Volume 52 part 2 (August 2007)

Summaries

Maarten Van Ginderachter, Social-Democracy and National Identity: The Ethnic Rift in the Belgian Workers' Party (1885-1914)
The image of the Belgian Workers' Party as a solid party unchallenged by ethnic tensions and united around a common Belgianness does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Using the key concepts of imagined communities, ethnies, mythomoteur and oppositional patriotism, this article argues that despite its undeniable integration into the political, social and economic structures of the Belgian nation-state, the BWP was ethnically divided between Flemish and Walloon socialists in the period 1885-1914.

Joan Sangster, Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body and Working-class History
This article historicizes the making of a fur coat in post-1940 Canada, exploring the social relationships and forms of labour that made the fur coat possible: skinning, sewing and selling. Focusing especially on women's labour, I examine the significance of Aboriginal women's work, often unwaged, and unrecognized in many fur trade sources, as well as the way in which racial constructions of Aboriginal women intersected with the appropriation of their labour. The wage labour of women in a manufacturing sector dominated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and by a masculine hierarchy of skill, as well as working women's protests and unionization, are also examined, as is retail selling labour in large and small stores. An exploration of these forms of labour, with a focus on gender, also provides insights into discussions about the body and working class history. While many feminist works have emphasized the cultural and discursive in their explorations of fur, I argue for a theoretical perspective that fuses a feminist critique of race and gender hierarchies with a materialist understanding of labour, class and alienation. While embracing a feminist scepticism about the existence of a "natural" body, we need to avoid the de-materialized body of much post-modern theory in our explorations of the body and working-class history.

Julia Martinez, When Wages Were Clothes: Dressing down Aboriginal Workers in Australia's Northern Territory
When Wages Were Clothes: Dressing down Aboriginal Workers in Australia's Northern Territory Prior to the introduction of equal wages for Aboriginal Australians in 1968, it was not unusual for Aboriginal workers in the Northern Territory to be paid in kind; in basic food, clothing and tobacco. Some workers received a few shillings a week, but even this wage could be withheld completely or placed in a trust fund. In keeping with a supposedly humanitarian protectionist ethos, clothing was encouraged as a substitute for cash wages. But in practice employers rarely equated clothing with wages. Within the exploitative colonial context of Northern Territory few employers believed that any form of payment was owed to Aboriginal workers. This paper explores the perspectives of pastoralists, employers of domestic servants, and the Army, considering how clothing primarily catered for the employers' needs. Aboriginal workers and indeed most government officials had the expectation that Aboriginal people would be given clothes as a form of remuneration but in practice this was rarely the case.