Gender and Precarious Labor in a Historical Perspective: Italian Women and Precarious Work between Fordism and Post-Fordism

This article investigates the historical relationship between gender and precarious labor by analyzing the case study of Italian women in the second half of the twentieth century. A gendered historical approach shows that different production modes and working conditions were simultaneously present in Fordist and post-Fordist societies, and women, as well as migrants, experienced a significant level of precariousness even in the so-called golden age of the twentieth century. Sexual division of labor and sex-based discrimination seem to lie at the very heart of the gendered nature of precarious work, a long duree nexus that has characterized industrial and postindustrial societies, as the article shows, in regard to the Italian case. By approaching the question of job precariousness as a multifaceted phenomenon, it is claimed that the subsequent spread of precarious work in the second half of the twentieth century was directly affected by labor and women's movement struggles, on the one hand, and by the role of the state and politics in defining and redefining the labor law relationship, on the other.