Abstract
To have my work taken so seriously by these three intellectually generous and stimulating reviewers is a huge pleasure. The reviewers have not only engaged with the arguments of my book, Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007, but have extended them and so made me think again, decide where to expand and whether to revise some of the arguments I made there.
The phrase that stood out, as I read these comments in early January 2015 was, of course, ‘we are labour’ (a claim towards the end of Beverley Skeggs’s comments) with its current resonances: we are Charlie, we are Juif, we are flic, we are Ahmed/Clarissa, identities also constructed by the state and by violence, but in different and tragic circumstances. But as the stories of migration and hard work, often in state-funded services, show, violence was part of the post-war lives of these women too, sometimes material and always symbolic.
As Bev also notes, I owe a debt to that tradition of ethnographies of women’s work begun in the 1970s and 1980s by a generation of feminists, many of them sociologists. These include Bev’s own book, Formations (1997), now a classic study of young working class girls, that she is too modest to mention, and Miriam’s wonderful book Women on the Line (Cavendish, 1982). Women on the Line was reissued in this millennium (Glucksmann, 2009) with an interesting foreword where Miriam discusses some of the changes over the two decades separating the two versions, in both theory and method and in the labour market position of men and women. All three books were inspirations to me in writing Working Lives.
As Miriam suggests in her review, I perhaps should have included a discussion of men’s changing labour market position, as men, but young men in particular, move into feminized work at the bottom end of the labour market – a task I did start in Redundant Masculinities? (2003). But men, as well as gender relations – a point Cathy McIlwaine makes – are not entirely absent from the narratives. The women from South Asia and East Africa involved in industrial struggles, for example, talked about support by husbands and brothers and about combining housework with duties on the picket line. The Baltic Cygnets regretted leaving fathers behind and talked about sharing childcare with their husbands and other family members through working different shifts, but these are threads beneath the surface of the main focus of my book. In Working Lives I wanted to challenge the theoretical dominance, especially in my own discipline of geography as well as in sociology, of those theories of economic and labour market transformation that draw on masculinist narratives of de-industrialization, the rise of the ‘knowledge’ economy, the end of work and the end of 9–5 jobs for life. My aim was to focus instead on continuities across the decades in women’s labour market position. Despite evident changes in the nature of work, in who does it, in how it is distributed across the working day and week and in how it is regulated and rewarded, women’s work remains predominantly low paid, often part time and typically in female-dominated jobs and sectors.
The most significant change, however, was that the impetus for the book was the end of empire. In 1945, 700 million people were imperial subjects; by 1965 the number was five million. Colonial assumptions about superiority, about race, about embodiment and whiteness, as Bev noted, influenced attitudes to migrant women across the entire seven decades. The Baltic Cygnets were not imperial subjects but nevertheless constructed as ‘superior’ within the discourse of the time. ‘Whiteness’ is also mutable, as other fine scholars have documented and as current xenophobic attitudes to the expansion of the EU to include Romania and Bulgaria have shown. And paradoxically, at the same time as the number of people entering the UK from the EU rises, the general public still seems to confuse immigrants with citizens, assuming all people of colour in the UK are strangers, immigrants who have come to ‘steal our jobs’. It is clear that the complex connections between histories of migration and employment need more careful consideration, not least by the media.
Cathy is right, I think, in her argument that my key focus is on work and employment, rather than on migration per se, but I hope that Working Lives is a book about migration too (and gender, even though the focus is women). Most of the women whose working lives inform the arguments are imperial or post-colonial subjects and all of them moved to the UK, typically as young women. Their different paths to the UK are not ignored in the book and migration influenced their sense of themselves, their reception in the UK and their opportunities and prospects as they built new lives in Britain. The desires, for example, of the women who came to Britain in the late 1940s as European Volunteer Workers not to ‘rock the boat’, their anxieties not to break the terms of their employment in the early years and, perhaps most significantly, to work hard to provide opportunities for their children, rather than for themselves, run right through their narratives. Interviewing their daughters (and sons), as Miriam suggests, would make a fascinating comparative project, although for someone else rather than for me.
Most of these generations of older women – now mothers and grandmothers of Britons – ‘came to stay’ and so their move to Britain transformed their later lives. Trans-nationalism, movement back and forth and between several countries, was not the habitual experience the earlier generations of post-war migrants. I wanted to insert the story of migrant women’s working lives into migration stories, as well as to provide a comparative account rather than focus on a particular group of women workers or women migrants. Too often, migration studies, especially in its recognition of the growing dominance of women in migration flows (now more than half of all migrants in North to North movements and almost half in South to North) focuses on women’s domestic roles, as wives and mothers, in the household and the community, as bearers and transmitters of memories and cultural practices rather than on migrant women as workers.
This brings me to the question of memory and recollections and the methodological issues of relying on recall. I touched on these in an early chapter in the book but perhaps I might have discussed them in more detail. One of the most evident differences between those classic accounts of women’s working lives and in feminist scholarship more broadly, is the now widespread acceptance and adoption of new methods and new sources. Memories, emotions and feelings now play a more central part in our analyses, facilitated in part by the turn to oral histories, to personal writing (Light, 2014; Smart, 2007) and auto-ethnographies, the use of photographs, diaries, shopping lists and other more ephemeral sources, while still not ignoring the key significance of earlier feminist work in challenging the dominant theories and methods in the social sciences from the late 1960s onwards.
I wish I had made more use of alternative sources in Working Lives, being braver about asking women whether I might include some of their photographs and other documents in the book, as well as including a wider range of historical documents and artefacts. But that would have been a different book, or a much longer one. The historian, Pat Thane (2013), in her review of Working Lives, asked why I had not included a good deal more of the women’s own voices in the book. I may not take up the challenges of the three WES reviewers, whether to include more about debt, about men or about the next generation, but I have just finished a book based on the full transcripts from 74 interviews, extracts from some of which are included in Working Lives while others are not. It is called Migrant Women’s Voices: Talking about Work in the UK and will be published by Bloomsbury Press at the end of 2015 in its history series. One of the real pleasures of being a feminist writing about women’s working lives is this disciplinary eclecticism, when a geographer might be reviewed by sociologists about historical material, without comment on her location. As well as thanking the three reviewers, I also want to thank the editors and readers of WES for their generosity in making space for me.