ABSTRACT
As the previous two chapters have demonstrated, exclusionary practices and policies toward female labor in the small metal industries in both Birmingham and the Black Country were becoming increasingly controversial. Community interests and the organization of capital and class relations, as well as the continued and in some cases growing presence of women in the workforce, were serving to place pressure on an artisanal discourse that constructed class in such a way as to exclude women and many men as well. In this context, evidence of a re-working of understandings of gender and gender relations among the working classes, to be examined in this chapter, emerges.
