Until now, the decline of manufacturing production in North America and Europe has been cast as a male experience: displacing male factory workers, eroding working class masculinity, and contributing to the rise of “angry” male voters. Thus, scholarly attention has been devoted to documenting how working class men cope with the disappearance of industrial life, while it has largely ignored the female experience. Working-class women have found themselves in the cross hairs of the transition to post-Fordist society. On one hand, working class women became the beneficiaries of a cultural value shift promoting women’s labor market emancipation while, on the other hand, they bore the brunt of economic restructuring through their occupational and industrial segregation into low paying service work. Working class women have confronted deindustrialization through various, and often overlapping, gender roles: as workers, wives, mothers, and Daughters. The aim of WOMADE is to investigate how manufacturing decline has reconfigured the way that working-class women participate in politics. It has three main objectives: 1) document how the working-class female political sub-culture has
changed due to women’s occupational restructuring;
2) determine how job loss and job insecurity for men in the family impacted working-class women’s political orientations;
and 3) establish how working class women reconcile the competing influences of female emancipation and economic restructuring on their political preferences.
The project combines both observational and experimental quantitative methods to achieve its objectives. The observational portion of the project will conduct a longitudinal analysis of panel data studies in the UK and Germany to study women’s occupational and household exposure to manufacturing decline and the relative impact on political participation and political attitudes. The experimental portion will design and implement original conjoint
experiment using nationally representative samples of women in the Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The project will expand the study of the politics of manufacturing decline across gender boundaries and push the sociology to consider the lived realities of working class women and their political consequences.