Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ed. by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ed. by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann Elizabeth McKillen Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ( Leiden: Brill 2018) The International Labour Organization (ilo) will celebrate its centennial in 2019. Studies by scholars and ilo functionaries of this long-lived and uniquely structured affiliate of the League of Nations and United Nations abound, but the role of women in shaping its policies has received only sporadic attention. Such neglect is not surprising because, until recently, women have constituted a very small percentage of the members of the ilo governing body, or of the delegates and technical advisors sent by individual nations to the yearly ilo conferences. Yet this edited collection of fourteen essays makes a convincing case that women have played an important role in shaping the ilo's policies toward women workers and in ensuring the ratification and implementation of ilo conventions governing women's work in diverse national contexts. The book is divided into two overlapping sections. The first section primarily considers the role of transnational women's networks in shaping debates and policies within the ilo; the second focuses on the ways in which ilo standards were negotiated and implemented within particular nations, regions, and populations of workers. In an important opening chapter of the first section, Dorothy Sue Cobble explores the neglected role of women in the "origin story" of the ilo. (27) The blueprints for the ilo were first drawn up by the all-male Commission on International Labour Legislation at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Fearful of the growing contagion of Bolshevism and other forms of labour radicalism in the aftermath of World War I, they recommended an innovative tripartite structure for the ilo: the yearly conferences would include national delegations of government, business, and labour representatives, and the governing body would also include representatives from all three groups. These groups were charged with working together to raise labour standards in order to prevent the injustices and poverty that caused social unrest and threatened world peace. A coalition of women's groups visited the commission to voice their concerns and several women's organizations asked that representation for women also be mandated as a component of the tripartite structure of the ilo. Instead, the Commission required only that the ilo's director appoint women to the ilo staff and recommended that national delegations include at least one woman in an advisory position. Of the 40 nations that sent delegations to the founding convention of the ilo in Washington, DC in the autumn of 1919, none appointed a woman as a voting delegate and most included only a few female advisors. The US and British-based Women's Trade Union League, however, responded by staging their own International Congress of Working Women (icww) in Washington, DC at the same time as the ilo convention. Their meeting included over two hundred women from nineteen nations, some of whom were also advisors to their national delegations at the ilo convention. The icww prepared a set of resolutions and policy statements that were then championed by the women advisors at the ilo meeting. The icww recommendations proved particularly important in shaping the ilo's Maternity Convention [End Page 302] to include a far-reaching demand for six weeks paid benefits for women before and after childbirth. icww proposals were also taken into consideration in debates over conventions on child labour and the prohibition of night work for women. Subsequent articles by Françoise Thébaud, Kirsten Scheiwe, and Lucia Artner highlight the way women continued to influence debates over labour standards for women during the interwar period through the no's Correspondence Committee on Women's Work and its dedicated staff members. The Cold War, as Eileen Boris demonstrates, complicated the quest for international labour standards as the no's protective legislation for women came under attack by feminist activists from Communist bloc countries as well as legal equality feminists based in the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Silke Neunsinger...