From the Labour Question to the Labour History Question

A number of criticisms were found in the pages of labour history journals. Perhaps most famously, Princeton University's Joan Scott, who engaged with the labour aristocracy scholarship in her prizewinning 1974 study of French glassworkers, notoriously criticized labour historians for, in her view, paying inadequate attention to gender relations a decade later.44 Without naming names, Scott, who also proudly identified Thompson and [Herbert G. Gutman] as key influences on her first book, made an especially forceful, though insufficiently footnoted, intervention in 1987, claiming that most scholars of labour have been only "half-hearted" in their "attention to gender." Recognizing that "gender" had "acquired a certain legitimacy" in the work of some, she nevertheless showed disappointment that others apparently did not "have time to study" it.45 Partially motivated by [Gareth Stedman Jones]'s use of language in his 1983 study of Chartism, Scott argued that greater attention to language and its different meanings would allow historians "to see the gender that is in the history of the working-class."46 A year earlier, Scott published an even more pointed defense of language against class and materialism, which remains an influential essay and has secured her position as perhaps the leading proponent of gender-centred studies.47 Zachary Schwartz-Weinstein's "The Limits of Work and the Subject of Labor History" is the volume's most theoretical essay. He makes two proposals: "First, I suggest that labour history look to the processes of marginalization and accumulation which constrict and expand the definitions of work and the classes of workers." Second, he insists that we must "focus on how newly 'labored' (and de-labored) forms of work are situated in relation to contemporary and historical capitalisms and articulations of race, gender, and nation."(489) Rather than focus primarily on "productive labor," scholars should pay greater attention to "the contingent and socially constructed means by which particular acts can become known, politically, legally, and in broader social and cultural frames, as labor."(494) Neither liberal nor classical Marxist accounts, he argues, can accurately address the diversity of laboured experiences. In light of these proposals, we should hardly be surprised that he, like [Daniel Bender], finds "valuable lessons" in the cultural turn. 14. [George Rawick], "Working-Class Self-Activity," Radical America, 3 (March-April 1969), 23-31