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The Working Class in American History
Gendering Labor History
This collection represents the thirty-year intellectual trajectory of one of today’s leading historians of gender and labor in the United States. The seventeen essays are divided into four sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of Alice Kessler-Harris's central showing gender’s fundamental importance in the shaping of United States history and working class culture. The first section considers women and organized labor while the second pushes this analysis toward a gendered labor history as the essays consider the gendering of male as well as female workers and how gender operates with and within the social category of class. Subsequent sections broaden this framework to examine U.S. social policy as a whole, the question of economic citizenship, and wage labor from a global perspective. While each essay represents an important intervention in American historiography in itself, the collection taken as a whole shows Kessler-Harris continuing to push the field of American history to greater levels of inclusion and analysis.
392 pages, Paperback
First published December 20, 2006
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About the author
Alice Kessler-Harris
23 books18 followersAlice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University, in New York City and former president of the Organization of American Historians. She specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender.
Kessler-Harris received her B.A. from Goucher College in 1961 and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1968.
She contributed the piece "Pink Collar Ghetto, Blue Collar Token" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.
Her newest book, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman, was published in June 2012. Her other books include Gendering Labor History, which collects some of her best-known essays on women and wage work; In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, which won several prizes including the Joan Kelly Prize, the Philip Taft award, and the Bancroft Prize. Among her other fellowships and awards, Kessler-Harris has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
(from Wikipedia)
Kessler-Harris received her B.A. from Goucher College in 1961 and her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1968.
She contributed the piece "Pink Collar Ghetto, Blue Collar Token" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.
Her newest book, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman, was published in June 2012. Her other books include Gendering Labor History, which collects some of her best-known essays on women and wage work; In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, which won several prizes including the Joan Kelly Prize, the Philip Taft award, and the Bancroft Prize. Among her other fellowships and awards, Kessler-Harris has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 8, 2019
Gendering Labor History is a collection of Alice Kessler-Harris's essays from 1976-2004. Kessler-Harris is probably the most prominent of feminist labor historians, and the author of the classic book Women Have Always Worked. In this collection, the evolution of her thinking and focuses is fascinating to trace. She considers herself both a historian of labor and a historian of women, and laments the rise of literature critic over history as the dominant force in women's studies and feminist discourse.
The book is divided into four sections. The first is on Women and the Labor Movement, in which she finds many of the women militants, educators, and organizers who built the labor movement. She looks to how women like Fania Cohn and Rose Pesotta pushed the male leaders of the mostly female union in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) as the garment industry became unionized after the Shirtwaist Fire tragedy. She argued that women organizers broke the notion that women made good strikers but terrible labor leaders.
In the second section, she looks to overall gender patterns in class patterns, as women were kept out of unions both by conscious efforts of management and by conservative union leaders like Samuel Gompers and craft unions. These craft unionists instead sought to grab a piece of the capitalist pie for a limited amount of men workers instead of all workers, including women. Kessler-Harris looks to how gender and class interplay with each other in power relations, arguing that they are not just relationships or simple facts, but instead are ongoing processes that have played out historically in who gets included and who does not.
In the third section, she concentrates on labor and social policy, and how often protective progressive labor laws have been framed around reinforcing gender by protecting women as a special group instead of pushing for equality, which began to change in the 1970s. She proposes a new understanding of citizenship being based around economic citizenship where all should have material access to a good life and a democratic say over all aspects of their life. In the fourth section, she looks to the new directions of feminist labor history. This points to her 40 year career as a historian, in which she helped build a public history program outside the traditional academy that would be accessible to working class people.
Kessler-Harris notes that historians are often setting out to understand the world, but in many cases end up writing an autobiography of how they arrived at that moment, and more deeply understanding themselves as well as what they have studied. I met her once in October 2018 at the North American Labor History Conference where she spoke about the re-release of Women Have Always Worked, and she is very impressive a speaker. Her work should be studied as a base for the intersection of women in labor history, not segregated but as a core part of the overall history.
The book is divided into four sections. The first is on Women and the Labor Movement, in which she finds many of the women militants, educators, and organizers who built the labor movement. She looks to how women like Fania Cohn and Rose Pesotta pushed the male leaders of the mostly female union in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) as the garment industry became unionized after the Shirtwaist Fire tragedy. She argued that women organizers broke the notion that women made good strikers but terrible labor leaders.
In the second section, she looks to overall gender patterns in class patterns, as women were kept out of unions both by conscious efforts of management and by conservative union leaders like Samuel Gompers and craft unions. These craft unionists instead sought to grab a piece of the capitalist pie for a limited amount of men workers instead of all workers, including women. Kessler-Harris looks to how gender and class interplay with each other in power relations, arguing that they are not just relationships or simple facts, but instead are ongoing processes that have played out historically in who gets included and who does not.
In the third section, she concentrates on labor and social policy, and how often protective progressive labor laws have been framed around reinforcing gender by protecting women as a special group instead of pushing for equality, which began to change in the 1970s. She proposes a new understanding of citizenship being based around economic citizenship where all should have material access to a good life and a democratic say over all aspects of their life. In the fourth section, she looks to the new directions of feminist labor history. This points to her 40 year career as a historian, in which she helped build a public history program outside the traditional academy that would be accessible to working class people.
Kessler-Harris notes that historians are often setting out to understand the world, but in many cases end up writing an autobiography of how they arrived at that moment, and more deeply understanding themselves as well as what they have studied. I met her once in October 2018 at the North American Labor History Conference where she spoke about the re-release of Women Have Always Worked, and she is very impressive a speaker. Her work should be studied as a base for the intersection of women in labor history, not segregated but as a core part of the overall history.
May 10, 2015
I read this book not long after it came out, as part of a seminar on gender history, towards the end of my career as a graduate student in history. There was a lot going on at the time, of course, and I don’t remember much about the discussion now. Judging by my use of the highlighter, I seem to have given the Introduction a very thorough read, but I’m not sure how much attention I gave the actual essays – probably far less, unfortunately.
This book consists of important essays which had been published previously in various places, but never readily available in one volume. They span roughly the period from 1975 to 2001, and thus reflect the author’s development as a feminist historian of labor. Appropriately, it begins with an essay asking the question, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?”, a question that opens the discussion of whether there is, in fact, a meaningful intersection between feminist and labor history. Much of Kessler-Harris’s career since that first essay has been devoted to finding that, yes, there is much for the two fields to learn from each other. The rest of the first section continues this discussion, allowing Kessler-Harris to move on to deeper questions in sections 2 and 3, on “Gender and Class” and “Labor and Social History.” Harris argues that class and gender are “processes,” more than relationships or tangible facts, and also makes the case that they inform one another’s construction in a kind of communicative process. So far as policy, she finds that it is informed by, and informs, the gender order of different countries. The final section, on “New Directions,” includes a few essays that argue for the importance of the academic as activist.
Looking it over again, I still find the first section to be the most interesting, as it moves from simply looking for feminine heroes within the labor movement to specifying the conditions of women within labor. It occurred to me that one would be unlikely to write the book “laboring gender history;” even though gender historians often lose sight of class relations in their examinations the understanding that class is a part of what they need to know is more widely accepted Kessler-Harris, and her colleagues still have a bit of an uphill struggle with the mainstream of labor history, but this book does demonstrate that the work they are doing has a firm foundation
This book consists of important essays which had been published previously in various places, but never readily available in one volume. They span roughly the period from 1975 to 2001, and thus reflect the author’s development as a feminist historian of labor. Appropriately, it begins with an essay asking the question, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?”, a question that opens the discussion of whether there is, in fact, a meaningful intersection between feminist and labor history. Much of Kessler-Harris’s career since that first essay has been devoted to finding that, yes, there is much for the two fields to learn from each other. The rest of the first section continues this discussion, allowing Kessler-Harris to move on to deeper questions in sections 2 and 3, on “Gender and Class” and “Labor and Social History.” Harris argues that class and gender are “processes,” more than relationships or tangible facts, and also makes the case that they inform one another’s construction in a kind of communicative process. So far as policy, she finds that it is informed by, and informs, the gender order of different countries. The final section, on “New Directions,” includes a few essays that argue for the importance of the academic as activist.
Looking it over again, I still find the first section to be the most interesting, as it moves from simply looking for feminine heroes within the labor movement to specifying the conditions of women within labor. It occurred to me that one would be unlikely to write the book “laboring gender history;” even though gender historians often lose sight of class relations in their examinations the understanding that class is a part of what they need to know is more widely accepted Kessler-Harris, and her colleagues still have a bit of an uphill struggle with the mainstream of labor history, but this book does demonstrate that the work they are doing has a firm foundation
April 1, 2009
There are a couple of valuable essays in here, but good golly, this is a boring thing to read from cover to cover.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews