War, Work, and the Culture of Gender

Abstract

AMONG THE ISSUES that have recently infused labour history with its electri cal energy, none has created more sparks than the debate over the meaning of workers' culture. Simply put, the problem is how to think about large groups of people in ethnic, racial, regional, or gendered ways in the context both of their own cultural integrity and of their relationships with a larger society. The issue has led some historians, following Herbert Gutman, into an exploration of culture as though it could somehow exist independently of a wider social reality, resisting it in the interests of traditional cultural forms. But concern with the inherently static implications of such a notion has led other historians to question the power and even the existence of independent cultures altogether, adhering more closely to the Marxian conception of a culture that emerges from a class-defined consciousness conditioned by social reality. In the interstices, such voices as those of Sean Wilentz and T. Jackson Lears are beginning to develop more complex explanations of the relationship between consciousness and culture, between behaviour and attitudes. My own current favourite inspiration is Charles Sabel, whose portrait of workers' world views provides a variegated picture of consciousness within which cultural change becomes plausible.1