Performing Work: Gender, Class, and the Printing Trade in Victorian Britain

Abstract

Women's employment in industrial trades was a highly contested issue in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. Nowhere was this more evident than in women's attempts to gain a foothold in printing. This article explores the campaign that Victorian feminists waged to enable women to enter the industrial workforce in the face of increasing opposition by male workers and labor organizations. Trade unions cast woman printers as a threat to the family wage; in response, women founded their own printing organizations. Started in 1876, the Women's Printing Society employed both working- and middle-class women as printers. Unable to join male-run printing houses because of the restrictions that the London Compositor Unions imposed, the Society created a place for women in the industry by basing their business on a system of shared profits that benefited both employees and investors. These businesses issued one of the first sustainable challenges to gendered hierarchies of work by reforming capitalist business practices in order to provide new opportunities for women workers.