From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban formation, and indeed, nation building. Depending on the political economy of the labor market, the images of laboring women accordingly oscillated between, for instance, helpless and exploited victims to national heroines in the service of developmental projects. At the same time, since the early nineteenth-century, the steadily accumulating social reform, labor inspection, or social scientific accounts of women's paid and unpaid labor testified to states’ and employers’ growing comfort with hiring what was and is still, in many ways, a cheap, easily exploitable category of workers, one whose profitability increased the more precarious their employment became. Such discourses and labor control practices were deeply racialized and classed. On the other side of the public imagination and employer's surveillance, women who engaged in paid work sometimes appropriated the discourses and reshaped the practices that were used to characterize their labor and judge their choices.

从十九世纪，当女性工厂劳动这一新的社会问题开始引起（中产阶级）公众的想象时，到当今劳动力链全球化的时代，关于性别劳动的话语既是流动的又是构成性的劳动力等级制度。这些话语和社会关系确认了它们在工业化和工作场所重组进程以及发展政策、城市形成乃至国家建设中的中心地位。根据劳动力市场的政治经济，劳动妇女的形象相应地在无助和受剥削的受害者和为发展项目服务的民族女英雄之间摇摆。与此同时，自十九世纪初期以来，不断积累的社会改革、劳动监察或对妇女有酬和无酬劳动的社会科学记录证明，国家和雇主对雇用过去和现在的妇女越来越放心。从很多方面来说，他们仍然是一类廉价、容易被剥削的工人，他们的就业越不稳定，他们的盈利能力就越高。这种话语和劳工控制实践被深深地种族化和阶级化。在公众想象力和雇主监视的另一面，从事有偿工作的女性有时会挪用话语并重塑用于描述她们的劳动和判断她们的选择的实践。