A real pleasure of academic exchange is to engage with readers who “get” one’s book. In their distinct ways, Chaumtoli Huq, Sarah Lyons, Katherine Turk, and Naomi Williams underscore the interpretative thrust behind the narrative arc of Making the Woman Worker, which uses the International Labour Organization (ILO) as its archive.

As a union researcher who uses participatory research methods, I was particularly interested in the chapter that discussed Maria Mies’s study of lace makers in India. Mies recruited women who were familiar with the region and the dialect to be part of her research team.

Eileen Boris’ meticulously researched and detailed book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019, reveals some enduring challenges for women globally to actualize their full labor rights.  There are three themes in the book that resonate for me as someone who works on transnational issues impacting women workers in Bangladesh and South Asia as well as low wage immigrant workers in the United States particularly in the South Asian diaspora.

Eileen Boris details the history of how the International Labor Organization (ILO) moved from positioning the male industrial worker in imperial centers to acknowledging the feminization of labor and promoting gender mainstreaming in Making the Woman Worker. She illustrates the ways that “othering” women workers led to treating women as objects instead of agents involved in their own economic justice efforts.