Gender and Class in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Few nonspecialists know that Belgium was the first continental European country to benefit and suffer from the Industrial Revolution. Resulting in part from this heritage and also building on an even older tradition of textile manufacturing dating back to the High Middle Ages, Belgium is home to a number of high-quality museums and institutions showcasing and researching the age of industry and its corresponding social movements. Two such organizations are the Archive and Museum of the Socialist Workers Movement (AMSAB) and the Museum of Industrial Archaeology and Textiles (MIAT) in the city of Ghent. On April 27–30, 1999, these two institutions joined forces to organize an international conference on “Gender and Class in the 20th Century.” For several days, participants from Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, and Belgium gathered to listen and respond to a variety of presentations covering the whole range of issues related to the conference theme, from sexuality at the point of production to the discursive construction of poverty as female in the contemporary global age.