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Natasha Zaretsky, The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Page 600, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae264
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Contemporary feminists are paying renewed attention to “care work” or “social reproductive labor” (pp. 4, 109). These terms encompass the activities required for survival and include the purchasing of household goods, food preparation, laundry, home maintenance, and the provision of care to the young, sick, and elderly. In this excellent book, Joan Flores-Villalobos places this social reproductive labor at the center of a story that we often associate with technical and engineering ingenuity alone: the building of the Panama canal between 1904 and 1914. The canal's construction required a large male labor force that required food and housing, and the Black women performed this vital provision work. Traveling from the West Indies to Panama in search of economic opportunity, these “silver women” (the term refers to the canal zone's two-tiered and discriminatory currency system) were key players in the transnational story of U.S. empire building at the turn of the twentieth century. And yet their story has remained hidden until now.
