Temporalities of Emancipation: Women, Work, and Time in 1970s America

The historiography of time in capitalism is dominated by “transition histories” that examine the shift from precapitalist time to industrial or abstract time discipline from the early modern period up through the nineteenth century. By contrast this article examines time in the history of women’s understanding of their domination and their political liberation at the key moment of economic restructuring in the 1970s. Like generations of workers before them, women’s mass entry into wage labor politicized their understanding of time. Yet unlike earlier struggles for shorter hours, women’s proletarianization occurred amid incipient economic stagnation and profound sectoral reconfiguration. Mass proletarianization amid immiseration thus both shaped the rich and vibrant thought of what “free time” could be in women’s lives, but it also set the limits on how much of it could be won.