New Unionism at the Grassroots: The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Rochester,New York, 1914–29

Labor movements have always found it difficult to reveal and transform the social relations that constitute markets. The growing transnational movements of goods, capital, and services in themselves have therefore not triggered closer trade union cooperation across borders. Transnational collective action also requires conscious choices and a mutual understanding that solidarity across borders is warranted. For this reason, this special issue of Labor History assesses the role that politicization processes play in triggering transnational union action.     

Structural conflict and the Farmworker: Norfolk, 1900–1920

In Britain the farm labourer has presented a severe organisational problem to the trade union organiser and the socialist agitator: a phenomenon which has been explained, conventionally, by different versions of the ‘idiocy of rural life” theory. A general orthodoxy has emerged to the effect that the farmworker is acquiescent in his bondage. In the following article this orthodoxy is questioned. It is shown that in Norfolk, between 1900 and 1920, there was a certain kind of conflict on the farm which went on beneath the apparently calm and ordered relationships of what has been categorised as a paternal and deferential society. Behind the show of deference lay a world in which conflict was potentially endemic: conflict which derived from the simple fact, clouded by much modern sociology, that the relationship between master and man was one of exploitation. Those tensions which exist in any work relationship were present and manifested themselves in struggle: over, for example, wages, hours and job definition. Such struggle was particularly likely at those times of the year (which were more numerous than is commonly realised) when withdrawal of labour could cause considerable difficulty to the farmer.     

A Radical in Retirement: Clara Collet, 1920–1948 1

The subject of this article is a neglected period in the life of the prominent feminist social investigator, Clara Collet (1860–1948). The article establishes a narrative account of Collet’s life in retirement from primary and secondary sources, which then provides a context for an evaluation of the most notable political ideas found in her later texts. Some Colletian writings from before 1920 are also discussed, partly because previous Collet scholarship has neglected her connections with the Women’s Freedom League and the feminist wing of the Labour movement during her middle‐age years. Like many progressives of her vintage, Collet’s political opinions were an amalgam of liberal and socialist ideas, and the article also makes connections between her views and wider debates within intellectual history, for example, the ‘New Liberalism’ and ‘new feminism’ debates. The article concludes that Collet’s political opinions during her old age were in many ways more radical than those she had expressed during the earlier stages of her lengthy career.     

Partisan players: sport,working-class culture,and the labour movement in South Wales 1920–1939

This article argues against the prevalent notion that sport was insignificant to inter-war Welsh labour by showing that it was in fact a ‘vital area of interest’ for local activists associated with leftist organisations. In South Wales, numerous sporting opportunities provided by the local labour movement were taken up with notable enthusiasm by local workers. It is demonstrated that this represented a ‘vibrant attempt to forge a coherent alternative to mainstream sporting activity by fusing it with political allegiance’ and that sport became ‘an articulation of working class self-awareness … [and] a mechanism through which working class desires and visions could be expressed’.     

Commodity relations and class formation in the Zimbabwean countryside, 1898–1920

By disaggregating the peasantry, this article seeks to explain the variety of experience uncovered by previous local studies of the Zimbabwean countryside. A combination of those pockets of pre‐colonial accumulation which had survived the violence of the 1890s, and the productive reinvestment of income earned in wage labour, gave rise to a distinctive pattern of rural differentiation. By the start of the 1920s a class of small farmers had emerged.     

A Transnational Project? Women and Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia, 1890–1945

This article presents a broad overview of the gendered regimes which shaped the development of social scientific knowledge in Australia, and the position of women within the field, from 1890 to 1945. It particularly explores the local desire to emulate developments in Europe and the United States. Australian women were prominent in early ‘amateur’ social science, which was strongly linked to social reforming activities. However, the social sciences developed exceedingly slowly within the Australian academy and rather continued to be sustained largely by the social reform movement. The continuing lack of formal institutionalisation, well into the twentieth century, provided considerable scope for some (privileged) women to create themselves as social scientific experts. Indeed, it was largely the interests of women social reformers who eventually drove professionalisation of the social sciences from the 1930s. Nevertheless, when professionalisation and institutionalisation did finally come in the 1940s, Australia followed remarkably similar patterns to those seen in the United States and United Kingdom nearly 50 years earlier. Women were largely regulated to the lower‐status, applied, feminine field of social work while men took over the new and more prestigious academic arena.     

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACT

During the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.