Gender and Precarity across Time: Where Are the Writing Working Women?

Abstract

The end of the nineteenth century in Britain saw a range of “newnesses”; New Unionism signified a boom in trade unionism, while the New Woman figure symbolized women's struggle for independence. However, both as literary figures and as real-life writers, such New Women were largely middle class and educated. Where are the working women within the sphere of literary and cultural production, and how are they represented within the New Unionism? Against a dominant trade unionism that argued for a “family wage” and considered women's organizing as a threat, the Women's Trade Union League (1874), the National Federation of Women Workers (1906), the 1888 Match Girls strike, and writers and labor activists such as Annie Besant and Clementina Black noted women's roles within labor. Attempting to locate a working New Woman in the trade union movement, this paper is a reflective work-in-progress, an exploration rather than a finished argument. Written by a precariously employed woman trade unionist in the twenty-first century, struggling to find time to write, examining the works of precariously employed women workers one hundred years earlier, the essay poses questions about what happens to politically engaged scholarship in a time of increasingly precarious working conditions and knowledges.