Abstract
Maria Tamboukou's book Women Workers’ Education, Life Narratives and Politics is a welcome and much-needed analysis of the evolution of adult education from a female perspective. The book focuses on the tensions that existed in the trade union movement about adult education for women workers, a neglected area in the historiography. Tamboukou approaches the subject of women workers’ education in three ways. Firstly, she gives a general overview of adult education in Britain, France, and the USA from the 19th to mid-20th centuries. She also provides subject-specific knowledge of female activism in creating, organizing, and disseminating adult education for and by women. And thirdly, she instills the book with a thoughtful analysis of the archival material as assemblages of evidence to support her thesis that adult education can be understood as a complex journey that had the potential to transform the lives of women workers.
Each chapter of the book is immersed in the pursuit of the elusive experience of adult education from the working woman's perspective. To achieve this aim, Tamboukou reflects deeply on how archival material such as life narratives, the donated self-curated biographical collections of individuals, and photographic records can be combined as assemblages of evidence to analyse to what extent adult education supported women as workers, individuals, and citizens. She embeds her analysis in the educational philosophies of Hannah Arendt, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Ranciére.
The first chapter takes a geographical approach and maps out the state of adult education in Britain, France, and the USA at the turn of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This was a key moment in the history of workers’ adult education, as its control, shifted from middle-class liberals to the workers themselves. In Britain, this phenomenon was best exemplified by Albert Mansbridge and the emergence of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) in 1903.
In chapter 2, Tamboukou applies a self-reflective approach to the archive of Fannia Cohn to understand the challenges that Cohn embraced in making women workers’ education her vocation. This fascinating chapter introduces us to Cohn, one of the primary female activists supporting education for working-class women in the USA.
Tamboukou succeeds in using Cohn's life narrative to gain insight into the entrenched inequalities in the American Federation of Labour (AFL) on the issue of adult education for its male and female members, thus addressing the twin issues of class and gender in the trade union movement. Tamboukou evaluates Cohn's writings as an attempt by this intriguing, complex, and driven crusader to set the record straight, lest key conflicts of opinion on women workers’ education were glossed over in the historical record. Other subjects covered in detail are the achievements of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for women workers and the rise and fall of Brookwood Labour College. Tamboukou skillfully weaves the issue of race into this chapter when she relates the campaigns undertaken by female students at these institutions to admit women of color on an equal basis. This brings to light an invisible history that deserves to be further illuminated by future research.
Chapter 3 aims to discover ‘the self’ through Cohn's correspondence. It humanizes Cohn by exploring her relationships and transnational and cross-class collaborations with women activists. An area of conflict for Cohn in her principled determination to create Independent Working-Class Education (IWCE; as coined by the Plebs) was her upper-middle-class bourgeois immigrant background. This was something that she kept secret, as Tamboukou's analysis of Cohn's correspondence shows. The chapter reads like a biography of Cohn's life. This approach though effective also limits the narrative in giving a more rounded view of the movement for women workers’ education from other perspectives. It does not detract from Tamboukou's scholarship but merely draws attention to where further research is called for.
Chapter 4 argues that the quality and type of education offered to women workers was deeply important to the process of their educational transformation. Tamboukou uses female genealogies to explore the actual lived experience of adult education in the framework of Foucault's concept of heterotopias, worlds within worlds, to understand the transformative impact of education, especially in the liberal arts on female students. The final chapter culminates in an analysis framed by Peircian and Barthian semiotics of the visual archive in the form of photographs of women workers’ education in progress in its many forms.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and evolution of adult education in relation to women workers specifically in the USA during the first half of the 20th century. It makes a significant contribution to the historiography in the study of gender, class, and education by pushing the boundaries in terms of how it approaches the biographical archival materials. Tamboukou, though her sensitive biographical analysis of the female activists at the heart of making adult education accessible and meaningful to women workers, succeeds in raising awareness of the importance of autonomy and independent thinking that education is supposed to engender in supporting women and those from disadvantaged backgrounds in taking greater control of their lives.