ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on gender division of labour, and especially how it relates to technological change and its periodization. It focuses on one pottery factory, Gustavsberg, in Sweden, during the crucial times after 1880, when a modern labour market in Sweden developed. Legal changes were introduced, which meant less favourable conditions for women. School teachers of both sexes had previously, in principle, earned equal wages. Ellen Key was the most eloquent Swedish speaker for the renewed construction of woman as ‘the Mother’, and warned against abandoning ‘women’s peculiarities’. The factory of Gustavsberg was established in 1825 on an island outside the Swedish capital of Stockholm. The 1880s saw the introduction of machines to replace the thrower’s wheel. The period from 1920 to 1950 again meant more rigid gender segregation. The reconstruction over a long period of the engendering of the forming of the ware – the work done at the clay end of the production – reveals several things.
