The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers

The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers examines the lives of Latin American women who entered factory labour in increasing numbers in the early part of the twentieth century. Emphasising the integration of traditional labour history topics with historical accounts of gender, female subjectivity, and community, this interdisciplinary volume explores working women's agency and consciousness and offers rich detail regarding women's lives as daughters, housewives, mothers, factory workers, trade union leaders, and political activists. Widely seen as a hostile sexualised space, the modern factory was considered a threat, not only to the virtue of working women, but also to the survival of the family, and thus, the future of the nation. Yet working-class women continued to labour outside the home and remained highly visible in the expanding world of modern industry. In nine essays dealing with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala, the contributors make extensive use of oral histories to describe the contradictory experiences of women whose work defied gender prescriptions but was deemed necessary by working-class families in a world of need and scarcity. The volume includes discussions of previously neglected topics such as single motherhood and women's struggle against domestic violence. Theoretically informed and original in scope, The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers should be of interest to students and scholars working in women's history as well as Latin American labour, political, and social history. Contributors. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Mary Lynn Pedersen Cluff, John D. French, Daniel James, Thomas Miller Klubock, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Heidi Tinsman, Theresa R. Veccia, Barbara Weinstein