At a time when activists call for an anticapitalist, international movement of “globalization from below,”¹

This paper offers one set of possible answers to these questions. It presents reflections on researching global and feminist labor history and on what such research taught us about work, workers, labor movements, gender, nation-states, and labor historians. In it, we draw from an ongoing research project affectionately called “Italians Everywhere.” That project examines the migrations of more than 26 million workers over two centuries, tracing the global trajectories of their movements, work, and labor activism on five continents, and their incorporation into national states around the world. To date, the project has generated two research collaborations, one focused on labor radicalism, migration, and the making of multiethnic states, and the other on women, work, militancy and transnational family economies (both are discussed below); two additional collaborations are currently in planning stages.³

While focused on one particular labor migration, our ongoing research project highlights issues to be pondered by historians of all mobile people. One is the relative blindness to class, economic power, and the state in theoretical work on transnationalism. A second is the on-going challenge of gendering class in labor history, particularly when analyzing immigrant workers who are regarded as outsiders. Our search for the best organizing concepts for empirical research on transnational labor migrations and labor movements suggest also that historians should treat national and transnational studies as entwined levels of analysis. A fourth issue is that analyses of internationally mobile labor problematize the historiography of national groups and reveal how profoundly—and usually also how “nationally”—every multiethnic nation-state understood relations among ethnicity, race or color, class, and gender.⁴

How We Did It: Crossing Frontiers

Perhaps because labor historians associate the study of single immigrant groups in the United States with the conservative politics of the white, so-called “unmeltable” ethnics of the 1970s or because histories of individual groups seem too respectful of national boundaries, labor history has focused increasingly on multiethnic working-class communities or on interethnic relations in local places. This allows labor historians to begin to write, from the bottom up, a history of a culturally diverse nation.⁵

Although trained as specialists in North American immigration, labor, and radicalism, we had all lived, studied, and worked abroad and so knew personally how the border-patrolling policies of national states have constrained the mobile and also how profoundly Italy, Germany, Canada, France, or Argentina have been shaped by international migrations. When applied to our shared interest in Italy's migrants, such experiences made us acutely aware of the disproportionate scholarly influence worldwide of a huge US literature on immigration.⁶

Of course, the 1990s also generated a great deal of millennial and ahistorical “global-babble” about the supposedly unprecedented, transformative power of globalization.⁷

We found that we had to assert repeatedly the significance of migrations from Italy in this long history of globalization largely because Italy's migrants have been misunderstood as primarily US-bound and family- and community-oriented “urban villagers” from southern Italy in the years between 1890 and 1930.⁹

The global labor markets within which Italian migrants moved were thoroughly gendered. Abroad, men worked in construction, commercial, or plantation agriculture, mining and in a number of heavy industries; women took jobs almost exclusively as machine tenders in the so-called “light industries.” Most women and children, however, remained in Italy to feed themselves through subsistence agriculture. Men's foreign wages subsidized both reproduction of family patrimonies and improvements in family consumption. Men and women occupied different places in a global division of labor, even as their private intimacies and family economies linked precapitalist and capitalist workplaces around the world.¹¹

When we initiated the “Italians Everywhere” project the terminology of transnationalism was practically unknown and theoretical work on globalization in the social sciences was just beginning.¹²

What Is to Be Done? The Challenges of Mobile Labor

Our project alerted us to problems that all researchers of mobile labor will face, including choices of theory, historiography, method, and organizing concepts. Lurking behind this special issue on transnational labor, for example, are social science theories about transnationalism that had interested but also troubled us. Historians interested in transnationalism typically cite just two key works from the early 1990s by anthropologists (many specializing on contemporary Caribbean migration to the US). In Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, editors Nina Glick-Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton sensibly defined transnationalism as social practices among migrants that occur on the territories of more than one nation-state.¹³

We were instead acutely aware both of the newness and instability of most of the states touched by Italy's global migration and of their capacity to gain power and influence during an earlier period of equally massive international mass migration. Finally, US social scientists' longstanding hostility to Marxist theory seemed to render many transnational theorists inattentive to class, though less often to gender (partly because so many of today's international migrants and scholars of migration—quite unlike the past—are female).¹⁵

Without inventing the term transnational, historians of Italy's migrants had much earlier produced a rich (if often gender-blind) literature on border-crossing. As early as 1919, Robert Foerster compared Italy's migrants in over half a dozen different countries.¹⁶

In evaluating competing theoretical concepts we explored relationships among social history, poststructuralist theory, and the social sciences. For example, we asked the readers of Diaspora, a journal oriented toward humanists, postmodernists, and literary scholars, whether Marx's “international proletariat” or social scientists Robin Cohen's and J.A. Anderson's “proletarian diaspora” best described networks of ideas, social relations, and capital among Italy's migrants.²²

What Difference Does it Make? Labor Movements and the Making of Multiethnic National States

If nations are imagined communities, nation-building—the conferring of rights of citizenship to some but not to others—long remained the privilege of the few.²⁸

Nation-building among Italy's humble peasants and workers began outside Italy. For most of Italy's residents in 1800, the village or paese was the only real territorial focus for identity and affection and the foundation, along with family and kin groups, of social solidarity. At a time when the peninsula was politically fragmented, nationalists already declared that Italy existed as a cultural nation, created by Catholic clerics or by urban humanist intellectuals and artists who had exported their cultures widely around Europe between 1000 and 1500. Few nationalists accepted uneducated, rural peasants and urban plebeians as members of the Italian nation. (Those who defined the nation as the speakers of Italian, for example, meant Dante's language, which only a small percentage of Italy's citizens spoke in the nineteenth century.) Our contributors showed how only the many republican exiles of the Italian Risorgimento—such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi—actively and with some success recruited humble migrants into their campaigns for national unification and independence. Many labor migrants first began to think of themselves as Italians while living and working abroad. Not a few joined Garibaldi in fighting for republican ideals in Latin America and significant numbers then returned with him to Italy to defend the Roman republic in 1848–9, to fight against Austria in 1859 and to invade Sicily, sparking Italian unification, in 1860. Italy's moderate new rulers realized quickly, however, that the country they governed was not yet a nation; the task of “making Italians” of the rural majority remained.²⁹

To the shock of Italy's new rulers, the citizens of the new nation immediately began to abandon it as migrants. Abroad, these humble male migrants were initially greeted by angry “natives” and workers who may have feared them as wage-depressors but who expressed their hostility in national terms. Italian Workers of the World illustrated how Italian migrants after 1870 first exposed, then challenged, the prevalence of what Robert Paris called the “proletarian nationalism” of early labor movements around the world.³⁰

Contrary to contemporary stereotypes, however, Italian migrants were not scabbing wage-breakers impervious to unionization; everywhere they displayed a notable degree of combativeness, as they had also to the imposition of new laws in unified Italy. In France and Argentina, Italian migrants frequently initiated labor struggles. In North America, Italian workers struck spontaneously and—when faced with nativist discrimination from unions of skilled workers—formed their own labor organizations. Socialist and anarchist internationalist ideals quickly appealed to Italy's migrants: In 1881, when attacked by French workers, one migrant cried out in vain that he was an “Italian, but a Socialist!”³²

During the half-century between 1870 and 1920, exiled Italian-speaking anarchists formed an especially far-flung and distinctive, if also contentious, ideological diaspora. Typically two steps ahead of the police, anarchists led peripatetic lives, circulating through as many as a dozen countries advocating either propaganda of the deed and terrorism or direct action in the workplace and general strikes against the state. Italian newspapers in Argentina were in touch with and excerpted news from their counterparts in Europe, North America, and North Africa; they reported on developments and activities among Spanish, Russian, French, and English-speaking anarchists. Research by Michael Miller Topp on Italian syndicalism demonstrates how organizing failures and successes in Argentina directly affected strategies and principles adopted in Italy; the US Italian radicals' debates and correspondence clearly document the existence of internationalism organized across national borders by mobile workers.³³

In ways that differed somewhat from country to country, Italy's exiles became what Elisabetta Vezzosi termed “radical ethnic brokers” who mediated between Italian migrant workers and nativist labor movements in receiving countries.³⁴

In countries such as Argentina and Brazil, where native labor movements were nonexistent or small, Italian radicals (mostly anarchists and syndicalists) joined with Spanish and Portuguese immigrant workers in the 1880s and 1890s to create and lead “cosmopolitan” or “internationalist” multiethnic labor organizations that blended the languages and customs of several nations. Angelo Trento shows that the amalgamation of workers of many ethnic origins into single unions extended beyond artisan circles to the emerging urban proletariat (such as railroad workers), and to agricultural workers and settlers (as in Brazil's Santa Caterina and São Paulo provinces or on the pampas of Argentina), as Carina Silberstein demonstrates.³⁶

In the United States, by contrast, the American Federation of Labor's hostility to unskilled laborers, socialism, and internationalism, and its adamant opposition to free immigration, initially prevented the integration of Italians. At first, Italian labor activism flourished outside the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and mainly in syndicalist unions—either the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or in organizations for Italian immigrants. As industrial unions for unskilled workers developed, Italians found their place within the AFL through the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), but, like other foreign workers, they typically did so as activists in separate “language locals.” Ethnic and class solidarities were developing in tandem—a point that labor historians of Anglo-American and British immigrant workers initially resisted or misunderstood.³⁷

By the eve of the First World War, mobile workers from Italy found themselves everywhere juggling international, national or ethnic, and local ideals and expressions of class solidarity. With the onset of a half-century of world wars and the ostensible collapse of labor internationalism in 1914, warring states made more assertive claims on their loyalty. Following the armistice in 1918, renewed antiforeign and antiradical nativist sentiment led to growing restrictions on immigration in most receiving countries, while in Italy, Mussolini's hostility to emigration was obvious from the onset of his regime in 1922. For Italy's migrants, the interwar years of the twentieth century were a turning point in the process of nationalization worldwide; their attitudes toward fascism in Italy and racial assumptions in the receiving countries helped to shape this process.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, wherever Italian migrants had settled, fascists and antifascists warred over what it meant, politically and ideologically, to be a “true” Italian, shifting workers' entrenched localism toward issues of nation-building both in and outside Italy. These battles helped to guarantee that receiving countries' efforts to “nationalize” foreign or immigrant workers mirrored earlier efforts of their national labor movements. In France, Belgium and Argentina, opposition to fascism helped to strengthen and expand ties between Italian immigrants and multiethnic working-class movements, often influenced by left ideologies. By the mid-1930s, in France, for example, Italians accounted for over half of the 400,000 foreign members of the pro-Communist union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT).³⁸

While the French left used antifascism for its own domestic purposes, immigrants expressed simultaneously in antifascism their internationalist commitment to the struggle against oppression in Italy, their cultural identities as Italians, and new national solidarities with French workers.³⁹

In Australia, Canada, and the United States, a history of discriminatory immigration laws, hostile labor movements, and the violent repression, deportation or execution of radicals such as Sacco and Vanzetti also pushed Italian immigrants beyond village loyalties to embrace new ethnic identities as Italians. Seeing in Mussolini a positive symbol of strength, fascists in these countries successfully built a diaspora nationalism that merged love of homeland with glorification of the fascist regime. This definition of identity persisted until the early stages of the Second World War.⁴¹

The nationalization of Italy's mobile millions seemed complete by war's end. While countries such as Canada and Australia recruited Italian workers as permanent settlers, the vastly increased power of national states became particularly evident in the rise of what in post-1945 Europe came to be called “guest worker programs.” Beginning in 1946, in exchange for trade and other privileges, Italy signed a series of bilateral treaties with Belgium, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and later still, with Germany (1955), and with Switzerland in the 1960s, to recruit, select and transport negotiated numbers of workers from Italy. In return, the receiving governments stipulated wages, housing provisions, or guaranteed social services for the recruits. What Italian padroni had provided a half-century earlier—connections to employers and landlords—was now handled by government bureaucrats.⁴³

Whether in Italy or abroad, these bureaucrats assumed that the guest workers were—and would remain—Italians. But by the time of the economic recession of the 1970s, it was clear that many guest workers would not return permanently to Italy. Countries that accepted immigrants as potential citizens—notably France and Belgium—permitted Italian guest workers to bring up fiancés and wives once they had fixed employment and residence abroad. Less sympathetic to the permanent settlement or political incorporation (citizenship) of guest workers, Switzerland and Germany were shocked to discover that the temporary collapse of their economic miracles in the early 1970s did not result in the immediate repatriation of hundreds of thousands of guest workers.⁴⁴

By 1990, five million Italians still lived abroad, a small minority among the more than sixty million persons of recent Italian descent scattered worldwide. Identities diverged sharply in this larger group. In Canada, Australia, and the United States, many of them participated in ethnic revivals that occurred as these nations in the 1970s began to encourage national solidarity through official ideologies of multiculturalism. They typically expressed sentimental, familial or cultural attachments to Italy but few knew that country either linguistically or culturally. Cultural stereotypes that originated in the English-speaking world helped construct the hyphens that marked identity for Italy's descendants,⁴⁵

In sharp contrast, the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants in France, Argentina, and Brazil, while aware of their cultural origins, did not make ethnicity a central component of their identities. Accepted on arrival as Europeans and whites, they had intermarried extensively with natives and thought of themselves simply as French, Argentine, or Brazilian nationals or citizens; more than a few viewed the hyphenated identities of the English-speaking world as the distasteful product or direct continuation of past racist prejudices. Just as the labor movements of these countries had blended workers of many backgrounds—often uniting across ethnic barriers through common ideologies—both republican France and authoritarian Brazil and Argentina had imagined their nations as successful biological melting pots.⁴⁸

In several European countries, the children and grandchildren of guest workers faced particularly complex choices. In Germany and Switzerland, where race and nation were largely coterminous, migrant workers did not automatically acquire access to citizenship nor did their children born abroad. Many (but not all) Italians living elsewhere in Europe continued to hold Italian citizenship, maintained close familial and linguistic ties in Italy, and identified with their homeland regions; regional governments in the 1970s began to organize programs to assure continued contact with all migrants.”⁴⁹

In exploring how labor migrations, internationalist activists and national labor movements shaped the racialized construction of multiethnic nations, we often sensed gender's influence but, with few exceptions (notably in the work of Topp, Vezzosi, and Trento), participants in our first research collaboration did not probe this connection. We also remained acutely aware that by focusing on the many men who left Italy, we had ignored women who remained behind, and the impact of men's migration on gender and class in Italy. We addressed these issues with a second research collaborative; whereas the first one demonstrated the relative ease with which labor historians could link border-crossing class dynamics and national narratives of working-class movements, it proved more difficult to entwine gender and class analysis in the study of border-crossing phenomena. But we also felt encouraged by the many parallel and ongoing feminist efforts to internationalize women's history.⁵⁰

What Difference Does it Make? Feminist Labor History

Our shift in focus produced a numerically female-dominant team of mostly feminist researchers familiar with interdisciplinary approaches (such as ethnic or women's studies) and with negotiating a variety of theoretical, methodological and research objectives, and involved more contributors with scholarly homes outside labor history. If some participants did not entirely share our material feminist perspective, all acknowledged the importance of material conditions—especially hard physical labor and material scarcity—in shaping women's lives. We also broadened our understanding of labor to include unpaid as well as waged work, the lives of peasant woman in Italy as well as emigrants abroad, and female activism both within traditional labor, political and radical movements and outside them. Finally, we benefited from (and hoped to contribute to) the now extensive feminist scholarship on women as “unequal sisters.”⁵¹

The challenge of decentering US paradigms loomed very large in this collaboration. North American historians had produced almost all work on immigrant Italian women, thereby replicating the coldwar pattern of US anthropologists' influential portrait of the supposedly familist and apolitical peasants of Italy's South.⁵²

By involving researchers from sending and receiving societies, and by paying attention to the unorganized everyday acts of resistance,⁵⁴

We fully expected that a comparison of the lives of women in countries such as Italy, France, Argentina, the US, Belgium, Canada, and Australia would offer more complex and engaging portraits of women as peasants, workers, wives, mothers, consumers, and militants, and we hoped to recover the voices and actions of at least some militants and radicals. Still, the numbers and powerful voices of Italian women that we uncovered surprised us.⁵⁷

This new research clearly challenged simplistic contrasts between a premodern Italian south peopled by competitive and conservative familists and cloistered women “in the shadows,” and a more prosperous, industrializing Italian north of emancipated, wage-earning men and women with few economic incentives to emigrate. While gender ratios did vary in northern and southern migrations, both North and South generated massive migrations between 1870 and 1945. Stereotypes of a stable north and a migratory south originated in Italy among urban, northern middle-class government officials, surveyors and social scientists who drew negative portraits of rural Italy's many sending villages and plebeian classes and described emigration as a sign of collapsing patriarchy and morality.

In the 1970s, social historians of Italian immigrants in North America reacted to these negative portraits but their important efforts to rehabilitate Italy's mobile millions were largely confined to the men of southern Italy. Such men became reconceptualized as migrant “men without women” who were guided by strongly-felt family values and who subsidized (not financed, as some mistakenly assumed) their families with wages from abroad before returning to reassume authority over them. Social historians who critiqued US depictions of Italian immigrant families as disorganized and pathological also criticized Oscar Handlin's seminal but problematic interpretation of immigrants as uprooted and alienated.⁵⁸

Surprisingly, the equally ideological and moralizing documents produced by Italy's bourgeois surveyors also proved enormously helpful: they described women's heavy work duties; their comments about the gruff, almost beast-like manner with which women attacked their many tasks revealed how they disparaged and marginalized such women. As part of subsistence production in an agricultural economy, women's duties included both domestic chores shared with men and children and tasks allotted to women alone, such as spinning wool, weaving, laundry, and food preparation. Census enumerators typically ignored women and children's domestic chores done without pay, whether in the home or fields.⁵⁹

Ironically, bourgeois Italians saw patriarchy collapsing in the same Italian countryside where American scholars would later claim to find the roots of immigrant women's conservative gender ideals. Government surveys showed that men's emigrations from Italy meant women had to work harder to guarantee family subsistence, and, in response, the investigators criticized male labor migrants for their callous and utilitarian approach to marriage and wives. While confirming the extent and importance of women's work, Linda Reeder instead linked male emigration from Sicily to more positive results at home—including higher rates of female literacy, improved housing, and improvements in peasant diets.⁶¹

Overall, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives demonstrates that women's domestic worlds were not isolated or patriarchal prisons from which they escaped into independence or female autonomy via wage-earning. But neither was the domestic world a female-dominated haven for highly skilled and chaste housewives, as bourgeois Americans more often believed. Conflicts between a peasant Italian discourse that posited the home or private sphere as the preferred workplace for all—male and female—and discourses of the home as a female sphere apart from the public world of male work seemed particularly intensive in the English-speaking world. One result was a fairly consistent portrait of Italian immigrant women as homebound, family-oriented wives and mothers rather, as was the case in other countries, as workers (Australia) or Communist activists (Belgium).⁶²

In US studies of working-class women, Italian immigrants' absence from domestic service was sometimes labelled a failure to take the same jobs as other immigrant women and was attributed to Italian men's rule over women's sexuality. Our research suggests it might be more helpful to view women's work as keepers of male boarders in their homes as a form of domestic service (or even female entrepreneurship) and as a way to earn incomes within their own ethnic and working-class, rather than American women's, domestic sphere. Such work never registered as wage-earning in America but was otherwise similar to the work done by live-in Irish and other immigrant domestics. Boarding housekeepers, much like other domestic servants, and much like factory workers, faced sexual risks. Alternatively, illicit love affairs, usually between young male boarders and their housekeepers' daughters, suggest that houses with boarders were sites of both pleasure and danger. That large numbers of Italian immigrant women kept boarders shows a willingness to take on new forms of income-earning, for the practice of boarding was almost unknown in Italy.⁶³

Although transnational in its approach to women's labors, our research deexoticized Italian immigrant women and portrayed them as quite like other working-class women who juggled family and waged work to guarantee survival and reproduction. Whether in northern or southern Italy or abroad, and whether Italian, eastern-European Jewish, African-American, or Mexican, women's work choices depended on a range of factors, including availability of jobs in the local economy, timing of arrival, age, lifecycle stage, and motherhood. The task of piecing together livelihoods involved women in a complicated set of activities that were seldom completely distinct from or independent of the home, neighborhood, or community.

Here, we would also warn against exoticizing working-class Italian immigrant women in studies of domestic violence. Eager to rescue immigrants from pathological portraits, ethnic scholars have generally avoided the subject. Yet feminist scholarship shows that domestic violence crosses all class and racial/ethnic boundaries. Abusive men, regardless of class or race/ethnicity, typically justified their actions by claiming to have a stubborn, disobedient, or inferior wife who failed to fulfill her duties.⁶⁴

Since the least understood feature of Italian immigrant and working-class women's lives has been their agency as militants and radicals, it bears stressing that our contributors easily uncovered activists in North and South America, in Italy, and in northern Europe. In many ways, women radicals resembled Italy's male activists: they organized across national borders and preferred anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism before the First World War and antifascism and communism during the interwar and postwar years. But their activism was also distinctive. Italian women were often “radicals of a different sort.” Like other radical proletarian immigrant and ethnic women, Italian anarchist women in North and South America and in Europe were both politicized by and their activities and ideologies rooted in the everyday material world; they tended to value relationship and informal organization over union membership or discipline. José Moya's and Caroline Merithew's analyses of the newsletters and debates of formally uneducated militant anarchist Italian housewives and miners' wives in turn-of-the century Argentina and the US, and Anne Morelli's work on rank-and-file communist women workers in interwar and post-1945 Belgium, reminds us of the limitation of top-down analyses of left or militant women that assume, implicitly or explicitly, that party cadres or leaders were representative of the unorganized, the rank-and-file and grass-roots organizers.⁶⁶

So, too, does Guglielmo's study of New York garment workers, which explores the meaning of a proletarian feminism that joined community, workplace, and family in distinctively female ways. Thus, for example, in the famous 1909 uprising that led to the massive influx of women into the ILGWU and the AFL, Italian women appeared as reluctant union members partly because they supported the IWW (as did more Italian men) and so were not part of the informal family and neighborhood networks that facilitated Jewish women's entry into the union. Together, this research suggests that labor and political activism for migrant Italian women were not battles for autonomous individualism, equal rights and economic independence, as they were for Anglo-American feminists, who were more likely to understand women's liberty in terms of a liberal discourse of individual rights and citizenship.⁶⁷

Maternalism, however, should not be confused with either passivity or with respectable womanhood, as it is usually understood in the Anglo-American world. While certain women radicals achieved notoriety as individuals,⁶⁸

The female political culture that emerged in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives was earthy, and it was based simultaneously on women's capacity for and pride in their incredibly harsh physical labor, their sharp tongues (the “belle e buone lingue”—good and beautiful tongues—noted in an Italian union ditty of the time), and the close connection between their often-rough and violent protest strategies and their commitments to family obligations. Street protests and labor militancy were normal, acceptable, and respectable elements of family and community life, completely consistent with women's identities as wives, daughters, and mothers.⁷⁰

The presence of rank-and-file women who acted in strikes as in daily life—with an earthy, assertive, and mouthy femininity rooted in the harsh realities and struggles of peasant and proletarian life—pose a major challenge to an older but still influential paradigm in North American feminist labor history. It stresses how working-class women were constrained in protesting and mounting militant campaigns by their aspirations to feminine propriety in either bourgeois (i.e., hegemonic) or proletarian-defined notion of domesticity and motherhood. Of course, not all Italian militant working-class women expressed their contempt for gouging landlords or exploitative employers in a violent way: fear, age, and other factors kept many from joining the female mobs or smashing windows. Still, our findings suggest the need to de-center more fully white Anglo-Celtic North American women's notions of gender respectability but to do so without creating romantic ethnic heroines or golden ages of female militancy.⁷¹

Our research collaboration on women and gender transnationally did not create a periodization of nationalization comparable to the one uncovered in Italian Workers of the World but it did confirm the prevalence of complex and multi-layered identities among women, too, during an earlier epoch of globalization. While the challenge of postmodernism (with its sometimes ahistorical claims to the uniqueness of the present) has sometimes led to strained relations between younger and older generations of labor historians, we experienced no major tensions among our rather eclectic group of authors. No debate developed over whether our project required a shift from material feminist to post-modern feminist perspectives. For us, a sensitivity to women's multiple identities emerged from our fairly traditional bottom-up approach to women's lives and from an understanding of a feminist labor scholarship that—as Carole Turbin, Sonya Rose, Neville Kirk, and others note—had already begun in the 1970s and 1980s to deconstruct class and to demonstrate the complicating influence of language, rhetoric, and ideology on social practice, class consciousness, hierarchies of power, and contested meanings and identities.⁷³

In ways that recall the earlier efforts of Marxist feminists to work through the uneasy alliance between analyses of patriarchy and class—an exercise that effectively demonstrated the symbiotic relationship of gender and class and of working-women's multiple identities⁷⁴

Conclusion

Of course, our agenda of entwining class and gender analysis on a global stage remains incompletely fulfilled. The need to link such analysis to the nationalization and racialization of mobile women and men workers also remains a pressing one. Still, we believe that our collaborative research on mobile labor offered one possible way to address quite a number of tough scholarly issues. Colleagues working together across national boundaries problematized the national character of some of the sharpest historiographical debates among labor historians. Both conflicts over postmodernist theory, for example, and the popularity of gender analysis, are far more pronounced in the English-speaking world than they are in Italy, France, or Argentina. By beginning to write a border-crossing or transnational history of conflicts across gender, racial, class, and national lines, we had found room for Italy's feisty woman as well as for the propagandist of the deed, the sojourner, and for the manly labor stalwart along with the multinational, multiethnic and multiracial families, communities, and workplaces—connected through migration—where men and women loved and battled with each other.