Foreign Rights

In the history of labour, women have played a part that most historians and sociologists have failed to recognize or even ignored. Over the past few decades, a few women historians have worked to fill this gap. Drawing on their work, Rolande Pinard offers here a sociohistorical analysis of women workers’ activism that has contributed, in the labour movement, to the development of the sociopolitical meaning of work. This richly documented research argues that, from their initial solidarity with workers, women have gradually been marginalized in the ensuing types of organized labour. In the end, emancipation through work was almost exclusively the privilege of men, who benefited from institutions (such as trade unionism) built through workers, social and political struggles. Stressing the multidimensional aspect of the formation of the working class, Rolande Pinard points out that understanding labour from a critical point of view implies taking into account its different agents through the historical periods of transformation of capitalism.