‘For Home and Country’: The Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes and the production and consumption of agricultural produce and ‘rural’ crafts

"In the historiography, and popular memory, Dundee is portrayed as a ‘women’s town’. The roots of this characterisation can be found in the city’s population structure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1911 there was three women for every two men. In the same year women formed 43 percent of the labour force and 54.3 percent of women aged over 15 were in employment. The Jute Industry in Dundee is historically associated with high levels of female labour participation, with this being especially true in the pre 1945 period. Women’s role in jute in the first half of the twentieth century was significant for two related reasons. First, Dundee had a comparably high percentage of married working women throughout this period. In addition Dundee also had a comparatively high proportion of female headed households as a result of the disproportionate number of female ‘breadwinners’. Thus, Dundee’s description as a ‘women’s town’ can be traced to the dominant role that women played in the workforce of the jute industry and the economic and social consequences of this. Yet women’s role in the industry was reduced in the post-war period both as a result of jute’s decline in size and influence in the city and also as a result of increasing numbers of men replacing women as the industry became more capital intensive. This major structural change characterised the industry’s response to the contraction of markets for jute products both at home and in the export field. The changing labour market in Dundee was also extremely influential in the availability of women workers for the jute industry, with the industry experiencing a labour shortage in the immediate post-war years. The efficiency required by the jute industry to remain profitable was seriously undermined by such labour supply problems. This paper will contrast women’s role in the jute industry in the immediate post war years, when women were very much in demand, to the 1960s and 1970s when the industry had in some ways overcome its labour shortage and was no longer entirely dependent on the work of women. Arguably, Jute was no longer ‘a woman’s industry’ as it had been characterised in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the work of women in the jute industry was, and remains, significant in the description of Dundee as a ‘woman’s town’ in a historical context. This paper will consider whether or not this remained an accurate description of the city in the period under consideration, at least in an economic sense."