Gendered Activism and the Politics of Women's Work: Introduction

It is often said that labor history is in decline. Yet other interpretations are possible. The flourishing of labor history from the 1960s to the 1980s could instead be regarded as exceptional and the situation during the last twenty years as the more typical state of affairs. A second interpretation, which I favor, is that labor history has, in fact, not declined. Rather, the content of labor history has shifted. There may be less scholarship on many of the traditional or original objects of research, but there is new research, in history and other disciplines, on topics that arguably fall under a new, expanded understanding of “labor history.†This second explanation is supported by the continued vitality of scholarship on women's work and women's activism.