Headline: Labor Historian gets Laid Off

Ah, long break. Been reading Ava Baron's edited collection Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor. I recommend it to anyone wondering 1.what good labor history is (yet to be determined) and 2.what gender analysis can add to it (quite a bit). Jackie Hall's article on the Fulton Mills strike is a bit iffy--the origins and outcome of the strike are entirely unrelated to the gender perspective she takes--but Baron's article on the shifting notions of masculinity necessitated by the death of apprenticeship programs in the late 19th/early 20th century is quite good. I guarantee you'll think differently about gender and history after that piece. On the whole, I suppose the question remains, though: just as many have criticized Joan Scott's essays on French women at the end of Gender and the Politics of History for not proving the centrality of gender analysis to a "new" understanding of history (hey, she said it was a useful category, not the only category), so too will readers of Baron's work have to decide if the essays contained there merit groundbreaking labels.
One last word: skip the Dana Franks piece. I think she's just trying to be difficult.