Abstract
Eileen Boris's Making the Woman Worker offers a fundamentally important contribution to the thriving research on twentieth-century global feminisms, to histories of the changing conditions of (women's) work, and to understandings of supranational organisations and the UN system. The importance of this thoroughly researched, ambitious book lies in its placing of the ‘woman worker’ at the centre of a historical narrative of norm-setting in work. Making the Woman Worker foregrounds the gendered quality of the working subject and de-centres the long-unquestioned universal male worker. In doing so, it fulfils the promise of gender history as an analytical framework: not limiting itself to a story of the conditions and discourses surrounding women's work as distinct from the norm, it demonstrates how discussions of the woman worker were also central to constructing the male worker, and how the presumed difference of the former contributed to defining the discursive ‘normality’ of the latter. A key originality of the book lies in the fact that it understands the ‘marginal’ to define the ‘norm’ not only in relation to gender difference, but also with regard to women in the Global South, constructed as the ‘other’ vis-à-vis women in the industrialised world.
Focusing on the International Labour Organization (ILO), the book reframes understandings of international norm-setting with regard to waged work since its foundation in 1919 and up to the present day. This is foremost a narrative of work precarity, a notion which ought to be taken as the norm rather than the exception in twentieth-century experiences of work, and which helps us to dismantle the male industrial worker as a paradigm. The story starts with women's demands for maternity provisions in the early twentieth-century, an agenda that formed the nucleus of what became the ILO's paradigm of ‘protection’ of the women worker, and its principles of ‘equality in difference’. Until the end of the Second World War, the organisation developed an array of legislative and normative tools facilitating women's to access decent and fairly paid jobs and allowing them to better combine these with their prime role as family caregivers. Protection, as Boris argues, formed the underpinning for a series of specific standards (including maternity provisions and bans on dangerous work), which often had discriminatory effects on women's access to jobs, and became tools for policing working women's behaviour and constraining their life-choices.
While much of this has been argued previously, Boris’ study maps these conversations more systematically in their global scope. The book's principal innovation lies in the second part, where attention is turned to the post-1945 era and to women in the Global South, constructed in the ILO and around the UN as the ‘other’ vis-à-vis women in the industrialised world. Central to the articulation of the ‘women in development’ agenda that gained traction in UN discourse from the 1970s onwards, the ILO became an advocate for approaches centred on the ‘difference’ of women in the Global South, their empowerment on the basis of their traditional domestic roles, and their grassroots activism. Placing rural women at the centre of this agenda, ILO built on the novel perspectives by UN feminist economists such as Ester Boserup in the early 1970s, but went further in not only demonstrating that Western-led industrialisation in the Global South disempowered women, but also questioning the structures of the family and breaking down the cultural and economic notion of the household, and this on the basis of a close observation of rural women's experiences.
By defining feminism broadly, and placing conflicting feminist agendas at the centre of the analysis (for instance, the long-standing tension between ILO's emphasis on difference, and the UN's Commission on the Status of Women, more focused on formal equality), Boris offers fresh insight into feminist politics as it played out in international institutions. However, while the author on several occasions mentions that the ILO was influenced by non-institutional feminisms (NGOs, militant activism), the latter actors mostly remain perhaps a little too marginal to the analysis – which is surprising, especially with regard to the 1970s-1990s when an explosion of women's rights NGOs in the Global South transformed the UN system. Feminists in the Global North, too, might have merited a somewhat more nuanced analysis: the discussion of conflicts at the UN Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975 (pp. 119–121), for instance, does not account for the multiple stances on the definition of work among Western feminists, or their strong drive to question ‘emancipation through work’ principles. A close analysis of interactions between militant feminisms around the world and the ILO and UN system, is a research agenda that remains to be deepened.
In the final section, Boris reflects on the effects of global deregulation since the 1980s, convincingly demonstrating that the long-standing precarity of the woman worker announced the more generalized deregulation of the post-1980 world of ‘feminized labour’. Yet at the same time, early twenty-first century developments suggest that a rethinking of the definition of work is taking place in the ILO, to which home-based women workers are central. As illustrated in chapters 5 and 6, a multitude of home-based forms of labour – including industrial outwork, domestic service, production of sustenance commodities, and the plethora of unwaged care tasks vis-à-vis the family or others’ families – has stubbornly persisted around the world in defiance of ‘modernisation’, and proliferated since the 1980s. As Boris’ very timely study suggests, it may well form the kernel of new paradigms of work and of future programmes for social and gender justice.