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

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel contributes to a growing and meaningful body of scholarship that explores the role of women as workers and uses gender as a lens for understanding the history of capitalism more broadly.  Here, we emphasize a gendered history of capitalism that traverses multiple and diverse histories of "labor" across the United States.  Recognizing all workers as part of an expansive transnational network, our papers offer a gendered history of capitalism that is underpinned by labor history, while simultaneously calling into question many conventions of traditional labor history. That is, we move beyond a monolithic focus on the “shop floor” and the reification of factory work and wage earners.

Together our projects challenge the false binary between “productive” and “reproductive” work, reimagining twentieth century labor history to include complicated economies that have both complimented and confronted globalized capitalism.  Our investigation is methodologically, geographically, and theoretically nuanced and calls into question narrow interpretations of the history of work.  Methodologically, by utilizing cultural analysis, legal theory, social history, and biography, our source use contests a concentration on institutions and disrupts disciplinary confines to provide a novel discussion on the intersection between narrative and legal history. Geographically, this panel transcends the limitations of regionalism and nationalism by rooting the analysis in specific place-based contexts. Theoretically, by both narrating the nexus between working-class leisure activities and labor legislation and assessing the informal, affective labor and the work of survival, this panel expands our understanding of economic systems, while uncovering overlooked struggles and forgotten voices.