The New Women’s Labor History, a special issue of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, offers the newest scholarship in the field of women’s labor history. The product of a spirited international conference on women’s labor history held at the University of Toronto in 2005, the issue suggests new directions for labor history—ones that address the study of gendered bodies at the intersections of politics of class, race, and citizenship.

Contributors to this issue include some of the field’s most respected senior scholars, as well as younger ones who represent the future of the field. The issue includes a “keynote” theoretical essay on the intersections of class, gender, and consumerism by renowned labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Another essay highlights the effects of work on laboring female bodies and promotes women’s work in both rural and service industries. Other essays cover both new and reinterpreted topics, addressing indigenous women’s labors; flight attendant unionism; the relationship among gender, class, and illness; the gendered meaning of disability in a working-class community; and the origins of the civil rights movement in African American women’s job struggles during World War II.

Contributors. Kathleen M. Barry, Eileen Boris, Cortney Davis, Nancy M. Forestell, Laurie B. Green, Esyllt Jones, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paige Raibmon

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Leon Fink is Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Graduate Concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Julie Greene is Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Joan Sangster is Professor of History and Director of the Frost Centre at Trent University. Mercedes Steedman is Professor of Sociology at Laurentian University.

  

  

  

  

1. Beyond Laments And Eulogies: Re-Imaginings–Eileen Boris

The Common Verse
2. Then There’s The Nurse –Cortney Davis

3. The Wages Of Patriarchy: Some Thoughts About The Continuing Relevance Of Class And Gender –Alice Kessler-Harris

4. The Practice Of Everyday Colonialism: Indigenous Women At Work In The Hop Fields And Tourist Industry Of Puget Sound–Paige Raibmon

5. Politicizing The Laboring Body: Working Families, Death,
And Burial In Winnipeg’s Influenza Epidemic, 1918–1919 –Esyllt Jones

¬6. “And I Feel Like I’m Dying From Mining For Gold”: Disability, Gender, And The Mining Community, 1920-1950 –Nancy M. Forestell

7. “Where Would The Negro Women Apply For Work?”: Gender, Race, And Labor In Wartime Memphis –Laurie B. Green

8. “Too Glamorous To Be Considered Workers”: Flight Attendants And Pink-Collar Activism In Mid-Twentieth-Century America–Kathleen M. Barry

9. Contributors