Cathy Brigden

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Cathy Brigden | Feminist Working Class History in Europe and Beyond | Labour History, 96 | The History Cooperative

CONFERENCE REPORT

Feminist Working Class History in Europe and Beyond

On the evening of 28 August 2008, 160 participants from 22 countries gathered at the Norra Latin Conference Centre in central Stockholm for the opening of the second 'Labouring Feminism' (LabFem2) conference. Following the success of the original 2005conference in Toronto, which had drawn together an unexpectedly large number of women's and labour historians, LabFem2 again exceeded organisers' expectations of the scale and breadth of interest. Warmly greeted by Silke Neunsinger from the Labour Movement Archives and Library and Franca Iacovetta, University of Toronto, one of the organisers of the Toronto conference (now 'LabFem1'), participants were then welcomed by Wanya Lundby-Wedin, president of the Swedish LO and the European Trade Union Confederation.	1
The main speaker of the evening was Alice Kessler-Harris who spoke about the impact of historians of women and women's labour, asserting that the face of history 'writ large' had been changed, not just labour history or women's history. In a broad ranging talk, she argued that class is the 'fulcrum for change'. Women's labour history, she contended, had changed the field in four ways – recognition of how gender was, and is, part of class formation, the impact of reproduction, the effect of the concept of the 'gendered imagination', and gender as dynamic and as process - before highlighting globalisation and immigration as questions for the future and the ongoing centrality of the gender struggle.	2
Later on, the 'Roundtable: Alice Kessler Harris work revisited' (the 'Alice' panel) further analysed Kessler-Harris' intellectual contribution, together with reflections on how her work had influenced individual scholarship. For me the most thought provoking was Kim Phillips' contribution as this made you want to read both Kessler-Harris and Phillips. Highlighting Kessler-Harris' influence on gendering her work on war, Phillips discussed moving towards conceiving of war as civil rights work, together with the differing war experiences of women: women in combat, as victims of war, as casualties of war, women's anti-war activism, all with differing complexities of gender, race and class.	3
The breadth of research in gender and women's history was amply demonstrated in the 76 papers with themes including feminist and community organising (in unions, political parties); citizenship; the politics of food (from food riots and boycotts to Mennonite cookbooks); consumption; communist women's activism; co-operatives; gendered division of labour (in packinghouses, lumberjack farms, auto plants, forestry and public elementary schools); representations of women and work (in national censuses); feminist working class literature, and labour activism. Reflecting its Scandinavian and European location, these topics were explored in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Nordic, European, Slovenian, Russian, German, Belgian, Canadian, American, Australian, British, Scottish, Spanish, Italian, Indian, Phillippino, as well as explicitly transnational contexts across the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final papers highlighted the intellectual impact of the work of Joan Scott on Nordic women's historians.	4
In one of the plenary sessions, Miriam Glucksmann (Essex University) revisited her book, Women on the line, published 30 years ago under the pseudonym Ruth Cavendish (which is being republished in 2009 with a new introduction). She provided insights into her experiences as an assembly line worker, together with photos from her time there for nine months in 1977–78. She canvassed the transformation of women's work over those 30 years including global shifts of manufacturing, initially offshore and then to China; highlighted emergent themes, and provided theoretical reflections.	. . .

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