Women's Work

Petrus Custers looks back to the pioneering work of the German proletarian women's movement at the beginning of the century, to propose a provocative reassessment of women's work and women's worth worldwide. The first section of the book outlines the philosophical and historical background to the debate. The second reviews the analysis of women's work made by three distinct currents within feminism - reformists, anarchists and socialists. The third section looks at contemporary feminism in relation to the women's action in the past. Custers argues that the theoretical gap left by the German proletarian women's movement has been filled by contemporary debates about household labour. He aims to show that there is much to be learnt, at a practical level, from the mobilization of women labourers and housewives by German feminists in the quarter century leading up to World War I.