Beyond Laments and Eulogies: Re-Imaginings

Beyond Laments and Eulogies: Re-imaginings

Eileen Boris

Thirty years ago, feminist historians of labor and the working class easily could iden- tify with proletarian suffragists and communist new women, who precariously tee- tered between class-based and women’s movements. Our research seemed outside of the main narrative of labor history, with its emphasis on the heroic rise of industrial unionism. To some, our focus on gender appeared threatening, as an alternative to, perhaps a substitute for, class analysis.1 It seemed, as one historian remarked in a 1991 review of books on clerical and domestic workers, that women’s history and labor history composed “separate tribes.”2 Some of us felt that we had entered our own “unhappy marriage,”3 suffering from domestic abuse and charges of disloyalty but feisty enough to threaten divorce, which would expose labor history as far less progressive and much more limited than adherents thought. As recently as fall 2004, in these pages, Ardis Cameron deconstructed the discursive structures of the “‘new’ labor history,” how it privileged notions of class and promoted a teleological agency that subsequent postmodernist, postcolonial, new racial, gender, and queer thought have destabilized.4 These articles are revisions of papers from the 2005 international conference “Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working-Class History in North America and Beyond,” held at the University of Toronto, of which Labor was a cosponsor. With plenary sessions on feminism and the gendering of working-class history, laboring and consuming bodies, and labor feminism and women’s activism, as well as nearly twenty-fi ve additional sessions, that meeting engaged 250 scholars in critical dialogues

1. Marjorie Murphy, “Review Article: What Women Have Wrought,” American Historical Review 93 (June 1998): 654. 2. Richard Oestreicher, “Separate Tribes? Working-Class and Women’s Histories,” Reviews in Ameri- can History 19 (June 1991): 228 – 31. 3. I refer to Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End, 1981). 4. Ardis Cameron, “Boys Do Cry: The Rhetorical Power of the ‘New’ Labor History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Fall 2004): 97 – 107.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/3/3/1/438179/01-boris.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 2 3:3 LABOR “across borders, theories and generations.”5 Race and ethnicity, national and transnational issues, representation and political economy, sexualities and abilities: the conference addressed identities, topics, and concerns dominating current research in gender studies as well as labor history. Replacing the old dichotomy, labor history versus women’s history, were new ones, predominantly bodies and sexualities versus activism and organizing, as well as consumption versus production. However, as many recognized, these pairings were not binaries but different directions that could embrace cultural, structural, political, and economic approaches. Thus, clothing, deportment, and representation may do political work, signifying gendered and racialized gendered class, providing the basis for mobilization, or offer- ing strategies for union campaigns. In this issue, we see the organizing work of cul- ture in Laurie B. Green’s discussion of representations of African American laundry workers during World War II and Kathleen Barry’s study of the double meaning of glamour for postwar fl ight attendants. We also witness the complication of class. Embodying class through gender analysis, widening its framework to encompass household and community, and incorporating ideology not only enrich the category, Alice Kessler-Harris argues in her powerful essay; such a reconfi guration also prom- ises to turn class into a powerful analytic for unifying labor history. This special issue introduces new terms of analysis and subjects of inquiry, such as indigenousness, disability, and the body, while addressing long-time concerns of feminist labor history — constructions of work and workers, gendered and racialized defi nitions of class, the meaning of difference, and conditions for organizing.6 Many essays ground large themes in those old standbys, the community and/or occupational study. Signifi cantly, the subject of labor history expands. Thus, Aboriginal peoples become workers, not vanishing objects of a preindustrial past, in Paige Raib- mon’s essay on the transnational movement of hop pickers along the Pacifi c Northwest coast. Raibmon historicizes the workings of globalization, adding a new chapter to the processes of migration. Not only does Raibmon recover Aboriginal women’s produc- tive, artistic, reproductive, and representational labor, she also exposes the simultane- ous ideological and material appropriation of their work by farmers, tourists, and colo- nial society. Through ethnographic political economy, we view how consumption — of crafts and portraits — constituted middle-class as well as indigenous identity.

5. We are indebted to Franca Iacovetta, Ruth Percy, and Rick Halpern from the University of To- ronto—who jointly organized and administered the conference—for bringing the new scholarship to- gether and making this special issue possible. See the original announcement at www.h-net.org/announce/ show.cgi?ID=146724. The program may be accessed at www.utoronto.ca/csus/alphaprog.htm (accessed February 21, 2006). 6. Compare these essays, for example, with a pioneering cluster in Labor History 17 (Winter 1976), especially Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” 5 – 23; Susan J. Kleinberg, “Technology and Women’s Work: The Lives of Working-Class Women in Pittsburgh, 1870 – 1900,” 58 – 72; Barbara Klaczynska, “Why Women Work: A Comparison of Various Groups — Philadelphia, 1910 – 1930,” 73 – 87.

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The housewife reappears in these essays as essential to the well-being of working- class communities. Esyllt Jones highlights her role during death and burial in an account of Winnipeg’s infl uenza epidemic that further reveals the continuous making and remaking of classed bodies. Working-class feminism emerges in this account as the interrelation “between home and domestic life, economic struggles in the work- place, and political campaigns.” The electoral and municipal participation of working- class women and their advocates recasts standard stories of the political by moving the labors of reproduction and consumption to the center of public life.7 The miner’s wife, Nancy Forestell shows, also undertook necessary, though unpaid, care work. She nursed husbands, performed incapacitated men’s custom- ary household chores, and stretched budgets. What she could not do is earn wages in towns that reserved the few jobs open to women for miners’ daughters, not their wives. In reinterpreting her earlier work on Canada’s Porcupine gold mining dis- trict through the lens of disability, Forestell further complicates analysis of the family wage. Dangerous labor marked masculinity for an occupational group with dispro- portionately high levels of disease and injury; the ideology of the male breadwinner reinforced their worth. The support of wives in the union struggle for workmen’s compensation became an attempt to maintain the family wage rather than under- mine it. The essays by Laurie Green and Kathleen Barry further advance our understanding of the role of state policy in shaping working-class activism and union organizing. Green’s gendering of black workers’ quest for jobs and justice in Memphis highlights the self-conscious activity of community networks during World War II as laboring women rejected associations with servitude. Massive federal investment in wartime centers of production facilitated the shift of domestic labor from pri- vate households to public venues, such as government hospitals and laundries; fair employment orders provided a vehicle for black women to protest demeaning treat- ment, including sexual harassment, although their complaints languished amid the interstices of weak federal enforcement and a resistant localism. By suggesting that women’s militancy encouraged men’s, this history contextualizes the 1968 claim of striking Memphis sanitation workers, “I AM A MAN.” Green’s story of wartime protest contrasts with the pink-collar activism of postwar fl ight attendants, who had to labor hard to seem to be not working at reconstructing themselves into glamorous icons of white femininity. “Stewardesses” fought for state recognition of their skill and against sexual objectifi cation by the carriers as well as the general public. Barry not only provides fl ight attendant activism a longer history than previously thought, she also illuminates the complexity of the service relationship itself. Such case studies enhance the meaning of class. In turn, Alice Kessler-Harris boldly intervenes on its side in the intellectual identity wars that mark our time.

7. For another example, Karen Hunt, “Negotiating the Boundaries of the Domestic: British Socialist Women and the Politics of Consumption,” Women’s History Review 9 (2000): 389 – 410.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/3/3/1/438179/01-boris.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 4 3:3 LABOR By historicizing how the hostile political economy of the 1970s and 1980s, with the breakdown of the family wage, dissipation of organized labor, and divisions among working people, discredited the idea of class, she contextualizes the explanatory move to race, gender, religious, and other identities. But her understanding of class — like that of the other contributors — is not your father’s. It is a class reconfi gured through gender, consumption, nation, sexuality, household, and cultural community. While refusing to reduce class to a mere identity, Kessler-Harris nonetheless sees it shaped by the structural work of identities, the power relations within households, and the regulation of sexuality. This reconfi gured gendered understanding of class/citizen- ship illuminates globalization in terms of migrations of people and not merely fl ows of capital. For questions of poverty, welfare states, and global traffi cking in women’s labors, she asks us to “imagine” gender with class as we “have learned to think about gender as a racialized construct.” Finally, these essays remind us that the practice of labor history refl ects not only intellectual trends but also the direction of the labor movement itself. During the past two decades, in service sectors once dismissed as unorganizable, such as child and home care, hospitals and nursing homes, adult entertainment and sex workers, and hotel cleaning and janitorial services, a working class that is more female, non- white, and immigrant became the face of a vibrant unionism. The renewed struggle against global capitalism and free trade, the fi ght for corporate accountability through the antisweatshop movement, and living-wage campaigns further reinvigorated the union idea. Although it is too early to assess whether the “Change to Win” unions will succeed in enhancing union density, eulogies for the labor movement — and labor history — appear premature. It is now time to move beyond lament, re-imagining the subjects of labor history and constructing a narrative for our times.

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