You, your grandmother and your mother: thriving traditions of a trade unionism with women

Abstract

This article examines a set of initiatives carried out by different groups of women workers, focusing on various events in Argentine history between the late nineteenth century and the present. Based on written and visual documents that provide clues to the unionization and political practices of women workers linked to the left and Peronism in the first half of the twentieth century, and oral sources that report on collective actions undertaken in the recent past, it seeks to trace a genealogy of female participation in workers' and unemployed people's organizations. It argues that far from bursting into history in every conflictive context, women built traditions of struggle that, in a non-linear and non-univocal way, were transmitted from generation to generation, nurturing their present experiences.