This is an invaluable volume, expanding Latin American women's and
labor history in important thematic, methodological, and theoretical directions.
The authors explore the lives, struggles, and consciousness of urban working
women in Brazil, the Southern Cone, Guatemala, and Colombia. By and large, the
essays develop a nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender and
class in twentieth-century Latin America. They incorporate postmodern approaches
to historical analysis as well as the classic concerns of labor history with
material conditions, social relations, and working-class political
consciousness. The contributors examine the multiple meanings of discourse and
popular culture while insisting that it is indeed possible to recapture
women's experience in some measure. They generally move beyond the
dichotomy of celebrating women's heroism and denouncing sexism, instead
showing how solidarity between laboring women and men could be intimately
interwoven with male domination. Finally, several of the authors employ oral
history in sophisticated ways, demonstrating that how a story is told can be
just as important in shaping our understanding of history as the empirical
detail it may seem to offer us.