ABSTRACT
While it goes without saying feminist research, gender research is what we two editors do, and what we see this book as doing, it is also important to set out what we mean and how we and our research colleagues go about gendering research and researching gender. This is too rarely done in the field of labour and trade union studies, a mainly masculinised field dominated by gender-blind academic work. Yet we are also aware that feminism is not a unified project, feminists do not necessarily agree on the sources of gender domination, paradigms for analysis, nor where and how libera-tory projects are to be carried out. But we do believe that the first principle, always, is the placing of women and their lives, and gender relations, centrally in the understanding of social relations. From this flows the belief in praxis—theory into practice, where our research aims to provide data and analysis as a basis for challenge to the existing order, and commitment to the idea that as feminist and gender scholars and activists, our work can make a contribution to understanding of the world in relation to women in order to change it.
