Abstract
This chapter will examine gender in international relations through the example of the International Labour Organisation (ILO).1 As in the previous chapter, we are interested here in the ideas, material conditions, and the role of the ILO itself in reflecting and shaping understandings of gender throughout its history. The ILO is an older organisation than the IPPF, established with the League of Nations in 1919. It began with forty-two members and presently has one hundred and sixty. Additionally, it is an international governmental organisation (IGO), unlike the IPPF which is an international non-governmental organisation (INGO). The ILO’s substantive concerns also are very different from those of the IPPF. While the IPPF is functionally concerned with family planning and population control, an issue which is of obvious importance to women and men, the ILO’s focus on labour seems less directly an issue which involves gendered understandings and practices. Yet, from its beginnings, the ILO has developed policies which quite explicitly recognise certain assumptions about the appropriate role of women and men in the family, labour force and society more generally.
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Jane Jenson, ‘The Talents of Women, the Skills of Men: Flexible Specialisation and Women’, in Stephen Wood (ed.), The Transformation of Work (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
R.W. Cox, ‘ILO: Limited Monarchy’, in R.W. Cox and H.K. Jacobson (eds), The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in International Organization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 102
David A. Morse, The Origin and Evolution of the ILO and its Role in the World Community (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1969), p. 6
G.A. Johnston, The International Labour Organisation: Its Work for Social and Economic Progress (London: Europa Publications, 1970), p. 5
Ernest Mahaim, ‘The Historical and Social Importance of International Labor Legislation’, in James T. Shotwell (ed.), The Origins of the International Labor Organization Vol. I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), pp. 3–6
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘The United States and the International Labor Organization, 1889–1934’, PhD Dissertation Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Massachusetts, August 1, 1960, pp. 7–8.
Antony Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 5–6; Johnston, The International Labour Organisation p. 6.
Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation, pp. 7–11; Johnston, The International Labour Organisation, p. 10; Sir Malcolm Delevingne, ‘The Pre-War History of International Labor Legislation’, in James T. Shotwell, The Origins of the International Labor Organization, pp. 29ff. See also John McMahon, The International Labour Organization’, in Evan Luard (ed.), The Evolution of International Organizations (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), pp. 178–9.
John Mainwaring, The International Labour Organization: A Canadian View (Ottawa: Labour Canada, 1986), p. 11; Alcock, History of the International Labour Organisation, p. 12. See also Moynihan, ‘The United States and the International Labor Organization’, pp. 13–14.
Robert W. Cox, ‘Labor and Hegemony’, International Organization 31(3), Summer 1977, p. 387 and passim. See also, R.W. Cox, ‘Labor and Hegemony: A Reply’, International Organization, 34(1), Winter 1980, passim; Moynihan, ‘The United States and the International Labor Organization’, p. 109.
Edward L. Morse, ‘The Westphalia System and Classical Statecraft’, in E.L. Morse, Modernization and the Transformation of Statecraft (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 28, 32–4.
Ibid., pp. 25–6; Mary Anderson and Mary N. Winslow, Woman at Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951), p. 125.
Bob Reinalda, ‘Women as Transnational Political Force in Europe’, Paper Prepared for the Inaugural Pan-European Conference of the EPCR Standing Group on International Relations, Heidelberg, Germany, 16–20 September, 1992, p. 7. See also Lubin and Winslow, Social Justice for Women, pp. 21–2, 30.
See Susan D. Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), chapter 5 and ILO, Special Protective Measures for Women and Equality of Opportunity and Treatment (ILO: Geneva, 1989), chapter 2.
Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), especially chapter 4
Jane Lewis, ‘The Working-Class Wife and Mother and State Intervention, 1870–1918’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 99–122
Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 142 and chapters 4 and 6 passim.
See also Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978)
Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War: The British Experience (London: Croom Helm, 1981)
Angela V. John, ‘Introduction’, in Angela V. John (ed.), Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800–1918 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Meta Zimmeck, ‘Jobs for Girls: the Expansion of Clerical Work for Women, 1850–1914’, in John, Unequal Opportunities.
Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Female Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 202.
See also Rosalind Petchesky, ‘Workers, Reproductive Hazards and the Politics of Protection: An Introduction’, Feminist Studies 5(2), Summer 1979, p. 240
Vilma R. Hunt; ‘A Brief History of Women Workers and Hazards in the Workplace’, Feminist Studies, 5(2), Summer 1979, p. 275.
See for example, Jane Lewis, Women in England, 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1984), pp. 17580 Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family p. 188
Ruth Frager,’ No Proper Deal: Women Workers and the Canadian Labour Movement 1870–1940’, in L. Briskin and L. Yanz (eds), Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1983), pp. 50–7.
Henri Fuss, Chief of the Unemployment, Employment and Migration Section, ILO, ‘Unemployment and Employment Among Women’, International Labour Review, 31 (4), 1035, p. 465.
Michael J. Wright, ‘Reproductive Hazards and “Protective” Discrimination’, Feminist Studies, 5(2), Summer 1979, p. 303. See also Carolyn Bell, ‘Implementing Safety and Health Regulations for Women in the Workplace’, in Ibid., p. 296 and Sandra Blakeslee, ‘Fathers linked to child defects’, The Globe and Mail, January 1, 1991, p. Al.
Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 49.
See also Sheena Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, The War and Social Change (New York: New American Library, 1987), pp. 9–10.
See also Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L.-R. Higonnet, ‘The Double Helix’, in Margaret Randolph Higonnet, et al., (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987)
Elisabeth Hagen and Jane Jenson, ‘Paradoxes and Promises: Work and Politics in the Postwar Years’, in J. Jenson, E. Hagen and C. Reddy (eds), Feminization of the Labor Force, Paradoxes and Promises (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Lucille G. Caron, ‘A Question of Basic Human Rights’, Women at Work, 1986 No. 2, p. 4.
Virginia Galt, ‘Unions urged to promote women’, The Globe and Mail February 8, 1993, p. A6.
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© 1994 Sandra Whitworth
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Whitworth, S. (1994). The International Labour Organisation. In: Feminism and International Relations. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23572-8_6
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