Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship KATHLEEN CANNINGTER 4 § BEYOND INSULARITY? § THE VANCE OF LABOR HISTORY AT THE TURN 9 THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY OLOGUE 2005 ‘Seis first guise this essay was part ofa forum on the future of labor history in ‘new millennium, The starting point of our discussion was a widely shared “sense that labor history had aged or become passé with the turn from social to " cattural history that shifted attention to meanings, rhetorics, and languages _ sehile seeming to efface the materiality at the core of labor history. Yet today few ‘semember that labor was one of the first arenas of social history to unleash and ‘exbrace cultural inquiry. Instead of being a recalcitrant backwater, the history ‘of work constituted a site of vibrant epistemological contention and cteativ- ‘=p In the Anglo-Saxon academy at least, the cultural turn thus marks the hey- ‘€2y of labor history rather than its demise. In Germany, by contrast the history ‘of work, industrial transformation, and class formation was viewed as exhaus- ‘ively researched by the late 1980s, so social historians turned to the thus far un- explored Biirgertum, thereby closing the book on labor history before it “went cultural” or began to explore gender. On both sides of the Atlantic however, ‘zansformations of geopolitics, symbolized in the “fall of the Berlin Wall,” ap- peared to alter the political resonances of work and workers, shifting attention ‘sway from struggles of clas to those of citizens, civil societies, and govern- ‘mentality. Fora plethora of reasons, some specific to respective national or aca- demic contexts, labor, as a distinct field of inquiry, seemed to vanish from [A somewhat different version ofthis essay appeared in the journal Traverse, 2000/2 ‘June 2000) under the ttle“Gender and the Languages of Labor History: An Overview” | thank Chronos Verlag, Zitich, for permission to publish it herein revised form. 2. See, for example, William H, Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language af Labor from the Ol Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983; Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp,eds., Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organiza sion, and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y, 1986); and Patrick Joyce, ed, The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987).‘graduate seminars, conference programs, and academic best-seller lists in the ‘course of the 19905. In this essay I take a critical approach to the notion of labor history's disap- pearance and to the litanies of loss that charted this absence, I point instead to the intriguing afterlife of labor history, namely a wave of studies on gender and labor that revitalized the study of work precisely at the point of its alleged de- line. Yet these new studies, which culminated in the essay collection Gender and ‘Class in Modern Europe, edited by Laura L, Frader and Sonya O. Rose and pub- lished in 1996, appeared to have little impact on laments about labor history's premature end. They were viewed instead as evidence of the vitality of women's history/gender history, which contrasted starkly with the impression of labor history as afield in demise. This esay thus illuminates another central concern of this volume, namely the difficulty of seeing gender as integral to, rather than separate from “mainstream” inquiries like labor history. show here that this was, the case even at a crucial historiographical juncture when gender provided the analytical tools for significant renovations of the study of labor, pushing on its boundaries and revising its keywords, while expanding its scope and relevance. $$$ [At the turn to the twenty-first century it seems that the once vital field of labor history may be relegated to the realm of legacy. One of the crowning achievements of the new social history of the 1960s, the English-language new labor history was driven by the desire to grasp “the authentic voices and au- thentic experiences of working people” that underlay the metahistories of class formations and class conflicts Some three decades of innovative scholarship and intensive debate followed the publication of E. P, Thompson's The Mak- ing of the English Working Class in 1963, during which the history of work, ‘workers’ politics, and workers’ cultures was at the center of many of the most interesting and fruitful debates in the wider field of social history. In the Ger- rman scholarly arena of the 1960s and 1970s, studies of labor, industrialization, urbanization, and social movements drove the rise of social science history, the hallmark of which was the analysis of structures and processes of social trans- formation. Yet the “authentic experiences” and everyday lives of German work- cers came to figure in German labor history only as an oppositional narrative of 2 Laura Levine Prader and Sonya O. Rose, eds, Gender anid Class in Modern Europe (ithaca, NY, 1996) 5. Lenard R.Berlanstin, introduction to Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse ‘and Class Analysis, ed. Berlanstein (Urbana I, 1993). 124 BODIES, THE SOCIAL & LABOR “Altagshistoriker, whose anthropolo i en)