Educating the seamstress: studying and writing the memory of work

In this paper I excavate the memory of work by looking into institutional histories, discourses and ideologies revolving around women workers’ educational experiences, cultural lives and political activities in the first half of the twentieth century in the US. In doing this I sketch Rose Pesotta’s pen-portrait, drawing on her autobiographical narratives. As a migrant garment worker, an anarchist trade union leader and one of the few women vice-presidents in the history of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Pesotta emerges as a narrative persona, whose writings throw light on a rather neglected area in the field of gender studies: women’s memory of work and their contribution to the cultural formations of the twentieth century. In analysing Pesotta’s autobiographical writings in the context of their geographies and times, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of narratives as tangible traces of the contingency of action and the unpredictability of the human condition, constitutive of politics and the discourse of History.