Elizabeth Faue traces the transformation of the American labor movement from community forms of solidarity to bureaucratic unionism. Arguing that gender is central to understanding this shift, Faue explores women's involvement in labor and political organizations and the role of gender and family ideology in shaping unionism in the twentieth century. Her study of Minneapolis, the site of the important 1934 trucking strike, has broad implications for labor history as a whole. Initially the labor movement rooted itself in community organizations and networks in which women were active, both as members and as leaders. This community orientation reclaimed family, relief, and education as political ground for a labor movement seeking to re-establish itself after the losses of the 1920s. But as the depression deepened, women -- perceived as threats to men seeking work -- lost their places in union leadership, in working-class culture, and on labor's political agenda. When unions exchanged a community orientation for a focus on the workplace and on national politics, they lost the power to recruit and involve women members, even after World War II prompted large numbers of women to enter the work force. In a pathbreaking analysis, Faue explores how the iconography and language of labor reflected ideas about gender. The depiction of work and the worker as male; the reliance on sport, military, and familial metaphors for solidarity; and the ideas of women's place -- these all reinforced the representation of labor solidarity as masculine during a time of increasing female participation in the labor force. Although the language of labor as male was not new in the depression, the crisis of wage-earning -- as a crisis of masculinity -- helped to give psychological power to male dominance in the labor culture. By the end of the war, women no longer occupied a central position in organized labor but a peripheral one.
Eva McDonald Valesh was one of the Progressive Era's foremost labor publicists. Challenging the narrow confines placed on women, Valesh became a successful investigative journalist, organizer, and public speaker for labor reform.Valesh was a compatriot of the labor leaders of her day and the "right-hand man" of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. Events she covered during her colorful, unconventional reporting career included the Populist revolt, the Cuban crisis of the 1890s, and the 1910 Shirtwaistmakers' uprising. She was described as bright, even "comet-like," by her admirers, but her enemies saw her as "a pest" who took "all the benefit that her sex controls when in argument with a man."Elizabeth Faue examines the pivotal events that transformed this outspoken daughter of a working-class Scots-Irish family into a national political figure, interweaving the study of one woman's fascinating life with insightful analysis of the changing character of American labor reform during the period from 1880 to 1920. In her journey through the worlds of labor, journalism, and politics, Faue lays bare the underside of social reform and reveals how front-line workers in labor's political culture—reporters, investigators, and lecturers—provoked and informed American society by writing about social wrongs. Compelling, insightful, and at times humorous, Writing the Wrongs is a window on the Progressive Era, on social history and the new journalism, and on women's lives and the meanings of class and gender.
Elizabeth Faue reconsiders the varied strains of the labor movement, situating them within the context of rapidly transforming twentieth-century American society to show how these efforts have formed a political and social movement that has shaped the trajectory of American life. Rethinking the American Labor Movement is indispensable reading for scholars and students interested in American labor in the twentieth century and in the interplay between labor, wealth, and power.
Rethinking the American Labor Movement tells the story of the various groups and incidents that make up what we think of as the "labor movement." While the efforts of the American labor force towards greater wealth parity have been rife with contention, the struggle has embraced a broad vision of a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth and a desire for workers to have greater control over their own lives. In this succinct and authoritative volume, Elizabeth Faue reconsiders the varied strains of the labor movement, situating them within the context of rapidly transforming twentieth-century American society to show how these efforts have formed a political and social movement that has shaped the trajectory of American life. Rethinking the American Labor Movement is indispensable reading for scholars and students interested in American labor in the twentieth century and in the interplay between labor, wealth, and power.
Eva McDonald Valesh was one of the Progressive Era's foremost labor publicists. Challenging the narrow confines placed on women, Valesh became a successful investigative journalist, organizer, and public speaker for labor reform.Valesh was a compatriot of the labor leaders of her day and the "right-hand man" of Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. Events she covered during her colorful, unconventional reporting career included the Populist revolt, the Cuban crisis of the 1890s, and the 1910 Shirtwaistmakers' uprising. She was described as bright, even "comet-like," by her admirers, but her enemies saw her as "a pest" who took "all the benefit that her sex controls when in argument with a man."Elizabeth Faue examines the pivotal events that transformed this outspoken daughter of a working-class Scots-Irish family into a national political figure, interweaving the study of one woman's fascinating life with insightful analysis of the changing character of American labor reform during the period from 1880 to 1920. In her journey through the worlds of labor, journalism, and politics, Faue lays bare the underside of social reform and reveals how front-line workers in labor's political culture—reporters, investigators, and lecturers—provoked and informed American society by writing about social wrongs. Compelling, insightful, and at times humorous, Writing the Wrongs is a window on the Progressive Era, on social history and the new journalism, and on women's lives and the meanings of class and gender.
Elizabeth Faue traces the transformation of the American labor movement from community forms of solidarity to bureaucratic unionism. Arguing that gender is central to understanding this shift, Faue explores women's involvement in labor and political organizations and the role of gender and family ideology in shaping unionism in the twentieth century. Her study of Minneapolis, the site of the important 1934 trucking strike, has broad implications for labor history as a whole. Initially the labor movement rooted itself in community organizations and networks in which women were active, both as members and as leaders. This community orientation reclaimed family, relief, and education as political ground for a labor movement seeking to re-establish itself after the losses of the 1920s. But as the depression deepened, women -- perceived as threats to men seeking work -- lost their places in union leadership, in working-class culture, and on labor's political agenda. When unions exchanged a community orientation for a focus on the workplace and on national politics, they lost the power to recruit and involve women members, even after World War II prompted large numbers of women to enter the work force. In a pathbreaking analysis, Faue explores how the iconography and language of labor reflected ideas about gender. The depiction of work and the worker as male; the reliance on sport, military, and familial metaphors for solidarity; and the ideas of women's place -- these all reinforced the representation of labor solidarity as masculine during a time of increasing female participation in the labor force. Although the language of labor as male was not new in the depression, the crisis of wage-earning -- as a crisis of masculinity -- helped to give psychological power to male dominance in the labor culture. By the end of the war, women no longer occupied a central position in organized labor but a peripheral one.
At once a royal secretary, a poet, and a composer, Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most protean and creative figures of the late Middle Ages. Rather than focus on a single strand of his remarkable career, Elizabeth Eva Leach gives us a book that encompasses all aspects of his work, illuminating it in a distinctively interdisciplinary light. The author provides a comprehensive picture of Machaut's artistry, reviews the documentary evidence about his life, charts the different agendas pursued by modern scholarly disciplines in their rediscovery and use of specific parts of his output, and delineates Machaut's own poetic and material presentation of his authorial persona. Leach treats Machaut's central poetic themes of hope, fortune, and death, integrating the aspect of Machaut's multimedia art that differentiates him from his contemporaries' treatment of similar thematic issues: music. In restoring the centrality of music in Machaut's poetics, arguing that his words cannot be truly understood or appreciated without the additional layers of meaning created in their musicalization, Leach makes a compelling argument that musico-literary performance occupied a special place in the courts of fourteenth-century France.
Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center. She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted an enduring tradition of political activism. According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect, diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies, their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.
Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians_from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.
During the Great Depression, California became a wellspring for some of the era's most inventive and imaginative political movements. In response to the global catastrophe, the multiracial laboring populations who formed the basis of California's economy gave rise to an oppositional culture that challenged the modes of racialism, nationalism, and rationalism that had guided modernization during preceding decades. In Rebel Imaginaries Elizabeth E. Sine tells the story of that oppositional culture's emergence, revealing how aggrieved Californians asserted political visions that embraced difference, fostered a sense of shared vulnerability, and underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for human dignity. From the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields to Hollywood, seemingly disparate communities of African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, and White working-class people were linked by their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism and patterns of inequality and marginalization. In tracing the diverse coalition of those involved in labor strikes, citizenship and immigration reform, and articulating and imagining freedom through artistic practice, Sine demonstrates that the era's social movements were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than previously understood.
In 1902 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) petitioned the Japanese government to stop rewarding good deeds with the bestowal of sake cups. Alcohol production and consumption, its members argued, harmed individuals, endangered public welfare, and wasted vital resources. This campaign was part of a wide-ranging reform program to eliminate prostitution, eradicate drinking, spread Christianity, and improve the lives of women. As Elizabeth Dorn Lublin shows, members did not passively accept and propagate government policy but felt a duty to shape it by defining social problems and influencing opinion. Certain their beliefs and reforms were essential to Japan's advancement, members couched their calls for change in the rhetorical language of national progress. Ultimately, the WCTU's activism belies received notions of women's public involvement and political engagement in Meiji Japan.
The intense urbanization and industrialization of America's largest city from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class practice of heterosexual barter called "treating," Elizabeth Alice Clement examines changes in sexual morality and sexual and economic practices. Women "treated" when they exchanged sexual favors for dinner and an evening's entertainment or, more tangibly, for stockings, shoes, and other material goods. These "charity girls" created for themselves a moral space between prostitution and courtship that preserved both sexual barter and respectability. Although treating, as a clearly articulated language and identity, began to disappear after the 1920s and 1930s, Clement argues that it still had significant, lasting effects on modern sexual norms. She demonstrates how treating shaped courtship and dating practices, the prevalence and meaning of premarital sex, and America's developing commercial sex industry. Even further, her study illuminates the ways in which sexuality and morality interact and contribute to our understanding of the broader social categories of race, gender, and class.
This oral history portrays the lives of African American women who migrated from the rural South to work as domestic servants in Washington, DC in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Living In, Living Out Elizabeth Clark-Lewis narrates the personal experiences of eighty-one women who worked for wealthy white families. These women describe how they encountered—but never accepted—the master-servant relationship, and recount their struggles to change their status from “live in” servants to daily paid workers who “lived out.” With candor and passion, the women interviewed tell of leaving their families and adjusting to city life “up North,” of being placed as live-in servants, and of the frustrations and indignities they endured as domestics. By networking on the job, at churches, and at penny savers clubs, they found ways to transform their unending servitude into an employer-employee relationship—gaining a new independence that could only be experienced by living outside of their employers' homes. Clark-Lewis points out that their perseverance and courage not only improved their own lot but also transformed work life for succeeding generations of African American women. A series of in-depth vignettes about the later years of these women bears poignant witness to their efforts to carve out lives of fulfillment and dignity.
This book, first published in 1994, explores the impact of work and gender roles on union activism, and identifies factors that support and hinder women’s representation in trade unions. These issues are discussed in terms of gender role, work-related and union-related factors. The author details what trade unionists are doing to challenge inequalities that still exist, and identifies factors that divide and unite men and women within trade unions. The author shows the impact that feminism has had on the trade union movement and explores the extent to which men and women have similar priorities for collective bargaining.
Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.
In the 1960s, increasing numbers of African American students entered predominantly White colleges and universities in the northern and western United States. Too Much to Ask focuses on the women of this pioneering generation, examining their educational strategies and experiences and exploring how social class, family upbringing, and expectations--their own and others'--prepared them to achieve in an often hostile setting. Drawing on extensive questionnaires and in-depth interviews with Black women graduates, sociologist Elizabeth Higginbotham sketches the patterns that connected and divided the women who integrated American higher education before the era of affirmative action. Although they shared educational goals, for example, family resources to help achieve those goals varied widely according to their social class. Across class lines, however, both the middle- and working-class women Higginbotham studied noted the importance of personal initiative and perseverance in helping them to combat the institutionalized racism of elite institutions and to succeed. Highlighting the actions Black women took to secure their own futures as well as the challenges they faced in achieving their goals, Too Much to Ask provides a new perspective for understanding the complexity of racial interactions in the post-civil rights era.
In Labors Appropriate to Their Sex Elizabeth Quay Hutchison addresses the plight of working women in early twentieth-century Chile, when the growth of urban manufacturing was transforming the contours of women’s wage work and stimulating significant public debate, new legislation, educational reform, and social movements directed at women workers. Challenging earlier interpretations of women’s economic role in Chile’s industrial growth, which took at face value census figures showing a dramatic decline in women’s industrial work after 1907, Hutchison shows how the spread of industrial sweatshops and changing definitions of employment in the census combined to make female labor disappear from census records at the same time that it was in fact burgeoning in urban areas. In addition to population and industrial censuses, Hutchison culls published and archival sources to illuminate such misconceptions and to reveal how women’s paid labor became a locus of anxiety for a society confronting social problems—both real and imagined—that were linked to industrialization and modernization. The limited options of working women were viewed by politicians, elite women, industrialists, and labor organizers as indicative of a society in crisis, she claims, yet their struggles were also viewed as the potential springboard for reform. Labors Appropriate to Their Sex thus demonstrates how changing norms concerning gender and work were central factors in conditioning the behavior of both male and female workers, relations between capital and labor, and political change and reform in Chile. This study will be rewarding for those whose interests lie in labor, gender, or Latin American studies; as well as for those concerned with the histories of early feminism, working-class women, and sexual discrimination in Latin America.
Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics. Through their voluntary associations, legislative petitions, presence at political meetings and rallies, and published appeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to such controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society, to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties, to the literary defense of slavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, these women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as mediators who infused public life with the "feminine" virtues of compassion and harmony.
Including contributions by both British and American researchers, this book explores equal value developments in the two countries. Through thematic chapters and case studies, it examines legal developments, trade union activity, the operation of job evaluation, and the race and class politics of equal value. Both the possibilities and the limits of equal value reform are discussed.
The post-World War II years in the United States were marked by the business community's efforts to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty. Based on research in a wide variety of business and labor sources, this detailed account shows how business permeated every aspect of American life, including factories, schools, churches, and community institutions.
National Protection for National Citizens, 1873 to 1880 is the third of six planned volumes of TheSelected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The entire collection documents the friendship and accomplishments of two of America's most important social and political reformers. Though neither Stanton nor Anthony lived to see passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, each of them devoted fifty-five years to the cause of woman suffrage. The third volume of the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opens while woman suffragists await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in cases testing whether the Constitution recognized women as voters within the terms of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. At its close they are pursuing their own amendment to the Constitution and pressing the presidential candidates of 1880 to speak in its favor. Through their letters, speeches, articles, and diaries, the volume recounts the national careers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as popular lecturers, their work with members of Congress to expand women's rights, their protests during the Centennial Year of 1876, and the launch that same year of their campaign for a Sixteenth Amendment.
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