Women And The Labor Movement

A comprehensive account of the women who organized for labor rights and equality from the early factories to the 1970's.

As paid work becomes increasingly central in women’s lives, the history of their labor struggles assumes more and more importance. This volume represents the best of the new feminist scholarship in twentieth-century U.S. women’s labor history. Fourteen original essays illuminate the complex relationship between gender, consciousness and working-class activism, and deepen historical understanding of the contradictory legacy of trade unionism for women workers. The contributors take up a wide range of specific subjects, and write from diverse theoretical perspectives. Some of the essays are case studies of women’s participation in individual unions, organizing efforts, or strikes; others examine broader themes in women’s labor history, focusing on a specific time period; and still others explore the situation of particular categories of women workers over a longer time span. This collection extends the scope of current research and interpretation in women’s labor history, both conceptually and in terms of periodization – emphasis is placed on the post-World War I period where the literature is sparse. This book will be valuable for scholars, students and general readers alike.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Trade Union Woman" by Alice Henry. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Balser examines the Working Women's Assc. of 1868, Union WAGE of the 1970s, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women to answer questions about organizing around gender and work issues.

Comprised of articles from the original periodical, Woman worker.

The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of Women, Work and Activism examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women's labor activism in a wide variety of contexts. This includes spontaneous resistance to masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often precarious and unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor. The book is an innovative contribution to both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously contributing to an inclusive history of women’s labor-related activism wherever to be found. Examining women’s activism in male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women’s networks and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in gender history.

Gabin documents the struggles of United Auto Workers (UAW) women to achieve greater opportunity in the union, on the job, and ultimately in American society. Although the women never overcame segregated work and union hierarchies, they made considerable inroads from the 1940s forward. Contrasting the ideology of the union with the reality of their place in the auto industry, women pressed for recognition through the formation of a Women's Bureau in the UAW. This book addresses important issues in women's and labor history, and explores the complex and contingent character of the mediation process between feminism and unionism within the UAW. ISBN 0-8014-2435-6: $31.25.