Introduction

Abstract

This chapter examines how scholarship on social reproduction and feminism has called into question basic assumptions that have guided the field of labor history. It suggests that women’s paid and unpaid domestic work has multiple links to both capitalist production and state policy. In addition, the decline of manufacturing has moved women’s labor from the margins to the center of labor organizing, in the process redefining both the character and form of the labor movement. The work of social reproduction and labor organizing among women makes race, class, culture, and nation central to any discussion of work and feminism and also exposes the contested meaning of these categories.