Abstract
From the 2005 gathering of women from dozens of countries under sweltering white tents in Porto Alegre, Brazil to the use of oversized pregnant puppets in a 2009 campaign for paid maternity leave in Adelaide, South Australia, Making Feminist Politics documents how transnational feminist activists are changing the face of the labor movement. Suzanne Franzway and Mary Fonow demonstrate the tremendous courage, creativity, and commitment of women workers and their allies, as well as the daunting challenges of building a feminist international trade union movement in the age of globalization.
These struggles come to life in various strategic spaces, from local union offices and campaigns, to global federations, to political parties, to the kitchens and bedrooms of workers, and to the stories that are told or suppressed about all of the above. The authors argue, “(M)aking feminist politics within labor means contesting explicit but complex structures of power and requires discursive and political alliances to confront the sexual politics of unions, families, and everyday life” (p. 145). Thus, they situate trade union politics within a much broader social context of masculine norms, reproductive labor, and limiting discourses of gender and sexuality that make women’s labor activism simultaneously necessary, vital, and exacting.
Chapter Two, “Sexual Politics, Activism, and Everyday Life” and Chapter Three, “Sexual Politics, Labor, and the Family” are a tour-de-force that synthesize the vast literature on gender, work, and family while critiquing it within a broader transnational feminist framework of globalized gendered and sexualized labor. In particular, these chapters build on feminist arguments regarding women’s caregiving responsibilities as both limiting and inspiring their political participation. While recognizing the family as a political site which is integrally connected to women’s work and activism on issues ranging from childcare to pay equity, the authors also address the potential dangers of reifying the heteronormative, middle-class, nuclear family in appeals for “family friendly” policies. Campaigns for “working families” and “work/life balance” have mobilized broad constituencies and won important gains not only for women, but also for men and children. At the same time, these framings have often diluted more radical feminist goals of challenging the sexual politics of the family itself.
In this discussion of labor politics in everyday life, the authors develop the concept of “the laboring body” (p. 33), addressing the much-overlooked necessity of women to care for their own bodies in order to work, and how this self-care is often the last to receive attention. This discussion is especially exciting as it engages with the discursive analysis in the burgeoning scholarship on the body while grounding it more firmly in material labor conditions and practices. Some of the interesting and fruitful questions raised are: how are women workers expected to negotiate the material demands on their laboring bodies while maintaining appropriately feminine aesthetic appearances? How do particularly gendered and sexualized discourses of the body, such as those surrounding pregnant or lesbian bodies, impact women’s ability to work? How does union activism exact specific tolls on women’s bodies?
The historical breadth of the book is impressive, providing background on the development of global federations and forums, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), International Federation of Working Women (IFWW), Global Union Federation (GUF), and the World Social Forum (WSF), but also examining their ongoing legacies in shaping present and future directions in the trade union movement. For example, Franzway and Fonow take up the question of women’s “separate organizing” to assess the historical and contemporary tensions over focusing organizing efforts on ancillary women’s committees versus increasing women’s representation in male-dominated union hierarchies. Furthermore, they situate this sweeping historical overview not only in western countries but globally.
The authors then shift from this broad overview of feminist politics in the international labor movement and dedicate a whole chapter to an in-depth discussion of the International Metalworkers Federation. They chart shifts in the IMF’s strategies and priorities for organizing women from the 1958 focus on special protective legislation for women, including exclusion from night shifts, to the 2005 emphasis on coalitions with broader movements for social justice.
In the discussion of the IMF and throughout the book, the authors strive for an intersectional analysis. While they do an excellent job of addressing intersections of gender, class, and sexuality, their discussion of race, colonialism, nationality, and citizenship is much more limited. For example, they mention that in 1975 the IMF’s “activities were expanded beyond Europe to Latin America and Asia” (p. 114) but they do not provide any detailed discussion of these activities and their successes and failures around issues of difference. Similarly, the authors point out that eight women from Brazil, South Africa, Czech Republic, Canada, Macedonia, Singapore, and Sweden were added to the IMF’s executive body in 2005 “with much fanfare” but they do not cover what issues these women brought to the table and any ensuing debates and conflicts.
Thus, some of the important questions that the book could pursue more fully include: how do transnational feminists learn or fail to learn how to work together across racial and national boundaries?; how do women address the politics of domestic work in a global context in which women from the global South often clean the homes and care for the children of women in the global North?; how do transnational feminists find common purpose without suppressing difference or reinstating power relations?
Data for the study draw from multiple sources: archival records; interviews; participant observation at meetings, conferences, and global forums; websites; and research networks on women and unions. Given this extensive research, I found myself longing to hear more of the voices of the women labor activists themselves and more detailed descriptions of what must certainly have been heated, exhausting and exhilarating campaigns, protests, and struggles. Also, given Franzway and Fonow’s own lifelong engagement and prolific writing on these issues, the study presents many opportunities for more reflexive engagement on the evolution of their own analyses and the tensions between their own thinking and others they studied.
Making Feminist Politics is an important and much-needed contribution to the literature on labor and social movements that illuminates overlooked sites of labor politics, such as the family and the body, in contexts outside of Western industrialized countries.