This 1999 Supplement of the International Review of Social History focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. In concentrating on industrial workers, their politics, and institutions, labor and working-class history had tended to ignore gender, race, and ethnicity as discursive and material forces. It discussed the woman or black or immigrant worker as a subset of worker, assumed to be male, white, and of the dominant national or ethnic group. Only during recent years have historians began to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. This question has become particularly salient as the European Union and the United States seek to grapple with the human consequences of colonial and imperialist legacies both within and beyond national boundaries in an increasingly global economy.

Over the last few decades, feminist scholarship has demonstrated most powerfully the analytical power of gender to disrupt conventional understandings of worker identity, class formation, proletarianization, and a host of other prominent issues. Simultaneously, it has shifted the terms of discussion from the workplace to the home and family and back to other locations of labor. Its findings have seriously undermined the class paradigm in the study of labor and working-class history. We have moved beyond debating the explanatory primacy between class and gender to consider their mutual constitution.