Book Contents
Introduction: Mapping the Garment Industry
In the introductory chapter I give a historical overview of the garment industry particularly focusing on Paris and New York as its two main urban centres in the first half of the twentieth century. I further discuss the importance of women workers’ autobiographical narratives in writing counter-histories of the labour movement in general and the garment industry in particular.
Chapter 1: A Narrative Approach to Archival Research
In this chapter I retrace paths of narrative sensibility within the archive particularly focusing on the questions of how the archive is configured in the context of social sciences and on how many ways there are for doing archival research. I address these questions drawing on my research experience of working in the two archives that this book draws on, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (BHVP) and the New York Public Library (NYPL), while also making references to a number of archives that relate to them. In this context the archive emerges as an assemblage of material and discursive entanglements, a process in becoming whose genealogies and histories need to be investigated so that its collections and documents can be mapped within a specific grid of intelligibility. Autobiographical practices and the force of narrative are important processes in this context as they create conditions of possibility for archival documents to be reassembled and archival traces to take up meaning.
Chapter 4: A Migrant Dressmaker and Labour Organiser in the US
In this chapter I look at institutional histories, discourses and ideologies revolving around women workers’ cultural lives and political activities in the first half of the twentieth century in the US. In doing this I sketch Rose Pesotta’s pen-portrait, drawing on her papers at the New York Public Library. Pesotta was an immigrant garment worker and an anarchist labour organizer, one of the few to climb the ILGWU hierarchy and serve as its vice-president for almost ten years. The chapter focuses on Pesotta’s mnemonic technologies as inscribed in her two published autobiographies as well as in her correspondence, diaries and creative writings.
Chapter 5: Aesthetics and Politics in Writing Memory
This chapter revolves around the aesthetics and politics of writing memory, particularly focusing on the seamstresses’ literary work. It brings together insights and paradigms from both sides of the Atlantic and looks at processes of symbolic transformation. In mapping women workers’ creative forces on an international plane, the chapter particularly considers the role of fiction and its blurring boundaries with autobiography. It further charts the cultural and sexual politics of the seamstresses’ intellectual lives and cultural production and traces intertextual connections between and amongst them. What is finally highlighted is the material nexus of memory in its interrelation with narrative.
Chapter 2: Gendered Traces in the Memory of WorkIn
this chapter I look at gendered traces in the memory of work, a theme that has recently opened up interesting debates in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. In doing so I map the memory of work in the wider field of cultural memory studies and identify key themes and debates. Here I focus on the material turn in the philosophical treatment of memory, particularly looking at the strands of embodied and emplaced memories. In following entanglements between memory, forgetting and imagination, I finally examine how gender inflects the field of memory studies in general and the memory of work in particular.
Chapter 3: A Feminist Seamstress and Writer in Paris
This chapter looks at the life and work of Jeanne Bouvier, a Parisian couturière and writer and an ardent trade unionist in the French garment industry. In following life lines from her published memoirs, the chapter explores the harsh conditions of being a woman garment worker at the turn of the century in France, while also making connections with Marguerite Audoux’s autobiographical fiction. Coming from the world of work Bouvier’s autobiography unfolds as a relational genre of life writing. It strongly portrays the material and spatial dimensions of memory work, while highlighting the importance of collective reminiscences. The chapter finally considers her historical writings and more specifically her genealogy of the lingerie and the lingères.
Conclusion: Remembering / Imagining
In this concluding chapter I return to the importance of excavating archives in the memory of work. Archival research is related to the thickness of memory as it deals with the complexities of what has been actualised and the thinness of imagination, as it confronts the openness of pure possibilities. What I suggest is that the archive as a laboratory of memory and imagination intensifies auto/biographical research and in doing so opens up new vistas in the analysis of women workers’ documents of life and consequently to our understanding of workers’ contribution to the cultural formations of the twentieth century.