Gendering Labor History (Working Class in American History) - Softcover

"Over her 30-year career as a labor historian, Alice Kessler-Harris has established herself as one of the foremost authorities on the history of women and work in the United States. . . . Kessler-Harris provides an excellent starting point for those interested in understanding the contribution of women to the American labor movement and workforce."--Labor Studies Journal

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 included in Alice Kessler-Harris's Gendering Labor History are divided into 4 sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of her central project: to show gender's fundamental importance to the shaping of U.S. history and working-class culture. The first section considers women and organized labor; the second pushes this analysis towards 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 reveals Kessler-Harris as someone who has always pushed the field of American history to greater levels of inclusion and analysis, and who continues to do so today.