Abstract
Linda’s McDowell’s book recounts the experiences of ‘exceptional ordinary women’, who have been ‘born elsewhere’ (p. 50), in the British labour market between 1945 and 2007. Its basic premise is that women, and especially migrant women, are still neglected in accounts of labour markets. As such, it aims to provide an alternative yet complementary account of post-war economic change from a gendered perspective that places women at the centre rather than on the periphery of the analysis. This is done through drawing on a range of different research projects carried out by the author over the last several decades. It is this deliberate focus on women, and not on gender, that is the core strength of this book. In tracing the intersections between British labour and migration history from the perspective of women, the book ends up being much richer and more insightful than many broadly similar accounts of this period. Indeed, while this book is about economic change, work and migration, it is also about communities, motherhood, emotional labour, the body and exploitation. The last of these would most likely be absent from more conventional accounts of this period.
In an undoubtedly subjective reading, three themes stand out. The first is how the spatialities and temporalities of women’s lives interweave through a fascinating combination of history, memory and chronology. Not only does McDowell prominently outline the ways in which memory and history are constantly re-translated and re-transcribed individually and collectively, but this theme is played out throughout the text in some thoughtful periodizations and chronologies that highlight how migration regimes, labour markets and migrants’ lives intersect. Importantly, it is illustrated throughout the book by showing how women experience all these in different ways from men in terms of the specificity of lived female bodily experiences. This account is enriched by the way in which each chapter begins with excerpts from novels written by migrant authors to reflect the ‘exciting work’ being conducted by migrants themselves to ensure their experiences have an audience beyond the academic world.
Such an approach is directly linked to the second theme, which is how the book carefully foregrounds the voices of migrants. As McDowell points out, many texts to date have ignored or muted migrants’ voices in general and women migrants’ voices in particular. The rich excerpts from oral histories from a diversity of women – from Latvia, Jamaica, Barbados, Ireland, Uganda, Kenya, India, South Africa and the USA – bring the book alive in important ways. This approach not only captures the complex histories and geographies that influence women’s lives, but also their differences, resonances and similarities in their experiences.
These voices also chime with the theoretical ideas presented and especially with those revolving around the importance of intersectionality and of Burawoy’s Althusserian notion of interpellation, to forcefully highlight employers’ constructions of stereotypes of workers. It also shows how women from different classes, ethnic groups, ages, accents and other embodied characteristics are differentially constructed as suitable labour for different types of work in a way that ultimately serves the interests of the British economy. While these processes have been discussed in other work in relation to, for example, the emergence of a ‘migrant division of labour’ where migrants are employed as a preferential labour force because they are flexible, cheap and disposable (Wills et al., 2010), the attention to women’s embodied, visceral yet also economically rational experiences make this book stand out.
The third related theme addresses the simultaneously transformative and exploitative nature of women migrants’ lives, a discourse that underpins the politics of the book. As is clearly stated, women’s lives have changed for better and worse since 1945 as labour markets and migration regimes have changed. On one hand, these forces have led to female migrants entering the British labour force under exploitative and discriminatory conditions. Some of the accounts in the book are shocking in their depictions of degrading working practices, such as Caribbean nurses having faeces thrown at them or Irish nurses contracting TB as a result of their work. Degrading practices, worryingly, were recorded across all the time periods and in all spheres from manual to professional work. Such discrimination was also accompanied by a widespread fear: the fears of being far from home, of employers, of the unknown.
Yet the dignity of the women also emerges very clearly. Many women were able to reap rewards from their work, albeit with costs attached. They were able to assert some independence, to send money home and to develop self-respect. This dignity was also manifest in the various forms of resistance among women regardless of their nationality or the historical context. Although in some cases this resistance was tacit, as in banking, in other cases it was more overt, such as among the South Asian women’s strikes in the Grunwick photo processing factory. There is therefore evidence outlined in the book that gender ideologies and scripts can change, although much effort is still needed to press for change and to prevent the continuing processes of exploitation that occur on a daily basis in the UK.
On a final note, and emphasizing an earlier point, this is a book on women and not on gender. Men are not absent, but neither do they play a major role in the narrative. It is also a book on the changing British labour market; it is not a book on migration. The links are made between the two but there is a clear sense that this is about working lives and not migratory lives, as the title indeed suggests. Yet there is much in Working Lives to offer scholars of labour and migration, not least in remembering that women migrants are in many ways different to British born women, a fact often linked with their more precarious positions in the lower echelons of the labour market in jobs that many refuse to do; but that they also share much across divides. Such shared attributes include differential insertion in feminized sectors of the labour market vis-a-vis men, where pay, conditions and benefits tend to be worse.