Fashioning Political Identities: Cultural Studies and the Historical Construction of Political Subjects

When more than 20,000 shirtwaist workers walked off their jobs in New York City in November 1909, the public debate immediately focused on the flamboyant fashion of the female strikers. “I had come to observe the Crisis of a Social Condition;” wrote one commentator for Collier’s magazine, “but apparently this was a Festive Occasion. Lingerie waists were elaborate, [hair] puffs towered; there were picture turbans and di’mont pendants.” ¹ Working women were well known for their exuberant embrace of consumer culture products, particularly fashion, but elaborately-dressed female strikers did not meet middle-class expectations for the proper demeanor of political participants, and the reporter for Collier’s magazine did not immediately recognize them as political subjects. The shirtwaist strike is famous in labor history and women’s history both because it was the largest female-dominated strike to that date and because it inaugerated a string of large, “women’s strikes” in the 1910s that dramatically asserted working women’s political participation and firmly established women’s unionism. While women’s fashion does not play a large role in the established histories of the strike, it did play a part in the unfolding events of the public strike debate. This article explores women’s fashion in relation to the 1909 shirtwaist strike in order to demonstrate current theoretical challenges scholars face in the study of culture and politics and their implications for the field of cultural studies.

In recent years, American studies and U.S. history scholars have focused increasingly on popular culture, style, performance, and the “dream worlds” of mass consumption. Relying on a range of cultural theories, scholars explore the political significance of culture in the daily lives of historical actors whom they position in a field of cultural contradictions and limited agency. ² Studies of formal political protest, in contrast, have traditionally presented historical actors as stable subjects exerting their will on the body politic in actions imbued with agency. Recent work has begun to bridge the gap in approach between cultural studies and more traditional social and labor history, but for the most part, studies of culture still stand apart from studies of formal political protest. This analytical distance can be seen even in studies of protest that include discussions of culture, as many now do, because very often the analysis of culture does not greatly change the narrative of heroic, willful action in the context of a strike or collective action. While studies of protest regularly analyze culture as a crucial component in the construction of identities, content-based studies are just beginning to challenge the long-standing assumption that formal politics requires a stable subjectivity. ³ That is, while scholars show identities to be historically constructed rather than essential, they often present them as fixed and stable. This article proposes that we analyze grassroots politics with the eye for contingency, unfixed subjectivity and limited agency that scholars use in analyzing popular culture. This view sees grassroots politics not as an arena of unified willful action but as a field fraught with contradiction and cultural contestation. That is, scholars must see grassroots politics not as an arena in which coherent individuals make and respond to rational demands, but as a cultural arena, co-extensive with other cultural arenas in which subjectivities form and change. Indeed, doing so allows us to write a more diverse history of political protest and to clarify and deepen the social significance of cultural studies.

Scholarly representations of the turn-of-the-century working class diverge widely and demonstrate the analytical gap between studies of culture and studies of protest. Labor historians such as Meredith Tax, Susan Glenn, and Annelise Orleck described the female strikers as heroic, serious, willful actors who seized the day and through straightforward agency transformed the garment industry and inaugurated a heyday of unionization in the heretofore neglected female-dominated trades. However, Kathy Peiss and Leslie Tentler described New York working women as interested in fashion and entertainment. Peiss, particularly, revealed women’s vibrant engagement with consumer culture, including going to movies...