In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic by Alice Kessler-Harris
By Alice Kessler-Harris
Few historians have contributed extra to our figuring out of the historical past of girls, and women's impression on historical past, than Alice Kessler-Harris. writer of the vintage Out to Work, she is among the country's best students of gender, the economic system, and public coverage.
during this quantity, Kessler-Harris pierces the surface of arguments and laws to understand the preconceptions that experience formed the adventure of girls: a "gendered mind's eye" that has outlined what women and men alike contemplate as reasonable and fascinating. during this incredible account that strains social coverage from the recent Deal to the Seventies, she indicates how a deeply embedded set of ideals has distorted probably impartial social laws to additional restrict the liberty and equality of girls. executive principles ordinarily sought to guard girls from exploitation, even from employment itself; yet even as, they hooked up crucial advantages to salary paintings. To be a true citizen, one needs to earn--and such a lot policymakers (even lady ones) assumed from the start that girls weren't, and shouldn't be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris strains the effect of this gender bias within the New Deal courses of Social defense, unemployment assurance, and reasonable hard work criteria, in Federal source of revenue tax coverage, and the hot dialogue of women's rights that emerged after global struggle II. "For generations," she writes, "American girls lacked no longer in simple terms the perform, yet usually the belief of person monetary freedom." merely within the Nineteen Sixties and '70s did outdated assumptions start to holiday down--yet the method is way from whole.
Even this present day, with girls in the direction of complete fiscal citizenship than ever prior to, Kessler-Harris's insights provide a prepared new knowing of the problems that dominate the headlines, from the wedding penalty within the tax code to the glass ceiling in company the USA.
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Extra resources for In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
Sample text
Women, in the eyes of many, deserved state protection for fair and equitable treatment at work (equal wages, suitable working conditions, reasonable hours) precisely because they possessed few rights to work. In the first half of the twentieth century, persistent beliefs about the gendered right to earn helped to structure the labor market in ways that restricted women's job choices, fostered the adoption of new corporate welfare strategies that benefited male-headed families, and ultimately shaped the direction of social policy in the 1930s.
Among the six million women who earned wages in 1900, surely some must have wanted more than a guarantee of survival and a chance at genuine economic independence. Rose Schneiderman, immigrant capmaker and trade union organizer, was one of these—but she deplored the difficulty of organizing sister workers who had marriage on their minds. The tension between women's desires for more remunerative and satisfying workforce participation and the sense of entitlement to jobs that would have pitted men against women seems to have found its most effective resolution in the lives of African-American women.
When working-class men used the term (and they frequently did), the concept implied dignity, the capacity to support a household and family, the possibility of upward mobility, and a status that justified political citizenship. Working-class women rarely used the term to apply to themselves. They did have job-related expectations, including access to reasonable jobs at reasonable wages and under conditions that facilitated domestic lives. Middle-class women, the college-educated, and those with professional aspirations had ambitions that extended further, but many would have ceded the right to earn a living (as opposed to the opportunity to do so) to the unmarried.