International Labor and Working-Class History 77 opens with a special thematic feature, “Gendered Activism and the Politics of Women's Work.” In it, we include articles by Karen Hunt (Keele University), Julie Guard (University of Manitoba), Judith Smart (University of Melbourne and RMIT University), and June Hannam (University of the West of England), all of which were originally presented in 2008 at the international conference “Labouring Feminism and Feminist Labour History,” in Stockholm. Rounding out this section is a fifth essay by Kate Hardy (Queen's College, University of London), given first as a lecture at a spring 2009 symposium sponsored by ILWCH at Rutgers University.
These essays range in time and place, from Britain, Canada, and Australia in the early and mid-twentieth century to Argentina in the late twentieth century. Yet as Silke Neunsinger (Labour Archives and Library, Stockholm) points out in an introduction to this section, all of the essays expand conventional notions of how, when, and where political mobilization occurs, and all share a willingness to rethink inherited definitions of labor, labor movements, and labor activism. Neunsinger was the principal organizer of the 2008 Swedish conference and also served, along with senior editors Dorothy Sue Cobble and Peter Winn, as one of the issue editors for ILWCH 77. ILWCH appreciates the time she put into helping assemble and edit this group of thought-provoking and imaginative essays.
ILWCH 77 continues with an expanded “Classics Revisited” section, in which Michael Merrill (Empire State College, State University of New York), Alan Knight (St. Antony's College, Oxford), and Alejandro de la Fuente (University of Pittsburgh) reflect on the life and work of Frank Tannenbaum, the anarcho-syndicalist organizer of the US jobless poor, analyst of the US labor movement, and later a major historian of the Mexican Revolution and comparative slavery and race relations in the Americas.
ILWCH 77 is pleased to publish a film review essay as part of our occasional series, “Through the Camera's Eye,” begun in ILWCH 70. Xiaodan Zhang (York College, City University of New York) analyzes seven documentary films by Chinese, European, and North American directors that explore the impact of neoliberal modernization and globalization on Chinese workers. They present evocative and often troubling portraits of the migration of individuals and families from rural areas to new manufacturing landscapes and the movement of an entire factory complex from Germany to China.
Returning to the issue's special theme on gendered activism, we conclude with a report from the field on the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). HUCTW recently celebrated twenty years of “bread and roses unionism,” and ILWCH decided to mark the occasion by publishing photos and documents from the union's history, song lyrics from the union's chorus, the Pipets, and the twentieth-birthday-party keynote talk given by HUCTW lead organizer Kris Rondeau. In an introduction to the section, senior editor Dorothy Sue Cobble reports firsthand from the union's birthday bash and reflects on the significance of HUCTW for scholars and activists.
