Laboring Feminism and Gendering Working-Class History

Nearly 300 feminist and labour historians gathered at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto for this conference, which was organized by Franca Iacovetta, Rick Halpern, and myself. When we first conceived of the event we thought we might attract around 100 participants; the end result, then, was incredibly encouraging and gratifying. Since I first entered North America's labour history community some five years ago (having decided to move from University College London to the University of Toronto) I have heard a great deal of talk – or lament – about the many problems facing the field of labour history, indeed, of its declining interest and popularity. The conference last autumn was a very strong indicator that this is far from the truth, especially among feminist scholars eager to take new directions in the field. Not only is there clearly a new generation of graduate students interested in labour and working-class history, but they are helping to widen the boundaries, to bring in a diversity of approaches, and to engage with a wide range of paradigms and theoretical literatures. At the same times, senior feminist scholars at the conference were not protective of their approach to labour history, but engaging across the generations, probing, in dialogue. Indeed, their openness to dialogue made this conference ‘feel’ very different from the many labour history conferences I have attended in North America. The depth of scholarship evident in the many sessions and the energetic conversations that took place throughout the weekend made it clear to me that there is a very large, strong, and diverse group of scholars, from graduate students to senior professors, who are working towards rigorously gendered approaches to writing labour and working-class history.

As the graduate student co-chair, I learned a great deal while preparing the conference – not least about the time and energy required to organize an international conference, especially a feminist one, where we tried to respect the feminist collective and consultative decision-making process. We chose to structure the conference around four plenary sessions, each with between four and six speakers. With each plenary, we tried to address central interests in the field within an international context. Thus we grouped together a diverse range of speakers who came from a variety of national, ethnic, and regional locales. While we were fairly successful at balancing junior and senior scholars in both the plenaries and the parallel workshop sessions, the majority of presenters and participants, as is all too common at North American conferences, were white and dealt with North American topics. Perhaps this can be explained by our location in Canada; nevertheless, it is to be regretted.

The conference opened on the Thursday evening with a plenary addressing the state of the field under the heading ‘Feminism and Gendering Working Class History: Class, Race, and Comparative Contexts’. With presentations that dealt with historiographical foundations, race, trans-national approaches and religion, the six speakers – Alice Kessler-Harris, Paige Raibmon, Lynne Marks, Jayeeta Sharma, Lara Putnam, and Kimberley Phillips – set the tone of the conference. It was to be a weekend of pushing forward in new directions while also drawing connections with established paradigms and literature. Marks's plea that working-class historians pay greater attention to workers’ religion as lived experience rather than simply religious affiliation was compelling, but not pursued by most of the subsequent presenters except in the parallel session on African American activism. By contrast, the issues of race and racialized labour raised by Raibmon (who spoke on Aboriginal labour), Putnam (on Latin America), and Phillips (on African Americans) were revisited and developed throughout the course of the weekend. Scholars considered diverse issues from the physical representation of race to racial discrimination and activism. The range of papers revealed the extent and depth of work on African America women, and the growing attention being paid to the study of aboriginal women.

The second plenary, ‘Labouring and Consuming Bodies’, which took place on the Friday afternoon, addressed a subject that many conference participants viewed as one of the most interesting...