It is often said that labor history is in decline. Yet other interpretations are possible. The flourishing of labor history from the 1960s to the 1980s could instead be regarded as exceptional and the situation during the last twenty years as the more typical state of affairs. A second interpretation, which I favor, is that labor history has, in fact, not declined. Rather, the content of labor history has shifted. There may be less scholarship on many of the traditional or original objects of research, but there is new research, in history and other disciplines, on topics that arguably fall under a new, expanded understanding of “labor history.” This second explanation is supported by the continued vitality of scholarship on women's work and women's activism.
In September 2005, some 250 scholars came together for the first “Labouring Feminism” conference, held at the University of Toronto. The conference was announced in Europe and elsewhere, but only a few people from outside North America attended. Yet the conference inspired and energized me, in part because I have often felt rather isolated as a feminist labor historian in Sweden. I spoke to some of the other European conference participants, and we agreed that there was a need for a similar conference in Europe. During spring 2006 the idea of such a conference was presented to the research council at the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm (ARAB) and in August 2006 they accepted the suggestion. Together with a group of Swedish researchers, I took on the task of organizing the 2008 conference.Footnote 1
Our ambition was to gather researchers from different disciplines and from different parts of the world in order to internationalize feminist labor history and to encourage more comparative and transnational research. A second, equally important ambition from a Swedish perspective was to revitalize feminist labor-history research in Sweden by bringing scholars from around the world to Sweden. We hoped to make the conference a meeting place for different generations of labor historians as well. We had originally planned on a maximum of one hundred participants. However, our call for papers elicited responses from twice that number—an indication of the still-robust interest in feminist labor history. We thus opened the conference to more people. We also had to find new premises and a professional conference administrator.
Nevertheless, the response to our call for papers, as exciting as it was, indicated that our ambition to make this conference a global meeting place would not be fulfilled. Both the percentage of proposals from researchers from the Global South and the percentage of papers dealing with regions of the world other than North America and Western Europe were extremely low. Canadian researchers were the most well represented national group—not surprising given the many Canadians involved in the 2005 Toronto conference and their eagerness to continue the discussion. Yet the geographic imbalance also reflected the character of our networks in Scandinavia, which extend primarily to the English-speaking countries. Even our closer neighbors, such as Germany and the Baltic countries, were not present to the extent one would have expected. To internationalize feminist labor history, we will need to expand our networks; we will need also to find ways of funding the participation of researchers from poorer regions.
We relied on a broad definition of feminist labor history when we accepted different proposals. We wanted to broaden the field by discipline, geographic spaces, and time span. We also encouraged comparative and transnational panels, though only a few, less than we expected, were explicitly conceived along these lines or occupied themselves with such questions. We were surprised by how deeply rooted historians are in their own national histories and how difficult it is to engage in comparative or cross-border history, discussing, for example, the consequences of historical developments in one region of the world for those in other regions.Footnote 2
Yet many researchers at the conference, including those chosen for inclusion in this issue of International Labor and Working-Class History, rose to the challenge of comparative and transnational work. We are pleased to present four such outstanding papers from the conference, by Karen Hunt, June Hannam, Julie Guard, and Judith Smart. We are also pleased to add Kate Hardy's essay on sex workers in Argentina to this special section on gendered activism and the politics of women's work. Her essay is a particularly valuable addition for its empirical rigor, theoretical sophistication, and ambition to capture the agency of a group of highly marginalized workers in the Global South.
Mobilizing the Margins
The five articles included in this special section focus on different periods of time and different geographical areas, but they are all concerned with the political and economic mobilization of women and with politicizing the spheres of reproduction and consumption. Some of these mobilizations resulted in the formation of new and politically powerful consumer organizations; others facilitated the inclusion of women and of women's politics into already-existing labor and political organizations. All five articles draw our attention to groups of women who have been outside the main interest of both feminist research and labor history.
The articles by Karen Hunt, Julie Guard, and Judith Smart explore the dynamics and character of women's food politics in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. The articles by June Hannam and Kate Hardy focus on the relationship between class and sex politics and the experiences of women in male-dominated movements and parties.
Housewives have often been perceived as difficult to organize into formal political organizations, in part because of their domestic responsibilities. Yet in some political parties on the Left in the first half of the twentieth century, housewives outnumbered wage-earning women.Footnote 3 Only recently have researchers begun to challenge the conventional wisdom that wage work heightens political activism and that housewives were more quiescent than other women because of their exclusion from wage work and their relegation to the private sphere of the home. These essays add to that growing body of revisionist scholarship.
The first three essays also offer new perspectives on women's political role as consumers. They make connections between the local and the national, show how mobilizations in one country affected those in another, and suggest the powerful and long-lasting effects of women's household and consumer activism. Finally, they expand our knowledge of the forms of women's activism by including the episodic and spontaneous protests in which they engaged as well as the long-term and formal institutions they created.
In her essay, Karen Hunt builds upon her earlier work on how British socialist women sought to establish a women's alternative consumer politics in the early twentieth century. Although Britain did not experience the voluble food riots that exploded in other countries during the First World War, a “women's politics of food” did emerge, particularly in the local committees set up to address the concerns of consumers. Yet the representation of housewives on these committees and boards remained low or even nonexistent. Hunt suggests that part of the problem was the failure to recognize consumer politics as gendered and the typical consumer as female.
If the experience of war was crucial for the mobilization of housewives in Britain and elsewhere in the early twentieth century, it was economic crisis that spurred the organization of working-class wives in Canada in the 1930s. In Julie Guard's contribution, rising milk prices prompted women's activism. As she argues, the protests of the Toronto Housewives Association were effective in part because they represented themselves as caring housewives who could not feed their children. These “housewife-activists” did not achieve all their goals. But as Guard suggests, their campaigns raised public expectations about governmental responsibilities for living standards and economic security and are an important and forgotten part of the history of the emergence of the Canadian welfare state.
The Australian housewives in Judith Smart's essay organized in nontraditional “in-between spaces” and moved between different kinds of strategies. First, they took over the distribution of sugar from the state by forming a cooperative association to lower food costs. When that strategy proved problematic, they turned to boycotts. Yet unlike the housewives in Canada, they did not necessarily back a Left politics. They protested both the lack of state regulation of rising food prices and the overly protectionist Australian politics, which, in their view, protected the inflated wages of white Australian workers. Thus, on the one hand, as Smart suggests, the housewives' organizations were conservative in their demand for a freer and more competitive market. On the other hand, she suggests they were progressive in their opposition to excess profits and their demand for the inclusion of the interests of consumers. Indeed, all three cases show that often the interests of producers and retailers were better represented in formal politics than the consumer perspective was. This lack prompted demands for more women's representation and for the recognition of a distinct “consumer” interest.
All of the essays illustrate the difficulties of sustaining solidarity and of translating spontaneous protest into effective political demands. There was no self-evident route either from food shortages to protest or from food protests to support of a specific political movement. Yet the essays do make a case for substantial and continuous political activism among housewives. They also demonstrate how politics is made at the point of consumption as well as the point of production and how labor history would benefit from expanding its conventional definition of politics, political spaces, and political actors.
Women's Activism within Labor Movements and Institutions
June Hannam's study of women organizers in the British Labour Party reveals the ways in which women's activism on the local level is crucial to understanding the strength of women's mobilization at the national level. It also reveals some of the tensions between the women and the party as well as the particular concerns of housewives. The women organizers she profiles took the problems of reproduction seriously. They also understood that household cleaning was work too and that there was a politics of dirt in the household as well as in the factory.
It would be interesting to explore further the transnational links between women organizers in different parts of the world. Canada, of course, was closely linked to Great Britain as a member of the British Commonwealth. Labour women such as Mary Sutherland, whom Hannam discusses, also worked outside of Britain. Sutherland was active in an organization for labor women of the British Commonwealth in the 1930s, and in the late 1940s, she went to Canada to help mobilize women there.Footnote 4 In letters to Marjorie Mann, the chair of the Ontario Cooperative-Commonwealth Federation's (CCF) women's committee, she offered her help and advice. In one letter, she urged the CCF to pay attention to the concerns of mothers. These concerns, she noted, had proven effective in mobilizing women in Britain. “I am sure,” she said, that “it is a good idea to get the women in the local branches to study practical questions like the administration of the Mother's Allowance Act.” “We found it most useful,” she added, “to plan practical social activities in connection with schools” and to focus on “the condition of playgrounds,” whether women had “facilities for drying wet clothes,” and other issues.Footnote 5
Women labor organizers also exchanged ideas and developed their political strategies in international organizations such as the Labour and Socialist International (LSI). Matters of reproduction were important topics for the women's committee in the LSI during the interwar years, for example. Consumer matters were discussed in the LSI at the highest organizational level, with calls for investigating and alleviating food shortages that were developing in certain countries.Footnote 6
Trade unions and the labor movement are growing in many parts of the world, including the Global South. Kate Hardy's article reminds us of this reality and shows how the integration of sex workers into an Argentinean trade union confederation has succeeded. It led, she argues, to growth in the labor movement and to a strengthening of the rights of sex workers. The Argentinean case is an interesting one. In countries such as Sweden, where “sex buyers” are criminalized, the inclusion of sex workers in unions would be more difficult. However, in Argentina, different legal conditions existed. These differences and the trade union's decision to define work broadly made the inclusion of sex workers in the labor movement more conceivable. Hardy's article raises interesting questions about whether other occupations and groups of workers usually seen as difficult to organize—such as undocumented immigrants or household workers like au pairs—can in fact unionize under the right conditions. It also suggests that we need further exploration of where to draw the organizational boundaries of trade unions, what it means to be working-class, and how to rethink working-class politics given the growth of new forms of work and the diverse concerns of the poor and working classes. We are hopeful that this set of articles will spark more such research.
