , 19 octobre au 29 04 1980Google Scholar.

57 Until this time, Belgium's women miners were among the few women workers whose working clothing was distinctive. The boteresses, the women dock workers, the ambulant merchants, the glassworkers usually carried some sort of distinctive tool (e.g. the large straw baskets of the boteresses), but their dress was generally indistinguishable from that of other women of their class and region. Although Marissiaux's photographs suggest that Liège area mining women had discarded their trousers, many photographs from the 1930s, as well as some twentieth-century drawings show women mine workers still wearing trousers, though they were no longer knee-length, and no longer white. These ‘uniforms’ also characterized Britain's mining women in the nineteenth century. As Campbell, Beatrix notes in Return, p. 100Google Scholar, ‘…their very strength, and their androgynous uniform was (sic) invoked in the campaign to abolish their right to work…during the 1890s’.

58 This method was not confined to the hiercheuses. One police spy reported that although a Partiouvrier meeting had attracted fifty women from Dison in April, 1893, they were ‘mainly recruited from Verviers houses of prostitution’. Report found in Liège. Archives de l' Etat, Sûreté publique, xxi. A. 43, ‘Dison. Commissariat de police à bourgmestre’, 14 avril 1893.

59 Needless to say, perhaps, this process of ‘pre-modernizing’ industrial scenes was yet another means of diluting the reality of Belgium's industrial problems. Of course in present-day Belgium, where there are no longer any working mines, the slag heaps have begun to sprout plant life. Indeed, some municipalities have sponsored tree-planting on the slag heaps – both to alter the grim sky-line with trees and to keep the slag from sliding. In some areas, the sky-line suggests that Belgium is naturally more hilly than it originally was.

60 Malva, C., Un Mineur vous parle (Lausanne, n.d.), p. 128Google Scholar.

61 Dethier, N.. Centrale syndicate des travailleurs des mines de Belgique: 60 années d'action, 1890–1905 (n.p., n.d.), p. 21Google Scholar. Two mining engineers, writing in the 1930s, also recalled, ‘Feminine personnel has from time immemorial been employed among us in the coal mines and in the sale of coal’. See Fourmarier, Paul and Denoel, Lucien, Géologic et industrie mine'rale du pays de Liège (Paris and Liège, 1930)Google Scholar.

62 See reports in Revue du travail, 1900, pp. 309, 421.

63 Quoted in Malva, , Un Mineur…, p. 51Google Scholar.

64 Eaton, Evelyn Thayer. The Belgian leagues of Christian working class women (Washington, D.C., 1954). P-50Google Scholar.

65 See note 52 above.

66 Delwiche, Michel and Groff, Francis, Les Gueules noires (Brussels, 1985), p.26Google Scholar.

67 Ibid. pp. 81, 149.