Re: Women & Industrialization (was Re: capitalist patriarchy)

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

Great post.  2 booknotes.

John D. French Daniel James eds. 1997. _The Gendered Worlds of Latin
American Women Workers_  Duke University Press

has wonderful articles by historians along these lines, several showing
the extent to which governments were involved in creating and enforcing
the male-breadwinner model.

I've also learned a lot from

Lee, C. K. 1998. _Gender and the South China Miracle._ University of
California Press.

Ong, Aihwa. 1987. _Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline:
Factory Women in Malaysia._  SUNY Press.

Lee is a student of Burawoy, Ong is an anthropologist.  Both of them
show you the ways that workplaces draw on gender ideology and what you
might think of as cultural technology -- pregiven notions of authority
and female identity.  Ong also provides an impressive analysis of the
political/cultural stresses that the presence of a large number of yound
women workers produces in Malaysia, which resonates with the material on
events in Latin Ameica decades earlier in the French/James volume.

So indeed this is not a mere "women were there too" analysis but points
to a much more interesting set of questions about how proletariats get
formed and remade.  Gender needs to be brought into the analysis on the
ground floor.

Best, Colin