Gender and Labor in Comparative Historical Perspective

Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds. Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Women Around the World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. xiv + 416 pp; ISBN 0-8020-3611-2 (cl); 0-8020-8462-1 (pb).

Dong-Sook S. Gills and Nicole Piper, eds. Women and Work in Globalising Asia. London: Routledge, 2002. xii + 238 pp; ISBN 0-415-25586-4 (cl).

Anna Lindberg. Experience and Identity: A Historical Account of Class, Caste, and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930-2000. Sweden: Department of History at Lund University, 2001. xviii + 382 pp; ISBN 91-628-4915-8 (pb).

Pamela Sharpe, ed. Women, Gender, and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2001. xviii + 318 pp; ISBN 0-415-22800-X (cl).

Questions of identity and difference have become familiar sites of theoretical discussion and empirical analysis in the field of women's and gender studies. In this context, interdisciplinary approaches have increasingly focused on the significance of national and transnational economic, cultural, and historical processes in shaping women's experiences, identities, and practices. The books by Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Gills and Piper, Lindberg, and Sharpe provide an interesting range of analyses that demonstrate the ways in which such a global perspective enriches feminist perspectives on labor history. Drawing on a broad array of geographical sites including Europe, Asia, Latin America, and South Africa, the books provide in-depth studies of women workers' employment histories, sociocultural identities, and political activities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A central contribution of these books lies in the ways in which they foreground the experience of women workers in thinking about current debates on transnationalism and globalization. In recent years, scholarship on transnationalism and globalization has often sought to interrogate the centrality of the nation-state as the foundational unit of analysis. ¹ Such an approach has demonstrated the significance of movements—whether of people, economic capital and commodities or cultural forms—across national borders. While this approach has been important in questioning the presumed naturalness of national boundaries, it has often had the unintended consequence of producing a notion of "the global" that is disconnected from historical specificities and the socioeconomic conditions of existence at the local and national levels. ² The books under review represent an important corrective to this danger. At one level, they present nuanced analyses that demonstrate the significance of transnational processes, in particular of the migration of people and of capital, in understanding the constitution of the experiences and identities of women workers. On a broader scale, they examine the ways in which such transnational processes unfold and are shaped by the material, social, and historical contexts in specific nation-states.

Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives presents a series of essays that systematically examine the gendered nature of transnational migration from Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A central objective of the book is to move away from a preoccupation with migration to the United States as the normative model for understanding transnational migration. Thus, while the book does contain essays on the United States, the primary focus is on migration to such contexts as France, Switzerland, Australia, Canada and Argentina. In particular, the book challenges stereotypical perspectives produced in the context of the U.S.-immigrant paradigm that have depicted Italian immigrant women, as Gabaccia and Iacovetta put it, as "docile, anti-union, housebound women controlled by men or victimized by a deeply patriarchal Latin culture" (xii). Moreover, as Roslyn Pesman's analysis of scholarly representations of Italian women immigrants in Australia as passive victims of patriarchy and capitalism demonstrates, such stereotypes are not limited to the production of knowledge in the United States. The first two parts of the book contest such stereotypical representations through a focus on the agency and practices of women's migration strategies both in relation to women who migrated (essays by Paola Corti and Diane Vecchio) as well as the larger number of women...