A little while ago I stumbled across a great page on the history of Women and the Labor Movement [TheHistoryNet], including the formative role that women played in labor radicalism (organized industrial work stoppages were going on in Lowell, Massachussetts as early as the 1820s) and the way that the mainstream, AFL-line labor movement conspired with the Progressive regulation movement to cut women out of the labor force in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries through protective labor restrictions which discriminated against women and by excluding women from the mainstream wing of the labor movement, which negotiated itself into a powerful alliance with the bosses and the government (this move, conveniently, induced greater labor shortages and drove up profits for their own all-male membership).

We think of unions as primarily male institutions these days, responding to the problems faced by men in industrial labor, but that neglects the fact that women have always been the first victims of industrialization (through textile mills and garment sweatshops, for example; this is still happening today in Mexico, Indonesia, immigrant communities in Los Angeles, etc.) and therefore had some of the first and strongest incentive to organize. The male-dominated condition of the labor movement and the industrial workforce today is precisely because of to the discriminatory laws that a powerful coalition of male mainstream union bosses, male corporate bosses, and male government officials managed to concoct during the labor struggles of the Gilded Age.

Of course, the ciritical role that women such as Sarah G. Bagley (a leading organizer in Lowell), Rose Schneiderman, Lucy Parsons, the female membership of the Knights of Labor, and innumerable others played in forming the labor movement, are often ignored in mainstream labor history. So are questions of women’s labor, the horrendous conditions imposed specifically on women under industrialization, and the struggles around the question of women’s labor and the anti-woman line that the mainstream male Left took in order to expand working men’s profits at the expense of working women’s (much like they used the racism and nativism of the post-Reconstruction era to exclude Blacks, Chinese-Americans, and poor immigrants from entering into unionized segments of the industrial workforce, thus protecting the profits of American-born white workers at the expense of all other workers). All of this isn’t too surprising, when we consider that the collective consciousness of the labor movement and labor history continues to be defined primarily by male organizers who aligned with the sexist AFL line and supported the discriminatory protective labor regulations that cut women out of the work force.

It’s also worth noting a couple of points about the relationship of all of this to feminism.

1. This unholy male supremacist alliance between mainstream male unions, male corporate bosses and Progressive regulation activists, emerged–like many other anti-woman alliances–during the post-Reconstruction period up to the 1920s, which happens to be more or less the same time as the peak of the struggle for women’s citizenship (with women’s suffrage finally being constitutionally protected in 1920). We may thus add it to the list of anti-woman institutions forming the backlash against First Wave feminism, including such illustrious company as Freudian psychoanalysis, the criminalization of abortion across the Western world, the flourishing of violent rape-based pornography in Victorian cities, and the AMA‘s efforts to seize control of women’s reproductive medicine away from midwives and other women into the hands of male surgeons.

2. The most effective forces in fighting the abuses inflicted on women laborers were organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization allying women of across social classes around the abuse specifically faced by women in the industrial workplace. The WTUL’s organizing efforts galvanized general strikes and other massive actions which eventually helped massively reform the horrendous sweatshop conditions faced by many garment workers (virtually all female) in New York. Not to be monomaniacal or anything, but once again organizing uniting all women on behalf of women (i.e., feminist organizing) was the most effective force in fighting patriarchal power.

She-Net has re-launched, with forums, a network of feminist websites, and feminist-oriented clothing, books, music, and movies [feminist media watch].

A group of women in the rural village Turkey of Sirt have garnered international media attention through enacting a real-life Lysistrata: they are striking from sex with their husbands to demand improvements to the city’s antiquated water system [Salon]. Since the boys were not the ones who have to hike miles out to the fountain, don’t have to wait in endless lines to collect water from the trickling fountain, don’t have to haul it home, and don’t have to be responsible for most of the household washing, the boys had not been doing much of anything to get the system fixed. Since the strike began, they have suddenly decided it might be a good idea to petition the municipal government for it to be fixed and have even offered to work on it themselves if the government will get them the parts.

Eye-roller for the day: Our women are right to protest, but we’re the ones who are suffering, grumbled Ibrahim Sari to the Milliyet newspaper. Poor boys!

I would like to point out that not only is The Feminist Blog a rad weblog publishing feminist news content every day, but Katilinne also nicely linked to Geekery Today after I sent her some fan mail. And, hey, The Weblog Review gave it a 4 out of 5. Give it a read every now and then.

Read the rest of The Feminist Blog Rocks …

SelectSmart has often had fun little political ideology tests that place you somewhere within the good old domains of conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. But they never had one for assessing feminist ideologies. So, I decided to make one. The result: the nifty little What Type of Feminist Are You? selector. It currently does its best to rank your affinity for radical feminism, socialist feminism, anarcha-feminism, liberal feminism, eco-feminism, libertarian feminism, womanism, girly "femme-inism," Amazon feminism, and anti-feminism.

It has some problems. For one SelectSmart only lets you put in 24 questions, and as a result I don’t have enough questions to distinguish some of the kinds of feminism. Also, SelectSmart’s methods of scoring are kind of limited. For example, I have a question "A free market economy benefits both women and men," meant to distinguish between libertarian feminists and radical feminists, socialist feminists, and anarcha-feminists, and indifferent to liberal feminists, Amazon feminists, etc. But I can only say what a question scores in favor of, not what it scores against, so somebody who disagrees that "A free market economy benefits both women and men" is marked as being equally likely to be liberal, radical, socialist, womanist, etc. … even though they are actually much more likely to be radical or socialist. Because of the problems with SelectSmart, I may end up eventually creating another survey, either with CGI programming on eskimo or with another surveying service.