Editor's Note

By replacing the phrase "women and work," associated with labor force participation, with that of "women's labors," this special issue expands the definition of work to recognize the diverse activities throughout the globe through which women have gained survival and sustenance. To speak of women's labors has meant to address all forms of women's work, both paid and unpaid, including but not limited to family, household, or domestic labor; carework and motherwork; and non-traditional and female-dominated occupations. A decade ago, in response to the naming of women's history and working-class history as "separate tribes," I argued in these pages that engendering labor history required "dissolving dichotomy"—between home and work, production and reproduction, private and public, community and shopfloor, class and (what I now name) racialized gender. ¹ These realms have shaped each other; thus the study of women as workers and women's labors belied any neat division into class and gender, especially since consciousness and subjectivity have emerged from multiple sites of identity, including class, culture, race/ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, occupation, age, and/or kinship position. This issue on "Women's Labors" seeks to complicate further such understandings.

The linguistic or cultural turn in historical writing deconstructed the categories "work" and "worker." Class, no less than gender, became contingent on factors beyond the workplace, shifting with time and place. ² My expanded definition, insisting on the centrality of reproductive labor in its manifold forms, is perhaps the lasting legacy of a socialist feminism that, in its heyday during the early 1980s, dominated theoretical debates within feminism and is undergoing somewhat of a reconsideration in the face of worldwide mobilization against capitalist restructuring, increased migration of women searching for income to support families "back home," and manifestations of a robust imperialism. ³ A new global and comparative turn is now reshaping study of the past.

Though accounting for diversity, difference, and power relations within specific locales, most women's labor history, like most historical practice, until recently has confined itself to the nation state. Global inequalities, which have privileged U.S. or Western European women as producers as well as consumers, rarely became the focus of investigation. Renewed anti-sweatshop campaigns, growing solidarity movements linking the global North to the global South, union organizing among immigrant women service workers, and feminism's revived transnational outlook have helped expand the analysis of women's labor as surely as the processes of globalization themselves.

As Alice Kessler-Harris points out here, contours of identity, status, and power vary enormously. The tension between family and wage labor—sometimes considered as a gender and generational conflict between domesticity and independence (so prevalent in the historiography on the United States)—must not be assumed to reign elsewhere. Leela Fernandes reinforces this observation in her review of global perspectives on feminist labor history by noting that a transnational, comparative context "requires a shift from an assumption of the primacy of gender to a relational approach to the study of structural inequalities and social identities."

Such a shift could help connect two paradigms: transnationalism, an approach emerging from postcolonial and other scholarship on global relations, and intersectionality, a mode of analysis derived from critical race and other women-of-color feminisms. These terms sometimes appear in opposition but more often seem, in Fernandes' words, as "separate bodies of knowledge." In a decade, we have shifted from an externalist duality (the two tribes of the working-class and women) to an internalist duality within feminist studies itself (the separate sites of transnationalism and intersectionality). Again, I suggest that we move beyond dichotomy. Although the possibilities will derive from specific investigation, we might consider the representational and structural production of inequality at home in relation to global flows of capital, people, culture, and protest, with all of their differential impacts on various groups of women, gender systems, and women's and other movements for economic and social justice.

These articles and review essays divide between those that directly engage with global...