Terrains of Inequality and (Re)Production: Proprietary Firms and Patriarchal Households, Steel and Port Cities in the 1870s

This paper explores the material and social geography of firms and households in four cities, Pittsburgh, Sheffield, Baltimore and Liverpool, at the close of the era of proprietary capitalism. Comparing steel cities and port cities in the US and UK, the paper maps out economic configurations of steel and transportation firms as well as the neighborhoods in which owners and workers lived and labored. Inequality was marked in a particular arrangement of space and resources in each city. Ownership structures remained local and closely tied to family partnerships. For each city, social network analysis is used to map out the leading participants in local banks, insurance companies, and utilities. Proprietors of family firms in steel and shipping were active participants in these local networks.

Given this setting of ownership and employment, the paper goes on to explore the social relations of power and management that prevailed in proprietary firms and patriarchal households in the 1870s. It brings together firms and households as intertwined sites of economic production and social reproduction. Proprietary firms relied on largely interpersonal domination and informal means of management. Family and religious ties shaped ownership structures, and shopfloor management was mostly delegated to skilled male workers who managed helpers, apprentices, and laborers. In homes, married men held powerful sovereignty over the bodies and labor of women and children. In the bourgeois homes of local proprietors, women commanded an “establishment” of domestic servants who carried out the most arduous and difficult labors of social reproduction.The organization of power within proprietary firms and patriarchal households mobilized overlapping and reinforcing structures of male privilege, interpersonal status hierarchies, and the use of informal, and often violent modes of resolving conflicts, whether in the kitchen or on the shopfloor.