Susan Zimmermann

THE CHALLENGE OF MULTINATIONAL EMPIRE FOR THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN's MOVEMENT: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Development of Feminist Inter/National Politics

This article analyzes strategies of transnational organizing as developed in the international womens movement prior to 1918, comparing the International Council of Women (ICW) and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). These organizations developed divergent schemes of dealing with political entities that did not conform to the western notion of the nation state, and with womens movements from these regions. In this context, neither the ICW nor the IWSA overtly challenged constitutional arrangements characterizing the pre-existing, deeply hierarchical international order. Yet in collaborating with organized women from the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, as well as from other dominated nations and regions in European and non-European contexts, the IWSA developed a cautious partisanship for national emancipation and self-determination. The study analyses how ICW and IWSA engaged in constructing the feminist inter/national through a complex set of policies relating womens international representation to state, nation, citizenship, and territory.

Introduction: A Century of Women’s ilo

“In general the problems of women workers are indistinguishable from those of men”, the International Labour Organization (ilo) announced in 1964—yet additional measures were still required because of women’s “manifold responsibilities, particularly those relating to their maternity and motherhood...[and] the evolution of their civic, economic and social status”.1 From the founding of the ilo in 1919, women sought a voice in ilo’s deliberations, and they wanted to use the ilo for advancing their own agendas. As we celebrate the centennial of the ilo, it is time to consider the past and present of what we have named ‘Women’s ilo’ with regard to a shifting global political economy, the twists and turns of women’s movements, and the changing nature of work itself. This collection addresses a century of ilo engagement with women’s work, gender equity, and gender policy in an unevenly developing world and a century of intertwined encounters of women and the ilo. It illuminates both the interaction between the ilo and international women’s networks and the history of women at the ilo in their capacities as staff, delegates and advisers. It uncovers a history far richer and engaging than previously recognized—a history that is central for thinking about the boundaries of feminism, the uneven advancement of gender equity, and the significant role that women experts and activists have played in creating a more humane world of work. We explore the gendered dimensions and dynamics of international labour law forged by the ilo and the resulting debates, negotiations, and practices in various local contexts. The original research presented in the fourteen, roughly chronological, chapters in this volume show the centrality of the ilo to the production of labour standards— and the difficulty of implementing policies on gender and work in light of an unequal distribution of power and resources among nations, regions, and classes. Written by historians, legal scholars, and social scientists, the chapters offer an interdisciplinary approach that should appeal to academic communities and policy experts alike, as well as to non-specialist readers interested in the ilo. The past and present of the ‘Women’s ilo’ is a topic hitherto outside the core of the new scholarship on women’s and labour internationalism,

The agrarian working class put somewhat centre stage: an often neglected group of workers in the historiography of labour in state-socialist Hungary

Abstract This study discusses a body of scholarship which is little-known internationally, written in Hungary in the period between 1949 and 1989: the historiography on agrarian labour from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. This historiography was conceptually inclusive in that it explored the history of many groups of agrarian workers, the varied types of labour in which they were involved, including long-term contracts, day and servant labour, seasonal migration and non-agricultural forms of labour, the role of agrarian labour in socio-economic development, and the political movement of ‘agrarian socialism’. This historiography for a large part remained embedded in three adjacent research clusters: peasant studies, local and regional history, and the history of the labour movement. This study argues that scholarly approaches and interests, and institutional framings specific to each of these clusters, were of key importance in generating the extensive scholarship that is reviewed. The fact that Hungary had been a dominantly agrarian country before 1945, the Leninist vision of the ‘alliance of the workers and the peasants’ that was to bring about socialism in Eastern Europe and the state-condoned interest in the history of the labour movement and labour more generally were other important factors conducive to, and to various degrees putting their stamp on, this research. Given its findings within a Marxian or classical social-history framing, and its focus on an often neglected group of workers, the historiography on agrarian labour written in state-socialist Hungary deserves to be integrated into the historiographical canon. This study discusses this scholarship against the backdrop of present-day global labour history. In pointing to some of its area-, time- and context-specific characteristics, the study aims to contribute to a global dialogue in labour history that is sensitive to and critically appreciative of different historiographical trajectories and traditions across world regions.

The art of link-making in global labour history: subaltern, feminist and Eastern European contributions

Abstract Benefiting from the ‘global’ and ‘trans-national’ turns in the larger historiography, labour historians in the past two decades have greatly expanded their geographical scope, developed new methodologies, refashioned categories of analysis and largely abandoned teleological assumptions. In this context, the history of labour in Eastern Europe still constitutes one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, even though the region attracted an array of excellent labour historians both before and after the collapse of state socialism in 1989/91. This introduction to the Dossier on labour history and Eastern Europe reflects on the reasons for the apparent mismatch between Eastern European labour history and the new global labour history. It does so by situating this large question within a discussion of some more or less successful examples of how scholarship on a particular theme in labour history has contributed or attempted to contribute to the conceptual and empirical enlargement of labour history in the past few decades. Focusing on particular aspects of the debates on class analysis, the peasant question, the history of gender, and the history of labour under state socialism, the authors address key questions in the international development of the history of labour. These questions, the authors argue, are at the core of the contributions on Eastern Europe assembled in the Dossier. Situating the four historiographical studies contained in the Dossier in this larger context, the introduction discusses the varied reception of scholarship on aspects of the history of labour emerging in and from different contexts and asks how this scholarship has contributed or might contribute to the development of a more inclusive global labour history.

Frauen- und Geschlechterstudien im höheren Bildungswesen in Zentraleuropa und im postsowjetischen Raum Teil 2: AkteurInnen und Interessen im Prozess der Institutionalisierung

Seit dem politischen Systemwechsel von / stellen Zentralosteuropa und der postsowjetische Raum – zu letzterem zählen die Nachfolgestaaten der Sowjetunion in Europa und Asien – einen ausgesprochenen Wachstumsmarkt für Frauenund Geschlechterstudien dar. Wohin auch der Blick richtet : die Frauenund Geschlechterstudien sind in der einen oder anderen Weise präsent. Zahlreiche Kurse mit diesem Schwerpunkt werden abgehalten, universitäre Programme, Schwerpunkte und Studiengänge in Geschlechterwissenschaften haben sich an einer beachtlichen Reihe von Hochschulen (mehr oder weniger) fest etabliert, weitere Expansion steht auf der Tagesordnung. In einigen Ländern spielen auch nicht-universitäre Einrichtungen und Initiativen eine Rolle für die ‚Verbreitung des Wortes‘. Wie begrenzt und/oder gefährdet diese Entwicklungen auch sein mögen, die Zeit seit dem Ende des „Staatssozialismus“ lässt sich doch als Epoche des Siegeszuges der Frauenund Geschlechterstudien im zentralosteuropäisch/postsowjetischen Raum begreifen.

Women’s and Gender Studies in a Global-Local Perspective: Developing the Frame

Endeavors to invent and institutionalize Women’s and Gender Studies in the academy in the last few decades have been based from the onset on (among others) two fundamental claims. First, unfolding education and writing in Women’s and Gender Studies have been informed by the insight that it is the partiality of social critique and critical scholarly analysis which lies at the heart of the persistent invisibility of gender and gender-related hierarchy and asymmetry in culture and society. Women’s Studies (in part) grew from a critique of gender-blind, masculinist conceptualizations of a number of fundamental categories such as the subject (as a fixed and universal category, e.g. once it came to struggles over citizenship), class (e.g. class struggle), nation (e.g. national liberation projects). This insight, by implication, went along with a promise: namely that paying attention to gender in the academy and in social struggle would result in more inclusive analytical perspectives and in more inclusive forms of social critique. The second and related fundamental assertion is linked to a critique of how the production of knowledge has been institutionalized in the academy. Gender, it was claimed early on, was an important category of analysis beyond time and space, in all spheres of culture and society. Consequently, Women’s and Gender Studies were imagined and conceptualized as fundamentally transgressing disciplinary boundaries. This implied a critique of dominant patterns of compartmentalization and departmentalization in the academy.