Working mothers: Seamstresses' labor struggles in Argentina, 1936-1942

Abstract

This article studies the local dimension of women's collective action during the 1930s in Tucumán, a city in northern Argentina. It follows multiple simultaneous trajectories: seamstresses belonging to two different unions, state agents, Catholic militants, and male union leaders. The wide range of components in the experience of female workers prevents them from being treated as a homogeneous group. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the meanings given by all these actors, but especially the women, to their work and their rights as workers and how social, policical, and religious factors influenced a gendered labor conflict. To find these meanings, I shall describe and analyze two strikes (1936 and 1942) declared by seamstresses who worked at home or sewed for third parties. Those conflicts were led by women and shaped by class disputes, tensions between gender representations, exploitation, religion, and also the State, the Catholic Church, the experience of the law, and the consolidation of a culture of rights. I am interested in exploring how these factors shaped the experience of these women and I intend to read the evidence as a function of patterns of social and economic relations within the universe of labor and the changes that took place in the regulation of home‐based work in Argentina.