Work, sewing and women's labor struggle in Argentina during the ?30s

FERNÁNDEZ DE ULLIVARRI, MARIA; CROSS, CECILIA

Paris

Congreso; 2nd Congrès de l?ELHN; 2017

Association Française pour l?Histoire des Mondes du Travail

This proposal is part of a wider research proyect about the production of poor women as social subjects in time of economic crisis in Argentina. In this paper we will analyze only a portion of women with a particular job: home sewing, but taking into account the experience of poor women in general.Many of the forms of female labor experience were associated with home-based work. Underreporting of women´s work was constant because of the categorization as "complementary work" or "family support." This invisibility was also determined by the spaces where many women carried out their tasks: home. Here women were supposed to be able to sustain their role in social reproduction and earn income through an extension of their "natural functions". However, home-based work was far from constituting a panacea. Thought of as the outer department of the factory, manufacture, or of the big store, this type of task was a difficult form of female labor. And sewing was one of the most common activities of home as location of production.In this paper the questions aim to explore the forms of the female workers´ experience in the labor world of Argentina, especially in home sewing. In order to find some answers we will stop in the analysis of two strikes (1936-1942) held by seamstresses. Conflicts were hampered by class disputes, tensions between gender representations, the dispute with male trade unions, exploitation, prejudice, religion, and also the State, Church and their social organizations, the experience of the law and the consolidation of a culture of rights. In this convoluted plot, we are interested in the analysis of how these factors together with relationships, discourses and representations shaped the experience of these women. We also ask how women understood their role as workers, how they dealt with domestic spaces as work places and how they constructed themselves as social subjects. At the end, our approach seeks to problematize classical distinction such as public-private sphere, paid-unpaid work, often considered as self-contained areas, mainly because these ?dichotomies? did not help to interpret the evidence we have recollected