June Nash

June C. Nash (May 30, 1927  – December 9, 2019) was a social and feminist anthropologist and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York (CUNY). She conducted extensive field work throughout the United States and Latin America, most notably in Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala. She was also a part of feminist and working class social movements such as that of the Zapatistas in Mexico.

Quotes

• Women mediate between men in the nerve centers of complex societies, seen but rarely heard, stimulating production over which they have no control, becoming consumers of products they inspire but do not produce, and finally becoming “consumed”- petted, admired and seduced- by the men who produce them."
  • Sex and Class in Latin America, (1976), p. 9: introduction

• This book recounts the story of the people in their struggle to maintain their way of life. Given this background of massacres, resistance, and protest, the courage they show in this current situation is remarkable. It should be an inspiration for those who maintain that progress can be made only when the rank and file of workers are the architects of the institutions in which they work and lie, just as it is a refutation of those who reject the primary role of workers in bringing about such a future"
  • We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (1979), p. xxi

• Just as the referential system of religion in the politics of indigenous peoples raises hackles with the sophisticated outside observer, so too does the self-referential language of motherhood and identification with the earth often used by women in these movements. In the postmodern, deconstructive mode now fashionable in anthropology, the very category of women is decried as essentialist.. . . We must go beyond deconstruction of the rhetoric to discover the incentives generating a common collective image among indigenous movements.
  • In: Foreword to Christine Eber,Christine Kovi (eds.), Women of Chiapas: Making History in Times of Struggle and Hope. (2003) p. xiv

Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, 1983

June C. Nash, ‎María Patricia Fernández-Kelly (1983), Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor.

• The last few decades have witnessed a growing integration of the world system of production on the basis of a new relationship between less developed and highly industrialized countries. The effect is a geographical dispersion of the various production stages in the manufacturing process as the large corporations of industrialized "First World" countries are attracted by low labor costs, taxes, and relaxed production restrictions available in developing countries.

This collection of papers focuses on inequalities among different sectors of the labor force, particularly those related to gender, and how these are affected by the changing international division of labor.

• Book summary

• The vanguard of industrial investment in the world capitalist system is in the lowest paid segment of those countries paying the lowest wages. Young women in developing countries are the labor force on this frontier just as women and children were in the industrialization of England and Europe in the nineteenth century. Escaping the patriarchal restrictions of domestic production, young women workers are segregated in the new industrial compounds where they are subject to the patriarchal control of managers.
  • p. x

• From the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England to the present in development countries, the household unit has resisted dependency on factory employment by clinging to a semisubsistence strategy.
  • p. 93