Beyond "Legal Equality" vs. "Difference" Feminism: Leah F. Vosko Interviews Eileen Boris on Women and the ILO

Eileen Boris's new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019, traces the history of the International Labour Organization's (ILO) incremental recognition of the work of social reproduction, culminating in the struggle of domestic workers to gain formal recognition at the ILO. Throughout three sections, Boris demonstrates the global making of the woman worker. She provides extensive evidence of how extraction of labor and raw materials from former colonies nourished and sustained the postwar welfare state. In the age of neoliberal globalization, the "global" is reconfigured partly through the expansion of migrant (domestic/care) labor alongside the production of cheap commodities. For Boris, the context of the Cold War is also central to making the woman worker, as the ILO standards regarding women's work were produced by the struggle between the US and the USSR and these superpowers' competing conceptions of social citizenship. Making the Woman Worker is filled with detail, reflecting Boris's aim to intertwine biographical data, historical facts, and their interpretation, while drawing on a feminist political economy. Boris recounts the lives of women (and, to a lesser extent, men) involved in the ILO and related UN institutions. The biographical plays a particularly pertinent role in the in-depth discussion of the evolution of the Programme on Rural Women in the 1970s and 1980s, led by socialist feminist Lourdes Benería and supporting the work of Maria Mies, arguably one of the strongest and most original segments of Making the Woman Worker.

The book is richly textured and covers a great deal of historical ground. It addresses wide-ranging issues and offers numerous potential explanations for ILO action, prompting me to intervene as follows:

On Protection vs. Legal Equality in Retrospect and Prospect

Leah Vosko:

You manage to move beyond the paradigm of a struggle between labor/ union feminists, who emphasized women-specific protections, and legal equality feminists, who argued for working women's legal equality with working men. Your account suggests that both groups helped develop international labor standards. You also show how legal equality presaged future neoliberal politics, where so-called gender-neutral solutions, such as increased part-time work (supposedly for all workers) and loosening of regulations on night work in the 1980s, were welcomed by employers. In light of the adoption of this framework, under conditions of austerity, when neoliberal labor policy invokes both gender neutrality and gender difference, and given especially the rise of the share economy, might there be any use in reappropriating older "protective language" once applied to women's work but extending it to workers in general?

Eileen Boris:

First, let me thank Leah for these perceptive and stimulating questions. They really help to advance the conversation that I had hoped that Making the Woman Worker would initiate.

Now, women have a constitutional right to starve: so reacted Florence Kelley when the United States Supreme Court struck down the woman-only minimum wage in 1923, reasoning that enfranchisement brought equality. My update for global neoliberalism might go like, now women have the right to fail (as well as to starve) if they engage in entrepreneurial schemes that leave poor women poor. Equal treatment is not enough in the face of unequal social relations. But protection too has had its costs when those with more power—like employers, governments, and organized male workers—adjudicate the labor of women between the family/household and employment, with differential impacts between women depending on class, race, geography, and other social locations. Our moment is full of examples: claims to "protect" women by restricting access to abortion! Or, definitions of employees as managers, like frontline nurses, or as independent contractors, like Uber drivers, or as nonworkers, like prisoners and housewives. Though some legal equality feminists in the past argued for setting standards on the basis of the nature of the work rather than inherent characteristics of the worker, they ignored the persistence of occupational segregation and the devaluing of reproductive labor, whether for love or...