The initiative for this book goes back to the ilo Century Project, which organized, together with the History Department of the University of Geneva, an interdisciplinary international workshop in December 2012 on the topic of women and the ilo in a historical perspective. Many of the contributions to this collection were presented as papers during this two-day event. In addition to the authors of several of the chapters of this volume, the participants included Jennifer Fish, Glaucia Fraccaro, Kristin Ghodsee, Albertina Jordao, Nora Natchkova, and Céline Schoeni. We would like to thank the Department of Development Studies of the University of Vienna for hosting a second workshop in April 2014, when we were able to discuss more advanced versions of some of the initial papers and to include new authors as well as other participants, notably Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama. The participants of both workshops contributed to the intellectual discussions that have shaped this publication.
We would also like to thank all the ilo staff who supported the work on this book, especially Remo Becci and Jacques Rodriguez from the ilo Archives, Chris Edgar and his team at ilo Publishing, the colleagues at the ilo’s Gender, Equality and Diversity Branch, which has generously financed a translation, and finally the Research Department, which has hosted the Century Project since May 2016. A number of people have helped to create the manuscript. Special thanks go to Victoria Guerin for her translation, Beatrix McBride for assisting with the bibliography, and Ana Paula Soares and Manfred Boemeke for copy-editing the manuscript. Eileen Boris acknowledges research support funded by the Hull Chair in Feminist Studies and grants from the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research and the Academic Senate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Susan Zimmermann acknowledges research support funded by the Central European University, Budapest. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and are grateful to Marcel van der Linden, former Research Director at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, for his