“Virile Syndicalism” in Comparative Perspective: A Gender Analysis of the IWW in the United States and Australia

Abstract

It is no coincidence that syndicalism emerges in a historical period when industrial discipline, economic efficiency, and social regularization are the guiding imperatives in the reconstruction of power and authority in the workplace. The syndicalist tendencies that mark the working-class response to this early twentieth-century effort at reconstituting workplace rules and regulations not only arise to combat capitalism but also to contest the respectable reformism of craft-based labor unions. “Syndicalism,” as Wayne Thorpe argues, “was simultaneously a contributing cause, a symptom, and a beneficiary of dissatisfaction with the dominant labor strategies of the period.” Wayne Thorpe, “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923 (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1989), 30. On the historical and in- ternational context for the emergence of syndicalism, see Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, England, 1990). Furthermore, as David Montgomery contends: “Revolutionary syndicalism extracted from the solidarities and ethical code of workers' daily lives a merciless critique of the existing structures of exploitation, power, and authority. It did not spare the institutions that workers had created for themselves.” David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1987), 310.