International Labor and Working-Class History

Table of Contents - Volume 81 - 2012  

Thirty Years on from Women on the Line: Researching Gender and Work

Reflecting on Women on the Line: Continuities and Change in Women's Work

Miriam Glucksmanna1

a1 University of Essex

Historically there has been a variety of ways for academics to engage with working people or to combine activism with scholarship. Women on the Line represents a historically specific form of engagement that was open to western feminists at the height of second wave feminism in the 1970s.

Miriam Glucksmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. She has longstanding interests in work, employment and gender, especially restructuring, and connections between different forms of labour. Her first book was Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (1974). Since then she has published widely in the fields of gender and work, including Women on the Line (1982, 2009), Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain (1990), Cotton and Casuals; the gendered organisation of labour in time and space (2000), and the jointly edited A New Sociology of Work? (2005). She recently completed an extensive research programme on ‘Transformations of Work: New Frontiers, Shifting Boundaries, Changing Temporalities’ as an ESRC Professorial Fellow, and is currently funded by the European Research Council to research ‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour’. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Doctor of Stockholm University.