Labor Movements And Gender Research Paper

Like much of the early interdisciplinary feminist research that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, the first wave of scholarship on the topic of gender and labor movements was largely compensatory. It sought to demonstrate that from the earliest period, all over the world, women had been actively engaged in strikes, unionizing efforts, and other collective actions intended to advance the interests of working people—even though these female contributions were nearly invisible in the literature on labor history. This work emerged alongside and was nurtured by the (then) ‘new’ social historians’ critique of institutional labor history, as well as by the revisionist labor history and neo-Marxist sociology of the 1970s and 1980s that constructed trade unions as essentially conservative institutions (see Buhle 1990).

Challenging the conventional wisdom that women were less easily mobilized into labor movements and less active in trade unions than their male counterparts, this early scholarship recuperated the previously hidden history of women’s labor struggles. It also documented the ways in which labor movements themselves had been historically—and were in the present—controlled by men, who seldom attempted to organize women, and in many cases actively excluded them from union membership. But when opportunities to mobilize and to join trade unions were available, women workers were responsive and by some accounts even more militant than men, this first wave of research showed (Kessler-Harris 1975). This perspective turned on its head the earlier view that women were a problem for labor movements, arguing instead that labor movements were problematic for women, due to institutionalized male domination. That, in turn, raised the issue of why labor movements were male dominated. Two distinct (although not mutually exclusive) explanations emerged from the initial phase of inquiry. Both linked male domination of unions and other labor movement organizations to gender inequality in the workforce and in the wider society, but one set of commentators emphasized structural and the other cultural factors. In the structural perspective, best exemplified by Hartmann’s work (1976), women’s exclusion from trade unions and their subordination within labor movements was understood as a linchpin of the larger patriarchal order. In this view, male-dominated unions play an active role in maintaining and perpetuating gender inequality throughout the society, most importantly confining women to marginal, poorly remunerated forms of paid employment and at the same time reinforcing the asymmetrical gender division of unpaid domestic labor. Male workers, Hartmann and others argued, have a material interest in perpetuating their power ‘as men,’ and labor organizations like trade unions are a key instrument through which they pursue this interest.

The parallel, cultural explanation for the relative marginality of women to labor movements focused less on the material interests of male workers than on their cultural domination of trade unions and other labor movement institutions. It took as its starting point the notion that male and female workers, due to their contrasting social positions and their sex-segregated experience in the labor force, rely on different, gender-specific understandings of their relationships to work and to collective action focused on labor issues. In this view, labor movements have typically been linked to a specifically masculine iconography and discourse that celebrate aggressiveness and violence, and to an informal work culture rooted in exclusively masculine cultural repertoires. Women workers, to be sure, also have a rich work culture that is often sharply opposed to management, but this is organized around such concerns as family, children, and romance which are quite remote from the agendas of unions and other labor organizations (Westwood 1984). Indeed, this cultural perspective suggested, labor movements are often perceived by women workers as exclusively masculine, not only because of their militant rhetoric and overtly adversarial posture toward employers, but also because they typically operate on male cultural terrain, for example, holding union meetings at night, and in bars, so that women must compromise their respectability if they wish to attend.

These two approaches, separately or in combination, dominated the first wave of literature on gender and labor movements. They were appealing in their apparent comprehensiveness. They seemed to explain not only women’s under-representation in the ranks of labor activists and among trade union members, but also their general exclusion from leadership positions in labor organizations and the scant attention paid to ‘women’s issues’ by labor movements. Yet despite the insights these perspectives offered, they could not explain the wide range of variations in the relationship of labor movements to gender documented in the growing body of historical and sociological feminist scholarship that burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s. As this limitation became increasingly obvious, new approaches to the subject emerged.

One of the new perspectives re-interrogated the cultural terrain that was previously viewed as separating women from male-dominated labor movements. Drawing on the concept of ‘women’s culture’ in feminist historiography as well as on ethnographic and historical research, such scholars as Kaplan (1982) argued that ‘female consciousness,’ rooted in traditional domestic concerns, was not antithetical to labor movement participation but in fact could actively propel women into broad, community-based labor struggles. Other scholarship has linked women’s work culture to a distinctively female style of leadership in labor organizing and to the mobilization of women workers into otherwise conventional modes of collective action, suggesting that women’s culture and labor movements may not be incompatible—contrary to the earlier claims that stressed the decisively masculine cultural character of labor movements. From this apparent paradox a key question emerged, namely, under what conditions have labor movements been effective vehicles of collective action for women workers?

Not only was the presumption that the culture of labor movements and ‘women’s culture’ are incompatible falsified, but also, the notion that the structure of labor movements was inherently male-dominated and a critical force contributing to the reproduction of patriarchy was increasingly questioned in the 1980s. Scholars began to uncover instances where male workers and labor movements dominated by them struggled on behalf of women workers and for gender equality, rather than the reverse. Indeed, sometimes male workers’ gender interest in maintaining male domination has taken precedence, but in other instances men’s class interest in gender equality has prevailed instead (Milkman 1987). Once again the question became: under what conditions is each of these possible outcomes likely to occur? Thus the deterministic grip of the structural and cultural explanations for male domination of labor movements and female marginality within them was increasingly loosened in favor of a more contingent approach.

Some commentators, accordingly, began to focus on variations over time in the relationship of labor movements to gender. One common line of argument constructed the shift from a craft-union dominated labor movement (which was comprised mainly of skilled workers and often excluded women and ethnic minorities) to a more inclusive industrial union movement as the basis for a significantly more womanfriendly labor movement in many countries, even if some aspects of male domination persisted (Cook et al. 1984). Indeed, an evolutionary logic underlies much of the literature, explicitly or implicitly, according to which there is progress over time toward more gender egalitarian and inclusive forms of labor mobilization and unionism. As the workforce has become increasingly feminized, and with the increasing challenge to gender inequality in the wider society, the claim here is that labor movements too have become increasingly open to women’s participation and that their commitment to gender equality has grown (Milkman 1990).

But recent research suggests a more complex and uneven pattern of historical development. For example, Cobble (1991) has shown how ‘occupational unionism’ among US food service workers in the craft union era offered important opportunities for female mobilization that were later obliterated as industrial unionism became the hegemonic mode. While the unions she describes were sex-segregated, all-female groupings, such an arrangement proved to have important advantages for women workers in this particular context. For early twentieth-century waitresses, Cobble argues, ‘an organizational structure based on the logic of craft, rather than being incompatible with female mobilization, provided instrumental in its creation and maintenance.’ Other scholars have highlighted the effects of labor movement bureaucratization, arguing that the more diffuse, community-based organizing that is typical of the pre-institutional phase of labor movement development was more accessible to women than the later, more bureaucratic phases. In the US, for example, Frank’s work (1993) shows how the broad-based labor movement that existed in Seattle in the 1920s, which included labor cooperatives, consumer boycotts, and ‘union label’ campaigns, offered a vehicle for women’s involvement rooted in domestic and community- oriented concerns, all of which became peripheral with the later triumph of a highly bureaucratic type of ‘business unionism.’ More generally, recent literature documents substantial variation in the gender dynamics of labor movements and in the gender composition of labor organization memberships, intra and internationally as well as over time. While there have been some efforts to systematically explain such variation there appears to be a strong element of historical contingency as well.

A theoretical approach that emphasizes the embeddedness of gender in social institutions, practices and culture has become increasingly influential in recent years (Scott 1988; Baron 1991). Deeply influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernist theory, feminist scholars working from this perspective excavate the ways in which gendered subjectivities are constituted both inside and outside the workplace and how these influence labor struggles. They see gender itself as an object of contestation and at the same time as a primary signifier of power relations more generally. This work has been valuable in underscoring the variable content of gender categories over time and space and the ways in which labor struggles both reflect and transform those categories.

Another focus of increased scholarly attention in recent years is the way in which gender interacts with race, ethnicity, and immigration status in the context of labor movements. The picture that emerges from the accumulated case studies is complex. Like their male counterparts, women workers often have constructed or defended exclusionary ethnic, racial, and citizenship-based boundaries within labor movements. Yet in the US, African–American women are far more likely to be union members than white women, in part because they are more often employed in unionized occupations and industries (especially in the public sector). And perhaps because today job segregation by gender tends to be even more extensive than job segregation by race, ethnicity, or citizenship, there are many examples of labor solidarity among women of diverse racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds.

In the final decades of the twentieth century, labor movements came under vigorous attack all over the world, a development that largely coincides with the global trend toward increased (although cross-nationally uneven) female labor force participation. The ironic result is that in many countries, labor movement membership has become increasingly feminized, and unions have become more concerned with gender issues and with promoting gender equality, in precisely the period in which the power and influence of labor movements have been dramatically eroded. In the US, for example, in 1999 only 14 percent of all wage and salary workers were union members (less than half the figure at the postwar peak), but the gender gap in unionization rates is lower than at any other time since records have been kept. In 1999, 16.1 percent of male and 11.4 percent of female wage and salary workers in the US were union members, compared to 24.7 and 14.6 percent respectively in 1983 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2000). In part as a result of its increasingly female membership, in recent years the US labor movement has embraced issues like pay equity and parental leave, and more generally has become a leading advocate of gender equality. Yet this development has had limited impact, because the overall effectiveness of the labor movement has declined so precipitously. An historically informed approach suggests the likelihood of labor movement resurgence at some future date, however, in which case it seems likely that such movements will help advance the struggle for gender equality to a greater degree than in the past.

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