Book Contents
Introduction: Politics, Geographies and Histories in Workers' Education
In the introductory chapter I map workers' education in France, the UK and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly focusing on the Worker’s Educational Association in the UK and its impact upon the US experience and developments. I further develop the idea of education as an adventure in imaginative freedom and as a platform for social change and explore how radical histories in education can inform contemporary alternative educational experiments.
Chapter 1: Assemblages of institutional histories and life narratives
In the first chapter I present and discuss the theoretical and methodological framework, of the book, particularly highlighting the importance of a life-history approach in understanding the subtleties and nuances of the movement for workers’ education in general and women workers’ education in particular. I further discuss the importance of an Arendtian approach to the analysis of women workers’ narratives in bringing together, work, stories and political action.
Chapter 2: The Self as/in Dialogue
In this chapter I draw on Cohn’s personal letters highlighting three particular bodies of correspondence with her friends, Evelyn Preston, and Theresa Wolfson, also actively involved in women workers’ education in the US, as well as Marion Phillips in the UK. There are five trails that I have particularly followed in this complex terrain: a) cross-class synergies, which eventually exposed problematics with the very concept of social class per se and its limitations as an analytical category; b) intra-labour and intra-gender relations that also need to be revisited in the light of associations; c) the struggle for the workers’ intellectual emancipation and the autonomy of their education movement, as well as their contribution to the knowledge economies of modernity; d) the formative role of letters in the movement for workers’ education; e) last but not least, the importance of the cultural capital that migrant workers carried with them, which is also an area that needs further work and study
Chapter 3: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics in women workers’ education
In the third chapter I draw on Cohn’s organizational letters and unpublished essays to discuss the difficulties of women organizers to encourage women workers’ active involvement in the labour movement. I particularly focus on the importance of art and the politics of aesthetics in women workers’ overall development within the labour movement and beyond. In this context there are three themes that I particularly follow: a) writing prose and poetry; b) technologies of critical reading and c) the workers' theatre movement. In theorisising this cultural movement I draw on Jaques Rancières influential analysis of the politics of aesthetics.
Cohn reviewing documents via the Kheel center
Chapter 4: Visual Technologies and other archives
Cohn with a young girl, kind permission, NYPL archives
Drawing on a range of very interesting photographs in Cohn’s papers in the context of two wider digital archives, the Bryn Mawr School of Women Working in the Industry and the ILGWU records at the Kheel Center of Cornell University, Chapter 4 discusses insights that emerge from an imaged based research in the history of women workers’ education. There are three insights that emerge from the turn to the visual: a) the importance of space/time rhythms that created the phenomenon of proletarian summers; b) visualizing women organizer's untenable position within the sexist hierarchies of the labour movement and c) materializing and grounding the adventure of education as a Spinozist ethic of joy.
ILGWU visit at Radio City in New York, via the Kheel Center
Conclusion: The Adventure of women workers' education
In the conclusion I bring together the analytical themes of the books looking at women workers: a) as students, b) as educators and labour organizers and c) as creators and writers. What I suggest is that brought together on a plane of nomadic positions, ethics and politics working women’s personal and political narratives create archives of radical futurity: they offer possibilities both for their narrators and readers of becoming untimely, moving beyond the constraints of the actual, in imagining a future, a world, a people yet to come.