Anglo-American Labor History at the AHA

Abstract

Of the three AHA sessions on working-class history we have been asked to report on, two were remarkably more successful than the third. One of those two, the session on "Working Class Political Culture" containing the especially important essay coauthored by Alan Dawley and Paul Faler, is discussed at length elsewhere.* Of the remaining two sessions, Paul and Thea Thompson's (Essex University, England) presentation of their oral history project on late Victorian and Edwardian England excelled. The panel on "Work and Industrial Discipline in Britain and America" did not. David Montgomery (Pittsburgh) chaired the session on Work-Time-Discipline and ably attempted to focus the panel on the ways Edward Thompson, in his influential article "Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism," has suggested industrial capitalism transformed pre-industrial work rhythms. The panel would, then, try to view this process in three different settings: Puerto Rico in the Great Depression: changing time-schedules and work patterns of American women in recent United States' history; leisure activities in the late Victorian working class outside London. However, not only did these papers' analysis fall short of Thompson's rigorous theoretical example, but the extended presentations did not leave time for comparative discussion. Montgomery summarized Thompson, tried to give a brief introduction to the other papers, and then discussed the methods adopted by American industrial workers to assert control over their working life. "Industrial time had created not spontaneous, universal obedience to the employers' values . . . :" rather "the stint" and the eight-hour day reflected the workers' concept of a rational, modern distribution of work and time. While Montgomery provided an overview, the rest of the papers failed to address themselves successfully to the theoretical implications of work and timediscipline. Blanca Silvestrini (University of Puerto Rico) spoke on "Work Patterns of Puerto Rican Women in the Rural Industries." Silvestrini presented some interesting material on the family economy of Puerto Rican workers in the 1930s and women's efforts to unionize and assert a public presence in their community, but she neglected to connect her argument with the larger historical debate on the relationship among women's work, their public role, and their power within the family. Similarly, Joanne Vanek (Queens College) in her discussion of "Time Schedules and Work Patterns of Married [American] Women," attacked the conventional assumption that labor-saving devices freed women to enter the workforce. The shift from women's paid labor inside the household (ie. piecework, boarders), she argued, to paid labor outside the household was achieved at the cost of less