CULTURE'S LAST STAND? GENDER AND THE SEARCH FOR SYNTHESIS IN AMERICAN LABOR HISTORY.

This article examines the relationship of gender analysis to the search for synthesis in labor history. Since David Brody first articulated a discontent with the labor history of the 1970s, a seed of doubt has grown into a field of dismay about the lack of clarity, direction and ultimate explanations in the study of U.S. working people. The 1984 labor history conference at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb seemed only to highlight tensions within the field; in its aftermath commentators have tended to unify around culturalism. Initially, and perhaps erroneously employed as a descriptive shorthand for the most original currents in the field, the moniker is now most often employed as a term of abuse. Trust in a theory of patriarchy as the key to integrating gender relations into labor history is, indeed, widespread. Situating gendered labor history in larger relations to working-class cultural analysis, to be sure, is also to identify certain unresolved problems within the literature. For one, gendered labor history may be susceptible to the familiar bugaboo of the culturalists, the charge of romanticism. Another problem for a gendered history might derive from the very fruits of the trend towards discourse analysis.