Recovering Participants’ Public and Private Labor in Women and Work (1975)

From 1973 to 1975, Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, and Kay Hunt created Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labor in Industry, a conceptual artwork and exhibition of occupational data on workers obtained from a metal box factory in Bermondsey, England: photographs, data on job classifications, training, and pay, as well as workers’ logs of daily activities. Many of the documents were stuffed in binders in the original exhibit and have been reproduced only in fragments. Recent scholarship has highlighted the collaborative nature of authorship (between the artists, factory management, and workers) and noted that the exhibition shows both housework and factory labor, yet critics past and present have less frequently analyzed the exhibition’s copious details, arguing that “the material, unfortunately, doesn’t ‘speak for itself.’” Building on recent scholarship and my own archival excavation of the work’s abundant documents, this paper considers multiple ways this seemingly dry and bureaucratic archive of participant labor can be interpreted as a lens onto the public and private lives of workers. It reads the exhibit’s extensive enumeration of factory and domestic tasks as a reflection on the larger economic and social context, and it also notices its pointed gaps and silences: much important information about the individual women completing the tasks remains poignantly absent.