The History of Women’s Work Starts and Continues with the Labor Movement
by Leah E. Simon
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA student at New York University
A review of the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition Women’s Work (July 21, 2023 — July 7, 2024)
From the earliest days of computer programming to contemporary book scanning practices, and amidst the evolution of voice-print technology, invisibilized labor continues to shape the archival tools and technologies we use today. As archivists, we gather to shape the past in the present and disinter the disappeared from historical records. Exhibitions like this year’s New-York Historical Society’s Women’s Work are crucial ‘ways in’ to interrogating the powers and terms of obfuscation at play in our institutions of public memory.
Along with this exhibition review, I will examine a concurrent battle in women’s labor organizing taking place here in New York City, a battle that I feel the exhibit would have benefited greatly from centering — namely, the Ain’t I A Woman Campaign that began in lower Manhattan. Among other questions, this review aims to investigate: What tensions and obligations arise in excavating histories of labor, of marginality, and of women’s work for exhibition? What is the role of history-keeping and historical societies in power struggle and movement work? What kinds of women’s work finds itself more frequently eclipsed than others in our understanding of our regional past, present, and future, particularly in New York City, and why?
Reminding ourselves of the larger social histories of women’s work can offer an avenue to explore the notion of ubiquity and labor politics. “Women’s work is everywhere”, the 2023 curatorial team proffers. In the exhibition, women’s labor achievements loom like a metonym for social progress — look how far we have come, the exhibit seems to suggest. Organized by the Center for Women’s History’s staff, the exhibition “seeks to demonstrate that women’s work has been essential to American society and is, therefore, inherently political.” Notably, the 2023 exhibition opens with a celebration of the New York State’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, a bill that passed after seven local unions in New York City founded the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) on June 3, 1900. Most of its members were young immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe. Many of them were Jewish. The ILGWU cemented its power with two large strikes in New York City.
Though the history of union work is important in celebrating past wins, union labor is often siloed into the early industrial era of American history — but it lives on in its contemporary struggle, a footnote absent from this exhibition. While visited in flickers, what struck me as absent from Women’s Work was a systemic and materialist analysis of the structural conditions that place women in power struggles in the first place. What, say, of the U.S. Palmer Raids, conducted in November 1919 and January 1920, a mere two decades or so following the inroads made by the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights? It was under President Woodrow Wilson’s administration that thousands of women workers were captured and arrested as suspected socialists, communists, and especially anarchists, and deported back to Eastern Europe. The truncation of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, exemplified by the elision and erasure of historical context and ongoing conditions of systemic assault facing workers, I found to be a preventable oversight.
Arguably, women’s work in this exhibition defies categorization, not so much by its neoliberal pluralism as by framing the timeline of women’s labor as a stolid progression of ubiquitous victories towards the present. This is a problem. Most labor historians will note that women’s work is far from parading into progress, but its progress is strikingly warped, contending with persistent assaults by federal institutions and various forms of late-stage capitalism. These assaults, as we know, are ongoing.
To the curators, I would love to propose: what could an exhibition on women’s work offer that centers the histories of obstruction, loss, and assault, which were and are being carried out upon the U.S. labor movement, as opposed to selected victories? How could a nuanced reflection on why our evolving modern society pits itself against women’s work, and the workers movement writ large, offer a more critical civic literacy to inform archival activism? Absent from the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition, ironically, was a robust Marxist analysis of the conditions of 20th century America: the conditions for women’s work and the various choreographies of obstruction to safety, dignity, and security that continue to bear down on women’s work today. While the exhibition included historical context, it failed to rise to the occasion of a systemic analysis of power that ties into our present.
Take, for instance, 119SEIU. 1199, The National Health Care Workers’ Union, was an American labor union founded as the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union-District 1199 by Leon J. Davis in 1932 for pharmacists in New York City. More than 100,000 home care workers are currently unionized by 1199SEIU; membership comprises many elderly women, immigrant women, and women workers most marginalized from New York’s social welfare infrastructure. Currently, under the auspices of 1199SEIU and the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC), women — largely women of color — are forced to work egregious hours. This labor is unpaid, invisibilized, and exploited in New York City — women’s work.
As a 2021 report titled The Nonprofit War on Workers details, CPC homecare workers are expected to be on-call during 24-hour shifts, despite only being paid for 13 hours of work. New York Assembly Member Ron Kim (D-Flushing) recently echoed advocates’ estimates that CPC owes its employees as much as $90 million dollars in withheld compensation. As I walked the halls of the New-York Historical Society, I was discomfited to recognize the name of the law firm Hogan Lovells, the lawyers for CPC, amidst the donors that sponsored the exhibition. CPC employees have filed numerous lawsuits against Hogan Lovells over the last decade, protesting the lack of overtime pay and 24-hour shifts. Most recently in 2019, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that employers must pay all 24 hours of wages unless a worker gets 5 hours of continuous sleep. However, after workers sued CPC, 1199SEIU changed the contract to force workers into mandatory arbitration, blocking them from enforcing the law. The law is rampantly violated for workers in New York City. A bill to outlaw the practice is currently in the City Council titled the No More 24 Act (Intro 175); however, the Speaker of the City Council, Adrienne Adams, continues to block efforts in protecting women workers by refusing to bring the bill to a vote.
“Oftentimes, big corporations now, as well as big nonprofits, when they scale to such a large size, they have the means to use the private court space to suppress workers’ rights, whether it’s CPC, whether it’s DoorDash, whether it’s Amazon … oftentimes they deploy similar tactics to suppress workers’ right to recourse,” Assemblymember Kim said. “Especially with this particular case, the CPC being the third largest provider in the state and one of the largest nonprofits in the state. What they’re doing in the independent courtroom can have a large, statewide impact on how other workers’ rights are impacted.”
When walking the halls of the exhibit, there was surprisingly scarce mention of women’s role in the American labor movement, and when it was mentioned, critical reflections on histories of corruption and worker exploitation between unions and city leadership was absent. I find this trend of stripping politics from the deep social and infrastructural dimensions of women’s work quite sinister, particularly when presented in the neoliberal museum space.
In the exhibition, the Center for Women’s History showcases approximately 45 objects from New-York Historical Society’s own museum and library collections to demonstrate how “women’s work” defies categorization. This was disheartening as it is precisely the conditions of struggle that, I would argue, categorize women’s work as such.
To conclude, while a fine exhibition on its own merit, I feel that it is our civic duty as archivists, historians, and curators to take what initiatives we can to present our research as tools for civil engagement. Exhibiting radical history must challenge and act as a provocation to the material conditions in our world and the world being made. Exhibitions ought not simply parade progress without tying conditions of repression from the past to their roots and evolution in the present. While perhaps not a ubiquitous and shared vision in museum culture, it is a responsibility that I hold dear. In preparing for this review, I took some time to explore the New-York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History and their digital resource platform, including watching a nine-minute segment narrated by actor Meryl Streep titled “We Rise.”
What struck me most about the ethos of the film was its misleading optimism — its imbued feeling that struggle beats forward towards progress. “Two out of three New Yorkers live in tenements,” the film states over images from the past. “Many buildings are dark, overcrowded and disease infested.” Why? Why, I found myself wondering, does the museum not ask what preconditions must occur in American society that “allowed for this to happen.” Is it because this question would invite an interrogation of the present, where those conditions continue to occur, disrupting a positive linear history of class struggle? Tenements, far from the nostalgia of a museum that shares the name, are a very present reality for many New Yorkers in downtown Manhattan. According to Columbia University’s report The State of Poverty and Disadvantage in New York City in 2020, roughly one in four Asian New Yorkers lived in poverty in 2020, double the poverty rate for white New Yorkers. In addition, 29 percent of adults and 38 percent of children struggle to afford food, housing, and utility payments. This report “illustrates what we’ve seen across our city — that too many people are struggling, and poverty remains persistent and pervasive.” Why do we sentimentalize struggle, strife, and striking so as to separate it neatly from our present? As an archivist, I wish for more from the museum space. I wish for more disruption and more civic engagement that contextualizes the past hand in hand with our present rather than relegating it to mere disjointed episodes and indifferent to ongoing power struggles.
Bibliography
Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The State of Poverty and Disadvantage in New York City , 2022, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/610831a16c95260dbd68934a/t/6271982e38d6dd422dcb5eb7/1651611698070/PT_Annual2021_final.pdf
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Krichevsky, Sophie. “Homecare Workers Rally Against CPC.” Queens Chronicle , 20 Jan. 2022, https://www.qchron.com/editions/queenswide/homecare-workers-rally-against-cpc/article_28168697-1836-55d3-a713-f22585b76c94.html
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