Women's work

About: Women's work is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1625 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33754 citations. The topic is also known as: woman's work.

Clean, White Girls: Assimilation and Women's Work

Abstract: Clean, White Girls: Assimilation and Women's Work Nothing is inherently dirty; dirt expresses a relation to social value and social disorder. Dirt is that which transgresses social boundary.(1) The cult of domesticity became indispensable to the consolidation of British national identity, and at the centre of the domestic cult stood the simple bar of soap.(2) Because it belongs to `the female realm of domesticity, soap is figured as beyond history and beyond politics proper,' and `has no social history,' as Anne McClintock points out. To `begin a social history of soap...is to refuse, in part, to accept the erasure of women's domestic value under imperial capitalism'(3) Narratives about the assimilation of indigenous Australian girls this century positioned them as the foremost targets of a social engineering project, enacted and legitimated by domestic training. Under assimilation it was essential to learn the cultural rituals of white society in order to approximate whiteness -- whiteness, while certainly premised on skin colour at the time, was also defined by a conformity to its social rules. These social rules were principally taught as a set of domestic rituals based on specific narratives about the character and duties of white women and their domestic work. In their Australian manifestations, narratives about `cleanliness' were pervasive throughout the assimilationist period and by the 1950s, white women were encouraged as a form of national duty to take on the mantle of role model and educator to a group who had been designated as `in-transition' people. This narrative line as reproduced by policy makers, missions and others, in film and print, will be my main focus. My analysis of the history of white women's involvement in national and state based policies of social engineering, through their role as domestic educators and as symbols of `acceptable' femininity, acknowledges their importance in creating dominant narratives of constructed racial difference. The Police Wife in Alexis Wright's novel, Plains of Promise, who endeavours to `keep the town clean'(4)by delivering a list of the social crimes of a young Aboriginal girl, or the missionaries' attempts to keep the dormitory clean by shaving heads of Aboriginal inmates in Wayne King's autobiography, Black Hours, are indicators of how Australia imagined racial difference and the civilising mission. While white women were also constrained by narratives of domesticity, as `incorporated' objects of a male colonial endeavour(5) throughout the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds, they were usually `in the men's room' when it came to the spaces allocated to indigenous people.(6) As Jackie Huggins observes, in relation to indigenous people, white women were often positioned as honorary men, called `Sir' or `boss.'(7) Use of the first names of white women by indigenous people was (in most instances) strictly forbidden; Aboriginal domestics and workers, as Marnie Kennedy observes in her autobiography Born a Half-Caste,(8) were called by their first names or generic titles such as `Jackie,' `Gin' or `Black Velvet.' These conventions instituted the racial superiority of all white people and maintained a stable hierarchy of power in work and other interactions. However, as Ann McGrath points out in Born in the Cattle, sexual politics had nonetheless a large bearing upon how racial stereotypes were formed and enforced. A letter to the Northern Territory Times in 1921, written by a woman calling herself `The Romany Lass,' demanded that white men who `seduced and abducted' Aboriginal women `by villainy' should pay for their offence `against the White Australia policy.'(9) An hierarchy of race divined through degrees of `caste' was supported, if not implemented and defined, by these `domestic' and `feminine' values throughout the assimilationist period in Australia. This is clearly exemplified by the `exemption certificate' form which marked candidates (so-called `half caste' Aboriginal wards of the state) on caste, cleanliness of person and home, and other indicators of public and private status such as occupation and number of children. …

Film Criticism as ‘Women's Work’: the Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain, 1945–65

Abstract: Film criticism occupies a liminal space in film history. As a practice and body of work, it is secondary to the film itself; an ancillary form that is entirely dependent on the continued release of...

From the Valley to the Summit: The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Work

Abstract: Meaningful discussions about women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a number of social and economic indicators. Sharp breaks are apparent in data on labor market expectations, college graduation rates, professional degrees, labor force participation rates, and the age at first marriage. Turning points are also evident in most of the series for college majors and occupations. Inflection or break points in almost all of these series occur from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and for cohorts born during the 1940s. Whatever the precise reasons for change, a great divide in college-graduate women's lives and employment occurred about 35 years ago. Previously, women who reached the peaks often made solo climbs and symbolized that women, contrary to conventional wisdom, could achieve greatness. But real change demanded a march by the masses from the valley to the summit.' That march began with cohorts born in the late 1940s.

Manning the Fields: Remaking Women's Work in the Tobacco South in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: Today, men make up the vast majority of the workforce in the tobacco fields of the American South. This was not always the case. For more than two centuries, enslaved women worked alongside men in the tobacco fields. In the late nineteenth century, the unpaid labor of female kin made possible the household's replacement of the plantation as the center of production, and it remained critical for farm families well into the twentieth century. Following World War II, agricultural engineers developed new technologies to eliminate tasks traditionally done by women. In the 1980s, the process of defeminization accelerated as growers began to hire male guestworkers from Mexico as more women moved into the non-farm labor market to supplement their families' farm incomes. The transition from family to wage labor in the tobacco South was far from a ‘natural’ process, but one nurtured by state agricultural, labor, and immigration policy.

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia

Abstract: In Women's Work, Men's Work, Betty Wood examines the struggle of bondpeople to secure and retain for themselves recognized rights as producers and consumers in the context of the brutal, formal slave economy sanctified by law. Wood examines this struggle in the Georgia lowcountry over a period of eighty years, from the 1750s to the 1830s, when, she argues, the evolution of the system of informal slave economies had reached the point that it would henceforth dominate Savannah's political agenda until the Civil War and emancipation. In considering the quasi-autonomous economic activities of bondpeople, Wood outlines the equally significant but quite different, roles of bondwomen and bondmen in organizing these economies. She also analyzes the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity on bondpeople, and the effects of the fusion of religious and economic morality on their circumstances. For a combination of practical and religious reasons, Wood finds, informal slave economies, with their impact on whites, became the single most important issue in Savannah politics. She contends that, by the 1820s, bondpeople were instrumental in defining the political agenda of a divided city - a significant, if unintentional, achievement.