I have to admit that I am not at all sure of the date of International Women’s Day. It seemed to be every day of the past week or so. Which perhaps ought to be the case every damn week.
So it seems timely to tell you about the current issue (Volume 35) of Women’s History Review, edited by me and Claire EF Wright, who based at the University of Technology Sydney. Claire was recently listed as Australia’s leading economic historian – which is especially impressive because she might also be the youngest (not to mention one of the most female). This was about citations. Just in case your mind leapt to the anti-DEI propaganda flooding the world right now.
We called the issue ‘Cheap Labour’, which describes on one level the price of women’s work, producing the gender pay gap (relatedly, I learned at work this week that even in fields where almost all workers are still women, there is still a gender pay gap in favour of men).
But we were not just wanting to repeat the well-known inequitable pay system. We wanted to use this special issue to think about women’s place in the history of capitalism. ‘Cheap labour’ refers to the kind of cheapness described by Raj Patel and Jason W Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. They show that way that surges in profitability have been driven by exploiting something that is (usually but not always temporarily) crazy cheap. For the capitalist, anyway: the cost of fossil fuels, time caring for family and stolen land is borne by someone – and, ultimately, everyone.