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.
So in the introduction to this special issue, we look at the ways that women have been remarkably successful in carving out spaces in the economy for themselves. But then, over and over, the space that they made was exploited in ways that proletarianised them, reducing their pay, conditions, capacity and time – so much of their one precious life.
Vanessa May, who is a historian at Hunter College CUNY, wrote ‘For the benefit of mothers and children:’ welfare, daycare, and cheap labor in the 1960s’. She shows that attempts to enable mothers to work were later met with American policy interventions that split the identity ‘mother’ from ‘worker’, inhibiting support for much-needed childcare for working-class women.
Eileen Boris, Hull Professor at UC Santa Barbara, wrote ‘Emma Goldman’s ‘the traffic in women’ revisited: sex work, sweatshops, and discourses of slavery’. Eileen uses a classic essay to examine relationships between race and and gender in thinking about women’s work, which she shows ‘complicates scholarly assumptions about the continuum of cheap, free, and coerced work under racial capitalism’.
Matt Bailey, who is currently head of history at Macquarie University, wrote ‘Gendered, aesthetic and emotional labour in Australian department stores across the twentieth century’ which charts the transformation of retail work from the sort of work that valued ‘appropriate and prescribed appearances, provide personalised customer service, and possess detailed product knowledge’ to the highly casualised, part-time and very cheap work that it has become.
Hannah Forsyth, whose new website you have no doubt read cover to cover (so to speak) wrote ‘Frontiers of human capital? women and the professions in the Angloworld’, which considers two surges in women’s white collar work, one in the late 19th century and the other in the late 20th. “The proletarianization and feminization of white-collar professions in recent decades”, I argue, “making professionals less autonomous and more precarious, can be explained by the ‘cheapness’ of women’s human capital investment, now appropriated by a masculinized managerial class”.
Josh Black, who was then a postdoc at the Australia Institute and/or possibly a Fellow at the Whitlam Institute (I can’t remember which one when he wrote this) and is currently a political speechwriter, wrote ‘From ‘literary air hostesses’ to ‘top bananas’: the professional identity of the woman publisher in Australia’. “Where men often controlled the decision-making processes at the apex of the industry, women’s editorial, emotional and entrepreneurial labour remained vital to the construction of its core product: the published book.”
We might note that as women worked more in paid employment, some of the care work that they were no longer able to do 24 hours a day was turned into an industry. This sounds like quite a good idea on the surface, though the industry that grew ‘drew on long-standing cultural and historical assumptions about women and ethnic minorities’, according to Freya Willis, DPhil candidate at St John’s College Oxford, who wrote ‘Caring for the community on poverty wages’: care workers’ experiences of low pay, exploitation, and precarity in Britain (1979–2010).’
Claire EF Wright wrote ‘The boss: female executives and the inertia of postfeminism’ about the growth of women in corporate leadership, by which corporations aligned ‘women’s empowerment, their assumed ‘natural’ femininity, and the needs of Australia’s corporate economy at the turn of the millennium’…funnelling them into feminised leadership portfolios and restricting them to corporate ‘housework’. Postfeminism, she argues, simultaneously enabled women to enter corporate leadership positions, but simultaneously inhibited them.
Happy International Women’s Day.
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