Gendering Labor History (The Working Class in American History (Wca)) - Softcover

Kessler-Harris, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252073932 ISBN 13: 9780252073939

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

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 are divided into four sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of Alice Kessler-Harris's central project: showing gender's fundamental importance in the shaping of United States history and working class culture.

The first section considers women and organized labor while 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 shows Kessler-Harris continuing to push the field of American history to greater levels of inclusion and analysis.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University. Her books include In Pursuit of Equity: How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship, which won the Joan Kelly, Phillip Taft, and Bancroft prizes; Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States; and A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences.

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Gendering Labor History

By Alice Kessler-Harris

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2007 Alice Kessler-Harris
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780252073939

Chapter One

"Where Are the Organized Women Workers?"

"The organization of women," wrote Fannia Cohn, an officer of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), to William Green, the newly elected president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), "is not merely a moral question, but also an economic one. Men will never be certain with their conditions unless the conditions of the millions of women are improved." Her letter touched a home truth and yet in 1925, the year in which the letter was written, the AFL, after nearly forty years of organizing, remained profoundly ambivalent about the fate of more than eight million wage-earning women.

During these four decades of industrial growth, the women who worked in the industrial labor force had not passively waited to be organized. Yet their best efforts had been tinged with failure. Figures for union members are notoriously unreliable, and estimates fluctuate widely. But something like 3.3 percent of the women who were engaged in industrial occupations in 1900 were organized into trade unions. As low as that figure was, it was to decline even further. Around 1902 and 1903 trade-union membership among women began to decrease, reaching a low of 1.5 percent in 1910. Then, a surge of organization among garment workers lifted it upwards. A reasonable estimate might put 6.6 percent of wage-earning women into trade unions by 1920. In a decade that saw little change in the relative proportion of female and male workers, the proportion of women who were trade-union members quadrupled, increasing at more than twice the rate for trade-union members in general. Even so, the relative numbers of wage-earning women who were trade-union members remained tiny. One in every five men in the industrial workforce belonged to a union, compared to one in every fifteen women. Although more than 20 percent of the labor force was female, less than 8 percent of organized workers were women. And five years later, when Fannia Cohn was urging William Green to pay attention to female workers, these startling gains had already been eroded.

Figures like these have led historians of the working class to join turn-of-the-century labor organizers in lamenting the difficulty of unionizing female workers. Typically, historians argue that the traditional place of women in families, as well as their position in the workforce, inhibited trade unionism. Statistical overviews support these arguments. At the turn of the century, most wage-earning women were young, temporary workers who looked to marriage as a way to escape the shop or factory; 85 percent of these women were unmarried, and nearly half were under twenty-five years old. Most women worked at traditionally hard-to-organize unskilled jobs: a third were domestic servants, and almost one quarter worked in the garment and textile industries. The remainder were scattered in a variety of industrial and service jobs, including the tobacco and boot and shoe industries, department stores, and laundries. Wage-earning women often came from groups without a union tradition: about half of all working women were immigrants or their daughters who shared rural backgrounds. In the cities, that figure sometimes climbed to 90 percent.

For all these reasons, women in the labor force unionized with difficulty. Yet dramatic fluctuations in the proportions of organized working women testify to their potential for organization. And the large numbers of unions in which the proportion of women enrolled exceeded their numbers in the industry urge us to seek further explanations for the small proportions of women who actually became union members.

No apparent change either in the type of women who worked or in the occupational structure explains the post-1902 decline in the proportion of unionized women. On the contrary, several trends suggest the potential for a rise in their numbers. The decline began at the point when union membership was increasing dramatically after the devastating depression of 1893-97. The proportion of first-generation immigrant women who were working dropped after the turn of the century, only to be matched by an increase in the proportion of their Americanized daughters who worked. Married women entered the labor force in larger numbers, suggesting at once a more permanent commitment to jobs and greater need for the security unions could provide. Large declines in the proportion of domestic workers reduced the numbers of women in these isolated, low-paying, and traditionally hard-to-organize jobs. At the same time, increases in office and clerical workers, department-store clerks, and factory operatives offered fertile areas for promoting unionization among women. Strenuous organizing campaigns by and among women in all these areas achieved few results.

Although cultural background, traditional roles, and social expectations hindered some unionizing efforts, they were clearly not insurmountable barriers. Given a chance, women were devoted and successful union members, convinced that unionism would serve them as it seemed to be serving their brothers. In the words of a seventeen-year-old textile worker, "We all work hard for a mean living. Our boys belong to the miners' union so their wages are better than ours. So I figured that girls must have a union. Women must act like men, ain't?" In the garment workers' union, where the majority of members were women, they often served as shop "chairladies" and reached positions of minor importance in the union structure. Faigele Shapiro recalled how her union activity began at the insistence of a business agent but quickly became an absorbing interest. In these unions, women arrested on picket lines thought highly enough of the union to try to save it bail money by offering to spend the night in jail before they returned to the line in the morning.

In mixed unions, women often led men in militant actions. Iowa cigar makers reported in 1899 that some striking men had resumed work, while the women were standing pat. Boot and shoe workers in Massachusetts were reported in 1905 to be tough bargainers. "'It is harder to induce women to compromise,'" said their president. "'They are more likely to hold out to the bitter end ... to obtain exactly what they want.'" The great uprising of 1909, in which twenty thousand women walked out of New York's garment shops, occurred over the objections of the male leadership, striking terror into the hearts of Jewish men afraid "of the security of their jobs." Polish "spool girls" protesting a rate cut in the textile mills of Chicopee, Massachusetts, refused their union's suggestion that they arbitrate and won a resounding victory. Swedish women enrolled in a Chicago Custom Clothing Makers local lost a battle against their bosses' attempts to subdivide and speed up the sewing process when the largely male United Garment Workers union agreed to the bosses' conditions. The bosses promptly locked out the women, forcing many to come to terms and others to seek new jobs. At the turn of the century, female garment workers in San Francisco and tobacco strippers, overall makers and sheepskin workers, and telephone operators in Boston ran highly successful sex-segregated unions.

If traditional explanations for women's failure to organize extensively in this period are not satisfying, they nevertheless offer clues to understanding the unionization...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252073932
• ISBN 13: 9780252073939
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande