Cathy Brigden

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.	5
Just as LabFem1 had celebrated the work of the late Susan Porter Benson, the session 'Social reproduction and intersectionality' was in memory of Christiane Hartzig. Franca Iacovetta gave the more personal account of Chris and her passion for her 'Domestic Workers around the Globe' project, while other presentations explored some of the complexities of service and home care work.	6
The session 'The world in the basement' showcasing sources on gender and women's history in four labour movement archives (Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebertstiftung, Bonn; Labour Movement Archives and Library, Stockholm; International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and University Library of Gothenburg) made the English speakers in the audience yearn to be multilingual as the vast scale of the repositories in the archives were revealed but with most only accessible in languages other than English. The following day, illustrating the unexpected sources found in archives, Joan Sangster evocatively spoke about the insights she derived from her analysis of women's correspondence to the Canadian Royal Commission on the Status of Women (some of which had been dismissed by the Commission as having 'no value'). As Anita Nyberg (Stockholm University) deftly showed with her analysis of labour force statistics, however, some things transcend language. The construction of data sets (who is counted, who is not and how this affects public policy) clearly reflected the juxtaposition posed by her session's title 'Labour force data – ideology or reality?'	7
The conference continued to be a supportive forum for early career researchers, as had been one of the aims, and achievements, of LabFem1. Younger researchers who, at the previous conference, had been PhD students or at that stage recently submitted their dissertations, showed their scholarly development as vividly experienced in the highly engaging session 'Delivering Cleanliness: Laundry workers, Office cleaners and Wives on the US, Canada and Britain', with presentations by Jenny Carson, Susan Miranda and Ruth Percy (one of the LabFem1 organisers). Despite this being the final session at the end of a long day, the reluctance of the audience to conclude the session demonstrated the degree of engagement in the pictures painted by these presenters.	8
As one of the two Australian participants at LabFem1 in 2005 (Danielle Thornton being the other), it was really pleasing for Danielle and I to be part of an increased Australian presence at LabFem2. There were seven Australian participants with Dorothy Driver (University of Adelaide) presenting one of the plenaries, 'Women Writing Africa'. With LabFem2 being such a stimulating and enjoyable success, and another inclusive and supportive experience, the talk of a LabFem3, possibly in India, was greeted enthusiastically in the final session.	9
Cathy Brigden is a senior lecturer in industrial relations in the School of Management at RMIT University. Her current research is focused on exploring historical patterns of women's representation and participation in peak unions, in particular the Victorian Trades Hall Council, and the role of women's unions, such as the Female Confectioners Union. <cathy.brigden@rmit.edu.au>

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