Creating A Female Dominion In American Reform 1890 1935

In this book, Muncy explains the continuity of white, middle-class, American female reform activity between the Progressive era and the New Deal. She argues that during the Progressive era, female reformers built an interlocking set of organizations that attempted to control child welfare policy. Within this policymaking body, female progressives professionalized their values, bureaucratized their methods, and institutionalized their reforming networks. To refer to the organizational structure embodying these processes, the book develops the original concept of a female dominion in the otherwise male empire of policymaking. At the head of this dominion stood the Children's Bureau in the federal Department of Labor. Muncy investigates the development of the dominion and its particular characteristics, such as its monopoly over child welfare and its commitment to public welfare, and shows how it was dependent on a peculiarly female professionalism. By exploring that process, this book illuminates the relationship between professionalization and reform, the origins and meaning of Progressive reform, and the role of gender in creating the American welfare state.

"This is a collection of biographies and composite essays of Texas women, contextualized over the course of history to include subjects that reflect the enormous racial, class, and religious diversity of the state. Offering insights into the complex ways that Texas' position on the margins of the United States has shaped a particular kind of gendered experience there, the volume also demonstrates how the larger questions in United States women's history are answered or reconceived in the state. Beginning with Juliana Barr's essay, which asserts that 'women marked the lines of dominion among Spanish and Indian nations in Texas' and explodes the myth of Spanish domination in colonial Texas, the essays examine the ways that women were able to use their borderland status to stretch the boundaries of their own lives. Eric Walther demonstrates that the constant changing of governments in Texas (Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and U.S.) gave slaves the opportunities to resist their oppression because of the differences in the laws of slavery under Spanish or English or American law. Gabriela Gonzalez examines the activism of Jovita Idar on behalf of civil rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans on both sides of the border. Renee Laegreid argues that female rodeo contestants employed a "unique regional interplay of masculine and feminine behaviors" to shape their identities as cowgirls"--

A penetrating analysis of how women shaped public and private space in Boston - and how space shaped women's lives in turn - during a period of dramatic change in American cities.

Child labor law strikes most Americans as a fixture of the country’s legal landscape, involving issues settled in the distant past. But these laws, however self-evidently sensible they might seem, were the product of deeply divisive legal debates stretching over the past century—and even now are subject to constitutional challenges. Child Labor in America tells the story of that historic legal struggle. The book offers the first full account of child labor law in America—from the earliest state regulations to the most recent important Supreme Court decisions and the latest contemporary attacks on existing laws. Children had worked in America from the time the first settlers arrived on its shores, but public attitudes about working children underwent dramatic changes along with the nation’s economy and culture. A close look at the origins of oppressive child labor clarifies these changing attitudes, providing context for the hard-won legal reforms that followed. Author John A. Fliter describes early attempts to regulate working children, beginning with haphazard and flawed state-level efforts in the 1840s and continuing in limited and ineffective ways as a consensus about the evils of child labor started to build. In the Progressive Era, the issue finally became a matter of national concern, resulting in several laws, four major Supreme Court decisions, an unsuccessful Child Labor Amendment, and the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Fliter offers a detailed overview of these events, introducing key figures, interest groups, and government officials on both sides of the debates and incorporating the latest legal and political science research on child labor reform. Unprecedented in its scope and depth, his work provides critical insight into the role child labor has played in the nation’s social, political, and legal development.

Slavery: a reexamination of its impact -- Sharecropping and the rural proletariat -- The African American family in the maternalistic era -- The arduous transition to the industrial north -- World War II and its aftermath -- The calm before the storm -- The "matriarchal" black family under siege -- Family composition and the "underclass" debate -- Black marriage patterns: representations and realities -- Where are we now? Where do we go from here?

In the last several decades, U.S. women's history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political, but they have also entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women's history itself. In this collection of seventeen original essays on women's lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. Among many other examples, they examine how conceptions of gender shaped government officials' attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women's mobilization for civil and labor rights.