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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. This includes spontaneous resistance to
masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women
workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female
long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the
gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often
precarious and 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. The book is an innovative contribution to
both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully
integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the
study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric
historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously
contributing to an inclusive history of women's labor-related
activism wherever to be found. Examining women's activism in
male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women's networks
and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in
gender history.
The recent vast upsurge in social science scholarship on job
precarity has generally little to say about earlier forms of this
phenomenon. Eloisa Betti's monograph convincingly demonstrates on
the example of Italy that even in the post-war phase of Keynesian
stability and welfare state, precarious labor was an underlying
feature of economic development. She examines how in this short
period exceptional politics of labor stability prevailed. The
volume then presents the processes whereby labor precarity regained
momentum- under the name of flexibility- in the post-Fordist phase
from the early 1980s, taking on new forms in the Craxi and
Berlusconi eras. Multiple actors are addressed in the analysis. The
book gives voice to intellectuals, scholars, politicians and trade
unionists as they have framed the concept and debates on precarious
work from the 1950s onwards. Views of labor law experts,
politicians and public servants are investigated in regard to labor
regulations. Positions of the very precarians are explored, ranging
from rural women, industrial homeworkers and blue-collar workers to
physicians, university researchers and trainees, unveiling the
emergence of anti-precarity social movements. The continuous role
of women's associations and feminist groups in opposing labor
precarity since the 1950s is prominently exposed.
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