2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Gender has played a central role in the development of the modern global workforce, shaping the ways in which women entered the market, which positions they received, and the roles they performed as workers. Additionally, gender anxieties over femininity often accompanied women as they broke into new professions and industries. Examining different geographical locations (Mexico, the U.S., Israel, and Colombia) the panel highlights the transnational aspects of women’s labor in negotiating gender identities and customs, specifically in the professional “white-collar” sector. It also explores how questions of race, class, and nationalism intersect with women’s experience in the skilled workforce. By focusing on secretaries, journalists, copywriters, and government workers, the panel explores how they carved out positions of power in sectors characterized by occupational segregation. These workers simultaneously fought against sexual biases and agitated for better working conditions such as equal pay and professional training, advancing this way feminist issues and causes. Exploring how these workers mediated the tensions between opportunities and limitations in the workplace, the panel shifts the attention to a hitherto neglected sector and presents four case studies that provide new understandings of the formations of gendered professional identities across different national contexts.

Our panel thus will generate a conversation on the multidirectional influences of the economy, women’s professionalization, and feminist perspectives on the internationalization of women’s struggles for gender equality in the workforce. The transnational perspective will also highlight the intersectional nature of workplace politics, which exist in larger frameworks of class, ethnicity, and nationalism.