This paper examines the song Riziki1 (2005), composed and performed by Ja-Mnazi Afrika, which theorizes night work. Written and performed by the Kenyan musician Michael Otieno Ooko a.k.a Awillo Mike Ja’mnazi, the song appropriates the Swahili word “Riziki” which refers to a livelihood to complicate the idea and value of work, and particularly work by night. This way, the song’s Swahili lyrics muse upon and animate the work process to an East African audience. The song narrates night work dynamics, with a temporal sensibility, and proffers dignity to work-by-night subcultures. Borrowing from performance analysis and close listening analytical approaches, this paper argues that the song communicates the stress and pressures of night work while simultaneously emphasizing how imperative the continued work is to secure people’s livelihoods. Furthermore, the choice of language, for the most part, of the song in Kiswahili, an African language, and a language of trade in Eastern Africa is perhaps aware of the diversity of people and occupations included in night work. This way, the song complicates the cultural dynamic of night work to move beyond its association with the pleasure economy to locate work by night within capitalist work cultures.

In 1920s Seattle, dance halls charging ten cents per dance became the focus of debate. Tracing the dance workers’ self-representations and labor organizing in a city increasingly hostile to interracial social spaces, this paper evaluates how gender, race, labor organizing, and politics intersected in unprecedented ways in Seattle’s nightlife. In a decade of tepid labor organizing and in a sexual labor sector where unions were extremely rare, female dancers in Seattle unionized. Moreover, they did so in what became under Mayor Betha Knight Landes (1926–1928) the first major American city to have a female mayor. The Women Dancing Entertainers’ Union’s (WDEU) tactics of emphasizing the respectability of their profession enjoyed initial successes, yet faltered when dance hall critics increasingly constructed the presence of interracial couples as a sign of immorality. The closure in 1929 of numerous ten-cent halls south of Yesler Way reflects how Anti-Asian prejudice entered into regulation of the city’s nightlife, adversely impacting dance hall workers, women in politics, and minoritized men. The WDEU’s insistence that they were upstanding workers and economic providers nonetheless provides a powerful corrective to contemporaries’ and, until recently, historians’ tendency to overlook sexual sector night labor.

In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and what kind of work women should do at night was a conflict about class, motherhood, and self-determination. This article profiles three leaders of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League—printer Ella M. Sherwin, transit guard Margaret Hinchey, and streetcar ticket agent Mary A. Murray. All three were devoted union members whose opposition to women-only laws made them dissidents within their unions. They remained shift workers their entire lives while lobbying state legislatures and Congress to demand formal legal equality for women. Histories of the early Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) have emphasized the support of upper- and middle-class women. These working-class women, who had long opposed protective legislation, later demanded the ERA—not in spite of the prospect that it would nullify single-sex labor laws, but because they hoped it would. Theirs was a minority position, and paying attention to it reveals the complexity of class conflict at the root of a feminist dispute which persisted long into the twentieth century.

This article rethinks the hegemonic “sex-work” discourses—popular sex-work discourse and radical-feminist discourse—that associate Japanese night work with prostitution and consider young women workers in this industry as victims. These discourses reinforce sex-work oppression–empowerment paradigms, which limit workers’ experiences to either oppressive/empowering, good/bad, and positive/negative. This research draws on transnational feminism and a polymorphous approach to the complex nature of sex work. In doing so, this article addresses three aspects of Japanese night work, including young Japanese women’s motivation to go into night work, their conceptualization of work they engage in, and shakai-keiken (social experience) that they gain out of doing night work. This article encourages readers to step away from dominant Western discourses and look closely at the nuanced nature of Japanese night work in its own context.