Franzway, Suzanne, and Mary Margaret Fonow. Making Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances Between Women and Labor.

Abstract

Franzway, Suzanne, and Mary Margaret Fonow. Making Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances Between Women and Labor. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 11 + 180 pp. $25.00 (paperback). ISBN-13: 978-0252077920. In the ongoing academic dialogue about conflicts between newer social movements and more traditional forms of social organization, perhaps the most quintessential examples offered by scholars exemplifying each type would be the women's movement for the newer form and labor unions for the older form. It is thus timely that scholars invested in both should produce a work of scholarship that not only intersects the concerns of women and labor but puts both into historical and theoretical context. Franzway and Fonow provide an engaging and insightful analysis not only of how women participate in and benefit from labor unions but of how feminism is interwoven into the cause of labor, which happens not only on factory floors and in offices but also in the home and in informal economies--areas where women are overwhelmingly the majority of workers. Franzway and Fonow set out to empirically study women's labor activism across class and nationality and to remedy what they see as an oversight in labor scholarship: the gendered division of labor. To this end, they have produced a theoretically rich project focused on the concept of sexual politics, following Kate Millet's germinal work of that title, and drawing upon historical, ethnographic ... and discursive methods of study (18). Their central argument is that by engaging in gendered activism across national boundaries, feminists are reshaping labor, and this contention is supported by extensive analysis, evidence, and insight. The work in this book is crucial for scholars of gender and communication today, in the age of a theoretical landscape still rent by division between the politics of identity and the politics of class. Making Feminist Politics makes it clear that we must analyze both, because their discourses are linked and reinforce each other. Labor is both gendered and classed. Throughout the text, Franzway and Fonow combine direct engagement with theoretical questions of power and privilege with practical reflections from union feminists, grounded in interviews and movement texts. Union activists themselves, the authors examine the full range of feminist labor concerns, from the politics of the family--Millett's quintessential sexual-political sphere--to international conferences and conventions where women articulate their concerns. Franzway and Fonow contend that a central problem for women in labor has been that conventional understandings of women's work cannot account for the extensive, embodied labor in which women engage. Women do not simply work an eight-hour, nine-to-five job; they also provide domestic and emotional support for husbands, children, and partners. In addition, the authors recognize that women who choose to become labor activists work even more hours, and they provide documentary evidence that feminist organizers have recognized the potentially oppressive role that fighting women's oppression can have upon the women who work and speak out. The authors also pay special attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and queer women's activism, noting that the sexist and male-dominated nature of unions cannot be fully changed until heteronormative assumptions are challenged. …