Re: Krupskaya

Katherine Brown (kbrown who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:36:52 -0700 (PDT)

Hi
Thanks for the continued interest and input on the history of women
participating in the deve,lopment of the scholarly record on AT.
This might be one angle to bringing the large bodies of work into
conversation with one another--who were the notable women marxist-leninis
t thinkers, who were women in the research projects and labs, what was
their influence (what evidence?) on the direction of the thought that
developed.
A second issue is the numerical presence and participation of women in
a particular field or subfield. My main reference for the following
comes from the work of Barbara Reskin and her students at the U of I
and later in Ohio (COlumbus). Reskin wrote a book called Job Queues and
Gender Queues that argued that whatheppens when an occupation becomes
feminized is that women gain access, the wages fall, and men leave.
Reskin and her students haveshown this in realty, bartending, medicine,
law, and numerous other occupational categories. Other of her students
have inquired "where do the men go?" when occupations get feminized.
The answer is that they rise up to middle/senior management and oversee
"stables" of women dling the jobs they used to do for less money.
In the NYT in the last 3 mos, there was an article on how colleges are
overwhelmingly attracting women for liberal arts degrees (this is less the
case in math/science/engineering still) because the labor market is stron
enough for men to commang high wages without college degrees (relative to
10 yrs ago) so they're getting technical or other specialized skill and
bypassing college. Meanwhile, women with college degrees who could earn
on par with male high school grads (this has been true in the US for many
years) are still needing to get those degreees or advanced degreesto compete.
College recruiters are trying to make their pitches and brohures appealing
to men to keep from going all girl....
SO its interesting that there is a broad feminist literature on work
(gender/race/class stratification) that predicts to an extent some of
the changes in the academy, in the composition of students, and points at
some technological factors...
rejecting explanations based purely on patriarchy or human capital explanations
but assigning more complex interactions between historical forces.
I always thought of this literature when looking at Engestrom's triangle
of activity, considering the relationship between the RULES and the
DIVISION OF LABOR, which I undrstood to be the formal and informal
rules of the game and the difference in power, in who does the work and
who gets the credit. I saw these things at work in the workplaces we
studies, in medicine, in law, ----whose knowledge was valued, relevant,
carried on, highly waged, and who knew other things that explained the
tensions, disruptions, contradictions in the systems....
All grist(le) for the mill(s).
Katherine BROwn