Gendering Work, (Re)Working Gender: The Contested Terrain of "Women and Work"

Jo Ann E. Argersinger. Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. x + 229 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8018-5989-1 (cl).

Christina Burr. Spreading the Light: Work and Labour Reform in Late-Nineteenth-Century Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. x + 254 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-8020-0940-9 (cl); 0-8020-7908-3 (pb).

Francisca de Haan. Gender and the Politics of Office Work: The Netherlands, 1860-1940. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998. 243 pp.; ill.; tables; appendixes. ISBN 90-5356-304-0 (cl).

Melanie Ilic. Women Workers in the Soviet Interwar Economy: From "Protection" to "Equality." New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. ix + 241 pp.; tables; glossary; appendixes. ISBN 0-312-21780-3 (cl).

Arwen P. Mohun. Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. x + 348 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8018-6002-4 (cl).

Samita Sen. Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xviii + 265 pp.; maps; tables. ISBN 0-521-45363-1 (cl).

As numerous feminist historians have pointed out, the significance of gender (until recently) has been overlooked and undertheorized in conventional historical accounts of work, labor, working-class culture, and industrial life. This omission is more than an oversight to be rectified by supplementary accounts of women's history or women's work--although such accounts certainly constitute an important part of the story. What feminist historians have contributed in recent years, however, goes far beyond uncovering women's hidden (labor) history. Their work suggests that the stories historians tell need to be rewritten and that, in many case, attention to gender completely transforms the landscape of labor history and industrialization in unexpected ways. Each of the six books reviewed here contributes to this rewriting and each offers an opportunity to consider what it means to approach history through a gendered lens.

The books reviewed here illustrate that this approach can take a variety of forms. Indeed, given the vast differences in constructions of masculinity, femininity, domesticity, skill, protection, and equality across time, space, and context, they underscore the contingency of these terms and the impossibility of uncovering any definitive historical analysis of "women and work." Gender is not the only significant lens operating in these texts. In many cases, constructions of race, ethnicity, class, nation, and culture profoundly shape and are shaped by shifting conceptualizations of gender and labor. Ultimately, these historical revisions challenge conventional accounts not only of labor and class struggle, but of the larger social, political, and economic processes associated with modernity, colonialism, industrialization, technological change, and globalization as well.

In Women Workers in the Soviet Interwar Economy, Melanie Ilic traces shifts in labor policy and rhetoric from 1917 to 1941, with chapters focusing on six major legislative arenas in which gender and work were negotiated: maternity, hours of work, menstrual leave, weights of loads, restricted occupations, and underground work. Backed by a rigorously researched and well-documented study of official policies, institutional research, and political debates on these topics, she traces the trend in policy toward Soviet women workers moving from protection in the 1920s to equality in the 1930s. She shows how earlier progressive reform was informed by Western debates about perceived dangers to women's health, particularly in heavy industrial jobs, based on notions of women's supposed biological and physiological fragility. Such protective goals fell out of favor (and were selectively applied even in the 1920s) for a variety of reasons, having less to do with changing attitudes about "women's constitution" than with the economic imperatives of the Soviet industrialization program and war preparations (175).

Ilic argues that conventional historical studies have not given adequate attention to women workers' contributions to...