Gendering Labor History | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

Gendering Labor History

By Alice Kessler-Harris (NHC Fellow, 2006–07)

Women; Working Class; Labor History; Labor Movement; Gender; Social Classes

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007

From the publisher’s description:

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 four 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 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 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.

Subjects
History / Gender and Sexuality / Women / Working Class / Labor History / Labor Movement / Gender / Social Classes /

Kessler-Harris, Alice (NHC Fellow, 2006–07). Gendering Labor History. The Working Class in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.