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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Torry D. Dickinson and Robert K. Schaeffer, Fast Forward: Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001) |
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TORRY D. DICKINSON, a professor of Women's Studies and Robert K. Schaffer, a sociologist, have combined efforts to present what they consider a new, comprehensive, and convincing explanation for global transformations over the last 500 years. The result is a sweeping, and not entirely convincing, description of changes in work, family, and social movements over the last 500 years — but with an emphasis on the last decade of the 20th century. Drawing on world systems theory and feminism, the authors argue that the global North and South are locked in inevitable conflict. "The entire material basis of life in the North," they note, "is endowed with the hard, underpaid work done by the world's economically subjugated majority." However, they assure us, "even though corporate domination has lasted 500 years it won't last forever."(14) There is hope for change, they suggest, if workers, North and South, recognize the nature of the world system, and the fact that "the modern world is socially manufactured."(15) |
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The first part of the book describes economic and social relations in the global North and South in terms that will be familiar to most readers of this journal. In what is hardly a new insight, the authors observe that since World War II wage work in the core has been redistributed and reorganized. They describe the expansion of women's wage work, the rise of consumer economies, the development of welfare states, and the trajectories of social movements as part of the centuries old struggle between the core and the periphery. Identifying four kinds of work — subsistence, sharing, enterprise, and wage — the authors argue that any analysis of global labour has to consider non-wage labor and multi-generational work as well as traditional wage labour. The book's second section describes the impact of world economic changes on households, workplaces, and the natural environment, while the last section critiques protest movements and "institutional" struggles, calling for "diversifying" social change and making the movements more "woman centered." |
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The book's most useful contribution is to place women's work — paid and unpaid — at the center of world economic development and to suggest that any movement for social change should focus on gender as well as class transformations. They argue that studying the household as part of the world economy indicates that "what may look like proletarianization, or labor's increasing dependence on wages and the global market may actually turn out to be deproletarianization or declining dependence on wages and market consumption." The household, they suggest, can now be considered a "powerful base upon which antisystemic movements can be built," and praise the rise of new woman-centered movements around the world. (162) The notion that unpaid household work should be considered in any analysis of labour and economic systems is not new and will be familiar to most readers. The authors seem, for example, to have just discovered the significance of "the kitchen, the hearth, the yard, the street, the neighborhood, and labor's informal markets" as centers of political activity while historians of women have been arguing just this for quite a while. (179) |
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The effort to make gendered work central to a world system's analysis is useful but the authors argue at such a general level that the book fails to systematically or convincingly address either the theoretical or the historical issues. In a puzzling assertion, for example, the authors write: |
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when working-class feminists and other activists realized that nonwage work was more than just housework, homebased work became defined as a part of a larger cooperative effort. This qualitative jump in understanding was made possible because workers recognized the value of women's work, unpaid work and informal work and appreciated the importance of collective survival skills. (254) | |
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One can only wonder who, what, and where they are talking about. In the US, for one thing, it was middle-class women who began to press for an acknowledgement of the significance of housework. To date, despite the AFL-CIO's campaign for "working families," the labour movement has been rather slow to address issues outside the workplace. Similarly, the authors suggest that "U.S. student and youth movements have grown largely because students realize that few young people will be able to obtain full-time positions that support middle-class life styles." (230) Again, one wonders who and what the authors can possibly be talking about. Neither the movement of students against sweatshop labour abroad nor the recent living wage campaigns address the economic prospects of the students' own lives. |
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Often, even when the authors refer to specific movements or developments, they seem to be forcing the evidence to fit their theory. They argue, for example, that falling fertility rates in the periphery are a response to "deteriorating economic conditions." While they admit that demographers point to multiple factors, including television and increased availability of contraceptives (curiously, no mention of education), they ignore these and simply quote one woman who says that food is expensive and the future is bleak. From this woman's statement the authors conclude, "the general decline in fertility rates reflects this economic assessment." (99) Like so many quotations in the book, this one has no identifying context, thus leaving room for a good deal of skepticism. If limiting fertility is simply a rational response to economic hardship how does one explain high fertility rates among historically impoverished groups? Surely in the case of fertility rates, cultural and religious factors are important. Ultimately, readers interested in understanding work, gender, and protest in a global context will find this book at best, a restatement of much that is familiar and at worst, an overly general statement of theoretical abstractions. |
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Susan Levine
University of Illinois at Chicago
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