The appearance of female workers: clothing, adornment, and the embodied experience of labor in 20th-century Argentina

Abstract

This article analyzes the appearance of various working women in Argentina throughout the twentieth century. It proposes an approach that, drawing on visual studies, fashion studies, and women’s history, emphasizes how different groups of women who entered the labor market between 1920 and 1970 dressed, styled their hair, and wore makeup. Examining the appearance of factory workers, domestic servants, saleswomen, secretaries, and nurses provides a privileged avenue for accessing the subjectivities these women developed as they entered this new world of paid labor outside the domestic sphere. Our aim is to complicate traditional readings produced within the social history of labor and women’s history by shifting the focus to the ways in which working women dressed and presented themselves. The analysis of images and oral testimonies – gathered from interviews with different workers – centered on their practices of dress and adornment, allows us to capture instances of female agency that did not always conform to the heteropatriarchal patterns of domination imposed upon their bodies. Moreover, attending to these dimensions helps to better understand what entering the workplace, the possibility – or necessity – of dressing to appear in public, and access to consumer goods may have meant for many of them as unprecedented experiences of movement, visibility, and being in the world.