Abstract
This chapter focuses on the legacies of the 1919 International Labour Conference that defined Western industrial male workers as the norm, with woman distinguished by maternity and family labour. It considers four legacies: promotion of labour standards; co-presence of cultures of protection addressing sexuality and the civilising mission; construction of geographical difference exemplified by women in the Global South; and privileging of industrial employment as work over home-based and informal labour. Standards established at the first International Labour Conference set the framework for future International Labour Organization (ILO) instruments. Where once care and household labour appeared as women’s obligations that required fewer hours of wage work to accommodate, a century later the ILO determined that carework, paid as well as unpaid, was essential for obtaining ‘decent work’.
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Notes
- 1.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920): 173.
- 2.
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012); V. Spike Peterson, “Rewriting (Global) Political Economy as Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual (Foucauldian) Economies,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4, no. 1 (2002): 1–30; and Alessandra Pescarolo, “Productive and Reproductive Work: Uses and Abuses of an Old Dichotomy,” in What Is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present, eds. Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018): 114–138.
- 3.
This chapter builds upon argument presented in Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). On ILO, Marcel van der Linden, “The International Labor Organization, 1919–2019: An Appraisal,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16, no. 2 (2019): 11–41. See also Daniel Maul, The International Labour Organization: 100 Years of Global Social Policy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Jasmien Van Daele, “Survey: The International Labour Organization (ILO) in Past and Present Research,” International Review of Social History 53, no. 3 (2008): 485–511; Gerry Rodgers, Eddy Lee Sweptson, and Jasmien Van Daele, The ILO and The Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Carol Riegelman Lubin and Anne Winslow, Social Justice for Women: The International Labor Organization and Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990).
- 4.
Edward C. Lorenz, Defining Global Justice: The History of U.S. International Labor Standards Policy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001).
- 5.
Seamen conventions in the interwar years, at NORMLEX Conventions, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12000:::NO:::; recommendation on hours of work for hotels, theatres, hospitals, at NORMLEX Recommendations, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12010:::NO:::.
- 6.
Susan Zimmermann, “Night Work for White Women and Bonded Labour for ‘Native’ Women? Contentious Traditions and the Globalization of Gender-Specific Labour Protection and Legal Equality Politics, 1926 to 1939,” in New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History, eds. Sara L. Kimble and Marion Röwekamp (New York: Routledge, 2017): 394–427; Susan Zimmermann, “‘Special Circumstances’ in Geneva: The ILO and the World of Non-metropolitan Labour in the Interwar Years,” in ILO Histories: Essays on the International Labour Organization and Its Impact on the World During the Twentieth Century, eds. Jasmien Van Daele, Magaly Rodrígues García, Geert Van Goethem, and Marcel van der Linden (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010): 221–250; and Susan Zimmermann, “Globalizing Gendered Labour Policy: International Labour Standards and the Global South, 1919–1947,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, eds. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann (Leiden and Geneva: Brill and the ILO, 2018): 227–254.
- 7.
C001—Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 1), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312146:NO.
- 8.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–43.
- 9.
Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Ch. 4.
- 10.
Director-General Guy Ryder quoted in http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/history/centenary/WCMS_480301/lang--en/index.htm.
- 11.
Reiner Tosstorff, “The International Trade-Union Movement and the Founding of the International Labour Organization,” International Review of Social History 50, no. 3 (2005): 399–433.
- 12.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 13.
- 13.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, “‘The Other ILO Founders’: 1919 and Its Legacies,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, eds. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann (Leiden and Geneva: Brill and the ILO, 2018): 27–49.
- 14.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004): 3–4.
- 15.
Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Ch. 1; Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders’”; Dorothy Sue Cobble, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919,” Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (2014): 1052–1085; Lara Vapnek, “The 1919 International Congress of Working Women: Transnational Debates on the ‘Woman Worker,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 1 (2014): 160–184.
- 16.
The Constitution of the ILO (9 October 1946), Instrument adopted by the General Conference of the International Labor Organization at Montreal October 9, 1946, 193, International Labour Organization Archives, Geneva (ILOA).
- 17.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 39.
- 18.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference, Thirteenth Session (Geneva: ILO, 1929): 105.
- 19.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler, and Susan Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
- 20.
“Stenographic Report of the ICWW, Afternoon Session, November 5, 1919,” 6, International Federation of Working Women (IFWW), Records, 1919–1923, Folder 3, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- 21.
“Stenographic Report of the ICWW, October 30”: 33.
- 22.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 103.
- 23.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 103, 106.
- 24.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 105; Nancy Woloch, A Class by Herself: Protection Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (New York: Oxford, 2015): 54–84.
- 25.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 103–104.
- 26.
For example, “Memorandum from Open Door to Governing Body,” January 1931, D601/2010/02/4/1, International Labour Organization Archives (ILOA), Geneva.
- 27.
Committee on Revision of Night Work (Women) Convention, Meeting 4, June 24, 3 p.m., ILC 31st Session, San Francisco: IV/1-3, ILC 31-501-01, ILOA.
- 28.
Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders.”
- 29.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 172–174. Sweden’s Kerstin Hesselgren, a factory inspector and labour feminist, spoke in favour of her government’s preference for four weeks but, as Cobble suggests, very weakly (Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders”: 40).
- 30.
- 31.
International Labour Organization, “The International Protection of Women Workers,” Studies and Reports, Series I, No. 1 (Geneva: ILO, 15 October 1921): 9; Cobble, “The Other ILO Founders.”
- 32.
- 33.
Eileen Boris, “‘No Right to Layettes or Nursing Time’: Maternity Leave and the Question of US Exceptionalism,” in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): 171–193.
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 50–51, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312150:NO, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312151:NO.
- 37.
- 38.
- 39.
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- 40.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 102.
- 41.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 97.
- 42.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 60; League of Nations, Minutes of the Commission on Hours of Labour (Geneva: ILO, 1923): 10.
- 43.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 60, 223.
- 44.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 120–121.
- 45.
League of Nations, Minutes of the Commission on Hours of Labour: 38.
- 46.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 121.
- 47.
Minimum Wage-Fixing Machinery Convention, 1928 (No. 26), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312171:NO; Elisabeth Prügl, The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 40–48; and Vivien Hart, Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers, and the Minimum Wage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- 48.
Paula Määttä, The ILO Principle of Equal Pay and Implementation (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2008): 89–92.
- 49.
Reply of Malta, 5, IC 17-2-171-1, Jacket 3, ILOA; Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Ch. 5.
- 50.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 98–99.
- 51.
- 52.
- 53.
Migration (Protection of Females at Sea) Recommendation, 1926 (No. 26), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12100:16120096205025::NO::P12100_SHOW_TEXT:Y:, compared to Migrant Workers (Supplementary Provisions) Convention, 1975 (No. 143), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312288:NO.
- 54.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 165, 167.
- 55.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 162.
- 56.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 159.
- 57.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 102, 169.
- 58.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 93.
- 59.
The Minimum Age (Industry) Convention (No. 5), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312150:NO, and Night Work of Young Persons (Industry) Convention (No. 6), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312151:NO.
- 60.
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting: 175.
- 61.
R12, “Maternity Protection (Agriculture) Recommendation,” 1921, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312350:NO; R13, “Night Work of Women (Agriculture) Recommendation,” 1921, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:12100:P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312351:NO.
- 62.
Article 7, Convention No. 100 at http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C100.
- 63.
- 64.
International Labour Conference, Women Workers in a Changing World. Report VI (1) (Geneva: ILO, 1963).
- 65.
Eileen Boris and Jennifer N. Fish, “‘Slaves No More’: Making Global Labor Standards for Domestic Workers,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 2 (2014): 411–443.
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Boris, Eileen, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Boris, Eileen, and Jennifer N. Fish, “‘Slaves No More’: Making Global Labor Standards for Domestic Workers,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 2 (2014): 411–443.
Cobble, Dorothy Sue, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Cobble, Dorothy Sue, “A Higher ‘Standard of Life’ for the World: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919,” Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (2014): 1052–1085.
Cobble, Dorothy Sue, “‘The Other ILO Founders’: 1919 and Its Legacies,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, eds. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann (Leiden and Geneva: Brill and the ILO, 2018): 27–49.
Federici, Silvia, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–43.
Hart, Vivien, Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers, and the Minimum Wage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
International Labour Conference, Women Workers in a Changing World. Report VI (1) (Geneva: ILO, 1963).
International Labour Organization, “The International Protection of Women Workers,” Studies and Reports, Series I, No. 1 (Geneva: ILO, 15 October 1921).
League of Nations, International Labour Conference: First Annual Meeting (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920).
League of Nations, Minutes of the Commission on Hours of Labour (Geneva: ILO, 1923).
League of Nations, International Labour Conference, Thirteenth Session (Geneva: ILO, 1929).
Lorenz, Edward C., Defining Global Justice: The History of U.S. International Labor Standards Policy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001).
Lubin, Carol Riegelman, and Anne Winslow, Social Justice for Women: The International Labor Organization and Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).
Määttä, Paula, The ILO Principle of Equal Pay and Implementation (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2008).
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NORMLEX Conventions. 2019–, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12000:::NO:::.
NORMLEX Recommendations. 2019–, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:12010:::NO:::.
Pescarolo, Alessandra, “Productive and Reproductive Work: Uses and Abuses of an Old Dichotomy,” in What Is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present, eds. Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018): 114–138.
Peterson, V. Spike, “Rewriting (Global) Political Economy as Reproductive, Productive, and Virtual (Foucauldian) Economies,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4, no. 1 (2002): 1–30.
Prügl, Elisabeth, The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political Economy of the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Rodgers, Gerry, Lee Sweptson, Eddy Lee, and Jasmien Van Daele, The ILO and The Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Anja Schüler, and Susan Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Tosstorff, Reiner, “The International Trade-Union Movement and the Founding of the International Labour Organization,” International Review of Social History 50, no. 3 (2005): 399–433.
Van Daele, Jasmien, “Survey: The International Labour Organization (ILO) in Past and Present Research,” International Review of Social History 53, no. 3 (2008): 485–511.
Van der Linden, Marcel, “The International Labor Organization, 1919–2019: An Appraisal,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16, no. 2 (2019): 11–41.
Vapnek, Lara, “The 1919 International Congress of Working Women: Transnational Debates on the ‘Woman Worker,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 1 (2014): 160–184.
Woloch, Nancy, A Class by Herself: Protection Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (New York: Oxford, 2015).
Zelizer, Viviana, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Zimmermann, Susan, “‘Special Circumstances’ in Geneva: The ILO and the World of Non-metropolitan Labour in the Interwar Years,” in ILO Histories: Essays on the International Labour Organization and Its Impact on the World During the Twentieth Century, eds. Jasmien Van Daele, Magaly Rodrígues García, Geert Van Goethem, and Marcel van der Linden (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010): 221–250.
Zimmermann, Susan, “Night Work for White Women and Bonded Labour for ‘Native’ Women? Contentious Traditions and the Globalization of Gender-Specific Labour Protection and Legal Equality Politics, 1926 to 1939,” in New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History, eds. Sara L. Kimble and Marion Röwekamp (New York: Routledge, 2017): 394–427.
Zimmermann, Susan, “Globalizing Gendered Labour Policy: International Labour Standards and the Global South, 1919–1947,” in Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present, eds. Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann (Leiden and Geneva: Brill and the ILO, 2018): 227–254.
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Boris, E. (2020). Woman’s Labours and the Definition of the Worker: Legacies of 1919. In: Bellucci, S., Weiss, H. (eds) The Internationalisation of the Labour Question. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28235-6_4
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