This seminar explores recent trends in the historiography of labor and women’s movements. In the past two decades these historiographies certainly have widened their geographical scope and contributed to building more inclusive conceptualizations of the history of social movements. The lectures assess, discuss, and illustrate, using multiple research examples, the ongoing scholarly debate in relation to the following conceptual issues: Why and how do we need to rethink the history of the cleavages between labor and women’s movements? How to engender the history of the labor movement? How to address the question of class in the history of the women’s movement? How to situate the Eastern European experience in the history of social movements? How can we best approach the history of organizational forms, repertoires, and agenda-setting chosen by women’s and labor movements, and the related traveling and translations from the local to the transnational and vice versa, as well as amongst activist networks?
Requirements
Students are required to carefully read the chapter/article conjoined with each session and shared with them in advance prior to the session. Each session opens with the lecture by the instructor; thereafter the lecture as well as the chapters and articles distributed in advance will be discussed
Lectures and Required Reading
One: Labor movements, women’s movements, women’s emancipation: A complex relationship
Required reading:
Maxine Molyneux, “No God, No Boss, No Husband. Anarchist Feminism in Nineteenth- Century Argentina,” in: Latin American Perspectives 13 (1986) 1: 119-145.
Two: Gender, class, global inequality: the international politics of women’s work
Required reading:
Dorothy Sue Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders: 1919 and Its Legacies,” in: Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, Susan Zimmermann (eds), Women’s ILO. Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, Leiden: Brill 2018: 27-49.
Three: Workers and women within and against the state: re-thinking the labor history of state socialism from a global and integrative perspective
Required reading:
Adrian Grama, Laboring Along. Industrial Workers and the Making of Postwar Romania (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2019), ch. 5 “The Politics of Productivity (1950-1958)”: 213-256.
Four: The example of the struggle for equal pay
Required reading:
Silke Neunsinger, “Translocal Activism and the Implementation of Equal Remuneration for Men and Women: The Case of the South African Textile Industry, 1980–1987,” in: International Review of Social History 64 (2019) 1: 1-36.