Gender & Work. Rappresentazioni di genere che confermano, complicano e sfidano l’etica del lavoro

The end of the 19th century saw the consolidation, especially in the industrialized West, of a cultural paradigm that placed and still places work at the center of human life. Although this model had been developing for at least a century and a half, it was in the decades around 1900 that it became predominant. Several of the dominant discourses of the time, although in other ways diverging —conservative or progressive, elitist or popular, religious or secular—agreed to exalt the value of work. Literature and the arts were as much a mirror of this transformation as they were actors who actively contributed to shaping, metabolizing and promoting this ideological perspective. As the historical and social researcher Alessandra Pescarolo, author of the book Women's Work in Contemporary Italy, explains, “research on women's work has developed a lot in recent years, with important but fragmented studies” (Pescarolo2019, n.p.) .In particular, there is still a lot to discover about how women workers—just at a time when their participation in the world of work was growing—have contributed to the affirmation of the centrality of work and work ethic, not only in terms of economic production and work ethic capitalist system, but also as a fundamental dimension of identity and personal life. Specifically, the transition of women from the domestic and agricultural spheres to the industrial sphere represented a radical change to say the least. The contributions collected in this special issue offer a reflection on the way in which literary and artistic representations of women's work (paid and unpaid) in the period between 1870 and 1930 account for the ways in which gender, understood as the complex of social and cultural mechanisms that determine its assignment and performativity within a traditionally binary system, has in fact influenced an unprecedented cultural change. Moving from different perspectives and disciplines, the contributions question how representations of expectations, norms and gender roles have helped to shape or challenge the dominant narrative at work. In particular, the research was guided by the following questions: how was the interconnection between work, identity and gender represented in literature and the arts at the turn of the 20th century? What do these literary narratives and artistic representations tell us about the exclusion of working women, their segregated roles, or their emancipated lives? To what extent have literature, in particular, and the arts, in general, helped to consolidate or question the ideologies of work and what role has the gender distinction played in this process?