Introduction: Thinking the History of Women’s Activism into Global Labor History

Abstract

Introduction to the book "Women, Work, and Activism: Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century". The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of "Women, Work, and Activism" examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women’s labor activism in a wide variety of contexts including transnational organizing, feminist engagement with men-dominated trade unionism, long-distance migration, and the socialist workplace. The chapters address the involvement of working people in multiple and often unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor activism. The book is an innovative contribution to both labor and gender history. It redefines the new labor history by focusing on the gendered political-social history of labor and by fully integrating the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism.