Time, labour, and the ‘dual role’: Viola Klein’s study of ‘Professional Womanpower’ as a feminist archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues for the role of the archive in upsetting existing simplifying timelines both in feminist chronology as well as in gendered understandings of sociology by working through the particular example of the records of Viola Klein’s 1963-study on ‘Professional Womanpower’ held at the LSE Women’s Library. Central to this archival deposit, and the article, are ninety fourteen-day diaries in the style of timesheets. The project, it is argued, sets out a gendered political economy of time and records the development of an awareness for the role played by domestic labour in national economies—predating debates now commonly attributed to the 1970s women’s movement. Instead, the article demonstrates the role played by a ‘feminist’ moment in post-war sociology, and the particular importance of archival records in substantiating such arguments whilst also laying bare the tensions between social researchers and ‘ordinary’ subjects in the formation of a ‘feminist consciousness’.