Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association

Abstract

America. She stressed the importance of placing women's migration in the context of family and economic conditions. Seeking to maximize their families' economic positions, women migrated under different circumstances. Decisions to migrate were shaped by labor force segregation in the destination cities, and by the possible existence of kin or ethnic networks. Women's family roles and obligations were the key determinants of their migration decisions. Louise Tilly (New School for Social Research) urged a sensitivity to the difficulty in using "identity" as a category in historical analysis and suggested that the emerging working-class culture discussed by Locke applied to women at only one point in their life cycles. She also pointed out that varied places of origin may have had a dramatic effect on the experiences of migrant women. In her comments, Donna Gabaccia (Mercy College) stressed the importance of tying together "women adrift" and "family economy" approaches to the experiences of working-class women. She suggested that economic and cultural conditions are difficult to separate when studying immigrant women and recommended a comparative approach to the history of female migration.These sessions revealed the need to approach working-class life with a sensitivity to the many factors mediating class experience. The sessions borrowed analytic insights from other disciplines to make sense out of working-class experiences, stepping outside rigid definitions of labor history and narrow conceptions of class. These labor historians benefit from analyses of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and politics. Yet the various sessions were seldom talking to one another. These varied and useful approaches have eroded the unity of labor history and, while all would agree that something links the experiences of working-class people, it is difficult to blend the diverging approaches into a comprehensive understanding of working-class experience. While these papers offer rich analyses of worker life and protest, they lack an adequate theoretical tie, making sense out of what makes these different cases part of the same history, labor history.