A Marx Family Reunion: Cultural Studies and Labor History on Common Ground

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. By Nan Enstad. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 266 pages. $49.50 (cloth). $17.50 (paper).

In 1996, a group of scholars in literature, American studies, and labor studies, myself among them, led a roundtable discussion at the North American Labor History Conference (NALHC) in Detroit on the development of a "new working-class studies." We argued for a broad vision of working-class culture, one that would encompass images of the working class, art and literature by and about working-class people, attention to groups of workers who had been left out of labor organizing, a greater emphasis on intersections of class, race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and analysis of working-class culture that didn't necessarily focus on work. Our goal was not to repudiate labor history, but rather to suggest that a more diverse, cultural studies approach to working-class life would yield valuable scholarship and could be a useful source for organizing. The response was underwhelming. The audience questioned our interdisciplinary approach, expressed doubts about the usefulness of literature and art for understanding history, and, at the same time, challenged our claim that such an approach would be any different from what they were already doing.

We should not have been surprised. Cultural studies and labor history have not usually made a comfortable pair. They are distant cousins, with Marx as a common ancestor and an inherited common interest in issues of class. Yet they have asked quite different questions, and, with a few notable exceptions, work in each field can almost be read as implicit critique of the other. While cultural studies scholars seek to understand subordinate cultures, and they may view work experiences as contributing to the development of oppositional practices, they rarely place union activity or specific labor events at the center of their analysis. And while labor historians have sometimes explored what Rick Fantasia calls "cultures of solidarity," the beliefs and experiences that facilitate workers' commitment to collective action, or examined the leisure activities of workers, they have not usually taken mass culture seriously as a source of working-class political consciousness. Often, they have criticized mass culture as a source of false consciousness, leading workers away from class solidarity toward consumerism and individualism.

However, recent events suggest that family ties have been strengthening. When regular participants in the NALHC formed an organization in 1998, they called it the Labor and Working-Class History Association. LAWCHA's by-laws advocate "an international, theoretically informed, comparative, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and diverse labor and working-class history." ¹ While the emphasis is still on labor history, the focus has broadened and interdisciplinary approaches are explicitly embraced.

In July 1999, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article and on-line "colloquy" on the emergence of working-class studies, using the fourth conference of the Center for Working-Class Studies as the focal point. ² As the e-mail responses posted to the colloquy page and a parallel discussion on the CWCS-L e-mail list suggest, this new interdisciplinary field is both contested and united. On the one hand, working-class studies scholars argue vehemently about how to approach the study of class. Do we try to analyze the culture of the working class, or do we focus on representations of class? What theoretical models of class do we embrace? How do we view the intersections and contentions between class, race, gender, and sexuality? On the other hand, working-class studies scholars agree on several basic points. Class does matter in the U.S. The role of class in American culture deserves more critical attention. Labor history matters, but working-class culture is not synonymous with organized labor or even with the culture of work.

The publication of Nan Enstad's Ladies...