Some three decades have elapsed since feminists turned the scholarly spotlight on the previously ignored historical experience of half the world's population. Nearly two decades have transpired since the publication of Joan Scott's pathbreaking essay on gender and history.Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, 5 (1986). See also Joan Scott's article “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (1987): 1–13, and her reflections on gender as a category of historical analysis in “Preface to the Revised Edition,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 2000), especially ix–xii. Since then, women's history and increasingly sophisticated forms of gender analysis have altered understandings of and approaches to many fields of history.

The papers by Eileen Boris, Laura Frader, Laura Tabili, and Eric Weitz were presented at the 2000 meeting of the Social Science History Association. The panel was organized to reflect upon how and in what ways the “gender turn”—the move from feminist-inspired women's history to feminist-inspired gender history—has influenced labor and working-class history in different national contexts. The gender turn was, to a large extent, informed and motivated by a renewed and reinvigorated cultural history, which itself grew out of scholarship focused on language and discourse.

Focusing on scholarship in US history, this article claims that under assault from feminists, the class paradigm in the study of labor and working-class history lost its primacy. This turn to gender developed as part of the linguistic turn and has led to an emphasis on bodies. I further argue that race and class themselves are both engendered identities and categories of analysis. Bodies create a realm upon which racialized gender as well as class is inscribed, constructed, made, and remade. I end with examples from my research on World War II on how rethinking breadwinner ideology, family wage, and related topics from the standpoint of black women and men destabilize normative notions of worker and provider.

Scholars of race and gender have borrowed heavily from the analysis of class in formulating strategies to analyze the operation of social stratification. In the process, the analysis of class itself, along with the definition of what counts as work and who counts as a worker, have been radically revised. A more powerful analytical tool has emerged, offering possibilities and flexibilities as well as a better understanding of the interdependence of multiple and mutually supporting processes of social stratification.

The examination of the cultural and linguistic production of gender and of gender relations in society has had a serious impact on the study of labor history over the past twenty years. Work on the role of gender has linked culture and ideas to politics and policies and has shown how ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped notions of the wage, skills, and work, as well as labor and employer practices, union strategies, and labor struggles. But this important methodological move and the new knowledge it has produced has had a limited impact on the field. The tendency to think of gender as a synonym for women has obscured the more radical potential of gender as an analytical tool. The problematic status of gender outside of North America and some parts of Western Europe, as well as the role that labor history itself plays in national histories, has also limited its impact. New research on the intersection of race and ethnicity with gender (including masculinity) and class—instead of treating gender, race, and class as distinct variables—has the potential of moving these investigations forward, especially in the European context.

The separation of labor and gender continues in German historiography. Major new studies in labor history still manage to ignore the category of gender. Partly this is a result of a well-entrenched academic culture. But this trend is also related to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. The issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), while certainly of great importance, has so dominated German intellectual life that it has become inordinately difficult to raise new perspectives or to develop innovative approaches to German history. In this confining context, not only gender but all sorts of other categories and approaches disappear from the intellectual and political horizon. Yet there is some innovative work, both in Germany and the United States, that combines a variety of perspectives, including gender, rejects the totalitarian model, and takes seriously daily life as a key site of the making of history.

The articles in this special issue by María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, Heather Fowler-Salamini, Susan Gauss, and Jocelyn Olcott reflect a new interest in feminist analysis of gender among Latin American labor historians trained in the United States. Together they prompt a reconsideration of the history of the working class, the labor movement, and the corporatist system of state-directed labor relations in twentieth-century Mexico. In addition, while Mexico's historical trajectory has largely been viewed as distinct in Latin America owing to the 1910–1917 revolution and near century-long rule of the official party of the revolution, the focus on gender suggests important commonalities among Latin American countries that experienced significant levels of industrialization during the twentieth century, especially Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The essays also underline the ways in which the processes of state formation and industrial modernization in post–1930 Latin America bear a striking resemblance to the establishment of welfare states and corporatist labor arrangements in advanced industrial economies in the United States and Europe. The use of feminist analysis to examine the histories of working-class and state formation, the labor process, and capital accumulation during a period of industrial modernization reveals broader histories of class and gender that are international and cannot be understood solely within national histories and historiographies.

In the 1930s, the Mexican federal government consolidated political control following the chaos of the revolution and developed strategies for industrial development and economic growth. In 1936, at the height of the Popular Front and amid unabashedly progressive declarations by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, the Department of Labor ordered an investigation to insure the protection of women's and children's labor rights. The “new woman” in postrevolutionary Mexico would be both a conscientious mother (protected by her husband) and a productive wage laborer (protected by the paterfamilias of the federal government). Two years later, confronting political and economic realities within Mexico, the Cárdenas government all but abandoned this agenda, turning a blind eye to labor abuses as labor-intensive enterprises leaned on underpaid women workers to facilitate the transition to industrial production.

This article emphasizes the crucial links between gender, working-class formation, and postrevolutionary statebuilding in Mexico. During the 1940s, textile unions in Puebla defined and implemented gendered conceptions of working-class identities and beliefs about men and women's proper roles within the sexual division of labor. Union leaders employed concepts of working-class honor to foster bonds of masculinity that in turn became the foundation for union authority and revolutionary working-class identities. These bonds subsequently underpinned union efforts to establish regional influence amid the union strife and political conflicts that persistently plagued postrevolutionary Puebla. To justify women's exclusion from factory and union life, unions concurrently promoted an ideal of working-class femininity, identified with home-based domesticity and scientific definitions of modern motherhood. This article ultimately suggests the important connections between industrial masculinization, modernization, and statebuilding in twentieth-century Mexico.

The mechanization of Guadalajara's corn mills—along with the building of the new revolutionary state, competition between secular and Catholic labor movements, the conflict between church and state, and changes in the labor force—created the conditions for a militant feminist working-class politics in the Mexico of the late 1920s and 1930s. The convergence of these processes sheds light on how men and women workers, entrepreneurs and the revolutionary state, and male and female labor leaders attributed different cultural meanings to sexual difference, work, and politics at this time. The example of women workers in the tortilla industry highlights how differences in gender and class became culturally significant and why specific gender differences changed and became politicized when mechanization at the corn mills was accelerated in the 1930s. This story challenges the myth of women's passivity, reveals the significance that women's mobilization and militancy had on the labor movement, and illustrates the difficulties encountered by secular feminists and organized women workers in a male-dominated trade union movement. It concludes that women gained a bittersweet victory by obtaining certain rights while remaining marginalized by male-dominated institutions.

This article highlights the heterogeneity within the Mexican women's labor force after the 1910 Mexican Revolution by profiling the coffee sorters in the Central Veracruz export industry. It contends that working women were not entirely subordinated to the patriarchal culture usually found in the workplace despite the seasonal and low-skilled nature of their work. Their work experience, ability to support their families, and the new social networks on and off the shop floor contributed to the shaping of their dual identity as women and as workers. In their life histories, these working women sought to construct an alternative working-class women's culture based on the meaning and importance of women's work, which reconfigured provincial conceptions of gender and class.

A steady stream of high quality journal articles, books, and conferences devoted to French labor history attests to the continued interest in this field. This scholarship, as reflected in the three books under review here, demonstrates a variety of approaches to both traditional and newer themes, rather than evidencing clear tendencies in any given topical or methodological direction. Paul Miller revisits the question of how the French labor movement swung, apparently overnight, from a position of opposition to the approaching outbreak of World War One to acquiescence and indeed support of the national war effort once hostilities began. He offers a cultural approach, arguing that, in spite of its collapse in August 1914, French working-class antimilitarism was an extremely significant cultural phenomenon for decades before the war. Delphine Gardey's careful study of women office workers during the second industrial revolution explores workers often ignored by labor historians and challenges traditional views of their class position. Adam Steinhouse breaks new ground in French labor history with his state-centered analysis of worker participation experiments between 1944 and 1947. A merit of these works is that each implicitly offers empirical evidence towards a more complete understanding of the social and political identities of modern French workers.

From August 8 to 10, 2002, a group of international scholars and labor practitioners attended a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara to honor David Brody. Organized by Nelson Lichtenstein (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Bruce Nelson (Dartmouth College) around the theme “Justice at Work,” the conference brought together thirty individuals from a range of perspectives, including history, sociology, political science, industrial relations practitioners, and legal, women's, and cultural studies. Brody, emeritus professor of History at University of California, Davis with a long affiliation with the Institute of Industrial Relations at University of California, Berkeley, attended the conference and offered his reflections on his craft, his students, and the labor movement. The conference provided an opportunity for those in attendance to share their thoughts on Brody's work, their own research, and the state of labor history and the labor movement.

The first State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook conference on working-class studies was the best structured, most enjoyable semi-academic meeting I have ever been to. Without being claustrophobic, organizers effectively matched the content of individual panels with plenary presentations in service of the subject: “How does class work?” Often conference themes get only the most nominal attention. Here, organizers apparently stuck to their guns when accepting proposals for panels and papers, and presenters largely stuck to the program. Attendees broke up into individual panels and repeatedly came together as a group throughout the day for plenaries. This worked on an informal basis as well. Plenary sessions always started off with a buzz as folks reintroduced each other in the mornings or, later in the day, compared notes on the panels they had just been to. Stony Brook is launching a working-class studies program, and its semi-yearly conference is to be the social science version of the Youngstown State University conference on class (they will alternate years). My sense is that the conferences will feed each other. Many people who had been to Youngstown also came to Stony Brook. And while at Stony Brook, they recruited for Youngstown.

Capital Moves is an important book written with a clear scholarly and political objective. Working in the mid-1990s, after the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization's (AFL-CIO) defeat in the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) debate, Jefferson Cowie sought to discredit a conception of workers and labor held not only by union leaders', but far too often by their allies in universities, politics, film, and literature as well. In this older conception, white men employed in the United States' auto, steel, and related industries struggled mightily for decades, in cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, to improve and defend their conditions and rights at work, only to lose their jobs because the President and the Congress did not prevent their employers from moving their factories to Mexico and Asia.

On the one hand Shostak uses the word “transformation” on his front cover. On the other, he quotes, on a flyleaf, the words of that personification of nineteenth- and twentieth-century business unionism, Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, 1886–1924. Gompers asked and answered his own question: “What does labor want? More.” This was a quantitative answer to what had earlier been, and today may again be, a qualitative question. So the question is raised, with respect to this book, as with his previous one (Shostak, 1999), whether Shostak wants faster unions or transformed unions.

In this award-winning documentary, producer and director Peter Miller uses an impressive collection of film clips and interviews to illustrate the connections between emotion, social politics, and music in the song “The Internationale.” Miller traces the history of this song as a rallying point for workers, activists, socialists, and communists, from its beginnings in the Paris Commune in 1871, through the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, labor struggles in the United States, and Tiananmen Square, to its recent reworking and revival by British musician Billy Bragg. The power of this documentary is its focus on the potent solidarity and optimism that “The Internationale” has inspired in workers and activists around the globe. Due to its combination of musical and social history, in addition to its accessibility, this film has the potential to reach a variety of audiences. It is suitable for public television broadcast and as an educational resource either for the classroom or for an activist or labor meeting.

If this book had halted after its opening chapter, an adjective like “elegant” would fit the resulting essay well. Those opening pages sketch with precision “the classic social movement agenda” developed since the 1960s, respectfully yet sharply identify important limitations of that agenda, and suggest some plausible theoretical tools for moving beyond those limits. Having themselves over those decades made so many contributions to the study of movements and related phenomena (the bibliography cites a half-dozen of their own previous books and could easily have contained more), the intrepid trio are now marking out some very interesting new trails.

These two books look very different: the Berberoglu collection deals almost exclusively with work and workers in the United States' economy (despite its subtitle), and the Waterman book deals mostly with labor internationalism. Yet they both highlight the conceptual and substantive issues that labor theorists and researchers have in coming to terms with the so-called age of globalization. This is all the more pertinent as both books are for the most part updates of previous publications. Berberoglu's volume is a new edition of his well-received (in left circles at least) The Labor Process and Control of Labor (1991), and Waterman's book is squarely based on his ongoing contributions to the Working Papers series of the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague.

Bertell Ollman's book is almost impossible to review, and this for at least two reasons. The first is that it's a one-of-a-kind, so there is no book one can compare it with. The second is that he has already reviewed it himself, on page 180, rather favorably. The third is that he sent me a free copy, enclosing a review from Z Magazine, thus combining a bribe with yet another model interview (sub-species: favorable). The fourth is that the back-page “puffs,” evidently from some more of his fans, say it better, and more briefly, than I possibly could. Consider this from Savas Michael: “A wonderful combination of Oxford scholarship and clarity, Marxist insight, Jewish humor, and revolutionary pedagogy, i.e. Ollman at his best.”