Preliminary Programme

Wed 30 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 31 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 1 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 2 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

All days
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Wednesday 30 March 2016 16.30 - 18.30
S-4 LAB04 Roundtable: From the Local to the Global: Relocating Women’s Labor History (Special labour session 2)
Aula 16, Nivel 1
Networks: Labour , Women and Gender Chair: Cristina Borderias
Organizer: Eileen Boris Discussants: -
Eileen Boris : (On Home Labors)
The recent plethora of research on the global history of domestic and care work builds upon earlier investigations by social scientists and reformers on work whose boundaries between private and public have shifted over time and space. This presentation addresses the range of home labors, both paid and unpaid, ... (Show more)
The recent plethora of research on the global history of domestic and care work builds upon earlier investigations by social scientists and reformers on work whose boundaries between private and public have shifted over time and space. This presentation addresses the range of home labors, both paid and unpaid, and the ways that historians have turned to feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial theory to make sense of the place of home in the generation of people as well as products. Boris will draw upon her own research on industrial homework and outwork, motherwork and unpaid family labor, domestic service and household work, and home health care work. She will raise a number of questions, including: what impact does location have on organizing? How have boundaries between intimate and formal, public and private, shifted to influence the nature of work, compensation, and resistance? What is the historical interplay between production and reproduction? How do ideologies and normative expectations shape the politics of home labor? What do these categories mean when all work becomes informal? Historians not only have expanded the range of studies of home labors but are questioning the very construction of teh categories contained in the documents we rely upon, whether generated by national governments or international bodies like the International Labor Organization. No longer appearing as residual forms of production, we now can see the persistence of home labors and trace the timing and extent of their commodification in terms of big forces like settler colonialism, capitalist industrialization, migration, struggles over sexual and generational division of labor within households, and new global supply chains. (Show less)

Mónica Burguera : (Rethinking Women’s Work. A perspective from Spain.)
The highly important studies on women’s work since the nineties exemplify the evolution of Spanish feminist historiography in relation to the incorporation of the theoretical tension that women’s history has maintained with social history on an international level. Women’s work has been one of the fundamental fields of research on ... (Show more)
The highly important studies on women’s work since the nineties exemplify the evolution of Spanish feminist historiography in relation to the incorporation of the theoretical tension that women’s history has maintained with social history on an international level. Women’s work has been one of the fundamental fields of research on which the discipline has been constructed in the last decade. Most studies appeared in the context of reservations about the new cultural history, so that the analytical focuses continued to maintain a close dialogue with the “conceptual breakthroughs” closest to the social sciences and, perhaps to a lesser extent, anthropology. Joan Scott and Louise Tilly on women, work, and family, and the translation of Joan Scott’s chapter on women’s work in the 19th century in Historia de las mujeres in 1993 became some of the most important references, going beyond the dichotomy between the public area of production and the private area of reproduction.
Making a necessarily schematic exposition of the very varied contributions in recent years, I look at overlapping debates. First, the impact of industrialization on women’s work opportunities (whether or not there was an increase in their standard of living or status, or an improvement in their work possibilities and wages, or their position in the family) and the evolution of the female workforce in the organization of the labor market; second, debates on the penetration of the middle-class “discourse of domesticity” in the world of work and especially in relation to the attitudes of working women; and finally, questions and research on women workers collective action. Against a background of enormous regional variety, historians questioned traditional assumptions that industrialization led to withdrawal of the female workforce, which accompanied a linear process of separation between the areas of work in the home and in the factory. As research shifted toward the early 20th century, historians moved beyond the idealized discourse of separate spheres to reconstruct the “real” conditions of women’s work and the moments of change, leading to an over-rigid dichotomous conceptualization involving materiality and social experience, on the one hand, and gender discourse or ideology, on the other. In connection with this conceptual perspective, the category of “woman” was also not questioned as a historically constructed object of study. The need to question some of those analytical assumptions gradually became evident from the research itself. For example, coinciding with the progressive shift of studies, especially toward the second half of the 19th century, the problematic analysis of the sources most frequently used to quantify the female workforce (such as censuses and statistics), which largely concealed women’s work and working conditions, has brought a necessary and increasing interest in the historical reconstruction of the categories used in the sources and their meanings. Along the same lines, there is also greater interest in combining the evolutions of the meanings of women’s work within the 19th-century discourse of domesticity with the “real” situation of women in the labor market. (Show less)

Silke Neunsinger : (Women, Unions, and Labor Federations)
Building upon research over the years, Neunsinger will explore the meaning of labor feminism through the work of the Women’s Committee of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, as well as sketch out the larger historiography about women and unions. She will consider: where are the organized ... (Show more)
Building upon research over the years, Neunsinger will explore the meaning of labor feminism through the work of the Women’s Committee of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, as well as sketch out the larger historiography about women and unions. She will consider: where are the organized women workers and how does organizing by women look different or similar to organizing by men? How has collective action in sectors dominated by women impacted labor movements? What roles have women leaders played in labor federations? How has local conditions as in India, South Africa, and elsewhere manifested in the opportunities and limits of labor women working globally? How does women and unions look differently when we investigate transnational connections between the global North and South? (Show less)

Elise Van Nederveen Meerkerk : (De-industrialization or Overlooking the Local?)
Women and Home Textile Production in Colonial Java, ca. 1850-1940

Recently, economic historian Jeffrey Williams (2013) has argued that nineteenth-century imperialist policies led to deindustrialization in the colonies. European rulers were anxious to extract raw materials and tropical products from their overseas territories, and in turn forced indigenous consumers to buy ... (Show more)
Women and Home Textile Production in Colonial Java, ca. 1850-1940

Recently, economic historian Jeffrey Williams (2013) has argued that nineteenth-century imperialist policies led to deindustrialization in the colonies. European rulers were anxious to extract raw materials and tropical products from their overseas territories, and in turn forced indigenous consumers to buy industrial goods from the metropolis, leading to terms of trade disadvantaging industrial production. While this analysis of macro-economic forces in itself makes sense, my paper argues that simultaneously, it is too much focused on capital-intensive industrialization and a factory labour force. The case of Java under colonial rule shows that, even though the Dutch colonial authorities from the 1825s onwards aimed to impose such terms of trade on the Netherlands East Indies for their factory-made cotton cloth, indigenous textile producers within a few decades resourcefully responded to the Dutch textile imports. I will demonstrate that, opposed to what recent historiography on the Javanese textile industry suggests, local production flourished and even utilized the imported semi-finished factory products from Europe. Indigenous textile production has largely been overlooked by contemporary rulers and present-day historians, for several reasons, in which gender plays a key role. First of all, industrialization has been equated too heavily with capital-intensive factory production, whereas textile production in Java was instead small-scale household labour, not taken into account as genuinely productive ‘work’ both by colonial authorities and many historians. Secondly, most labour historians working on Java have focussed on men, and the fact that Javanese (married) women actually produced for and traded on local and regional markets, has generally been overlooked. Thirdly, much of the source material was generally produced by the colonial authorities, and academics have only recently come to acknowledge that the ‘success stories’ the authorities may have wanted to present should not be taken at face value (e.g. Stoler 2010). Literally from the margins of the colonial reports, the historian can read that often, colonial bureaucrats had no idea what was happening in the archipelago and what – sometimes unintended – effects their economic policies had. This is how they were able to overlook thousands of home-producing male and (especially) female textile workers. (Show less)



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