Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor ed. by Ava Baron

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 705 Work Engendered: Toward a New History ofAmerican Labor. Edited by Ava Baron. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. viii + 385; notes, index. $42.50 (cloth); $13.95 (paper). That women workers have stood on the margins of labor history has long been an acknowledged and seemingly unshakable feature of a discipline committed to (a sexless) class struggle and rooted in the “unsteepled temples of male worship.” Cast as wives and mothers, laboring women appeared as superfluous members of a working class seemingly called into being by the very processes that masked the labor of women. Universalizing the experience of skilled white men—the aristocracy of labor—scholars seldom questioned the mean­ ing of work or of class, and working-class culture itself became synonymous with the fraternal world of men and boys. By exploring “new ways to think about and study the history of work and the working-class,” Work Engendered seeks to destabilize familiar assumptions and chart a new course for American labor history (p. 1). For Ava Baron, this means looking at work not through the eyes of women but, rather, through the “lens of gender.” Joining a number of scholars who have begun to study how gender shapes and is shaped by capitalist development and class formation, Baron sees gender as a social process, “a verb” as well as a noun; it is not simply gender that matters to Baron, but “gendering.” What is central to the “new history,” therefore, is exploring “how understandings of sexual difference shape institutions, practices, and relationships,” the “study of gendering” (p. 36). Bringing together some of the best recent work in labor history, Work Engendered underscores both the problems and the potential of gender studies for feminist historians. Because Baron’s repeated goal is “to integrate gender into labor history,” the collection is organized to demonstrate various ways of bringing gender to the forefront of working-class history and not necessarily to demonstrate how gender is implicated in the construction and consolidation of power itself. We learn from Dolores Janiewski, for example, that throughout southern history, employers fashioned a language that emphasized “racial differences and gender differences” and in so doing “submerged the reality of class domination” (p. 71). Yet the nature of these differences— how they worked to enable the signification of power or to fix the meaning of those differences—remains unclear and seemingly un­ contested over 300 years. As Joan Scott has argued, “Simply to assert . . . that gender is a political issue is not enough.” Integrating gender into labor history clearly promises many things, but it does not automatically bring power relations into play, nor does the study of gendering necessarily guarantee a remedy to malecentered labor history. Baron’s own piece, “An ‘Other’ Side of Gender Antagonism at Work: Men, Boys, and the Remasculinization of Printers’ 706 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Work, 1830—1920,” suggests as much. Drawing on the journals and minutes of skilled male printers, Baron traces in rich and vivid detail the shifting meanings of manliness among journeymen and appren­ tices, insightfully demonstrating the importance of these shifts for gauging a worker’s competence and subsequent admission into the union. Clearly gender is at work, but we are left with a question asked by Alice Kessler-Harris nearly two decades ago, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?” (Feminist Studies 3 [Fall 1975]). As Patricia Cooper noted in a similar study of the Cigar Makers’ Interna­ tional Union, “Women could hardly be manly.” Yet in Baron’s “new history” we find no relationship between masculinity and femininity. Under this lens of gender, female experience fades from view. If Baron brings us back to the shop floor and the world of skilled craftsmen, other contributors join the “new institutionalists” by broadening the boundaries of trade unionism to include the commu­ nity, the legal system, the household, and the web of relationships from which the labor movement emerged. Essays by Eileen Boris, Nancy Hewitt, Angel Kwolek-Folland, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Dana Frank, and Elizabeth Faue show how gender figured centrally in workers’ lives without confining those lives to the point of production. By focusing on the community, the...