ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how orthodoxy on gender segregation came to be established through a number of key texts written towards the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. It reviews some key ethnographic studies of women's work in order to demonstrate how the use of gender as a category helped to establish a feminist approach on gender segregation at work. The study Women on the Line by Ruth Cavendish is a text that typifies a descriptive rather than a theoretical study and is a classic example, from the beginning of second wave feminism, of an early account of women's work. Anna Pollert's Girls, Wives, Factory Lives is another study of working class women's work, this time in a tobacco factory in the south of England. This account follows much more closely the work of male sociologists such as Huw Benyon and Theo Nichols, in that it is based on informal interviews and participant observation on the shopfloor.
