On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (Working Class in American History) - Softcover

Milkman, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252081773 ISBN 13: 9780252081774

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define.

Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.

A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at The CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement and Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II.

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On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

By Ruth Milkman

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08177-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Abbreviations, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Women's Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression, 13, 
2 Redefining "Women's Work": The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II, 47, 
3 Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor: Historical Perspectives on "Women's Work" and the American Labor Movement, 79, 
4 Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Management's Postwar Purge of Women Automobile Workers, 119, 
5 Women's History and the Sears Case, 139, 
6 Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective, 164, 
7 Union Responses to Workforce Feminization in the United States, 184, 
8 Two Worlds of Unionism: Women and the Twenty-First Century Labor Movement, 205, 
9 The Macrosociology of Paid Domestic Labor Co-authored with Ellen Reese and Benita Roth, 225, 
10 Class Disparities, Market Fundamentalism, and Work-Family Policy: Lessons from California, 253, 
11 Women's Work and Economic Crisis Revisited: Comparing the Great Recession and the Great Depression, 275, 
Index, 301, 

CHAPTER 1

Women's Work and Economic Crisis

Some Lessons of the Great Depression

This chapter, although focusing on the experience of women workers during the Great Depression and World War II, also reflects the era in which it was written — the 1970s — when traditional family arrangements were still largely intact, and when the surge in labor force participation among mothers of young children and the entry of college-educated women into the elite professions was just beginning. Another crucial context for this chapter was the burgeoning of Marxist-feminist theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the argument here is deeply influenced by that literature but also presents a challenge to it. Originally published in 1976, this work was the first to critique the widely accepted precept that women workers were a "reserve army" of labor, pulled into the labor force during periods of economic expansion and then expelled during recessions or depressions. The central argument of this chapter is that job segregation by gender endures even during major economic upheavals like depressions and world wars. It shows that women were less likely to suffer unemployment than men during the Great Depression, contrary to what the "reserve army" theory suggests. However, women's unpaid work in the home did serve to absorb some of the economic pressures created by the most severe economic crisis of the twentieth century.

Introduction

In the course of capitalist development, women have come to play an increasingly important role in the sphere of paid labor, and yet participation in that sphere continues to be ideologically defined as "male." This disparity between the cultural definition of women and the reality of their material situation stems from a contradiction basic to the structure of capitalism. On the one hand, there is the continuing need for the family, particularly women's unpaid labor in it, and, on the other hand, the tendency for an increasing amount of human activity to be integrated into the sphere of commodity production in the course of economic growth.

The family lost its role as the primary unit of social production with the development of industrial capitalism, but as an institution it remains central to that form of economic organization, performing many vital functions. Women have been designated as the people responsible for the execution of these functions in the home. They provide a wide variety of personal services — preparing meals, cleaning the home, providing basic healthcare, and so forth. This work is necessary to the maintenance of the working ability, or labor power, of adult family members, and to the preparation of a new generation of workers. Women also do most of the family's buying, and the institution is the basic unit of commodity consumption. In addition, women instill in their children and maintain in their husbands the individualistic values basic to capitalist society, and they are responsible for emotionally and sexually maintaining their husbands. Family "life" is defined in direct opposition to work, as the one place where people can escape the "impersonal forces" of the economy. As wives and mothers, women are expected to absorb any tension generated by those forces. Finally, of course, they bear children, society's next generation of workers.

It is theoretically conceivable that all of the family's functions could be taken over by other institutions, and that the work involved, with the exception of childbearing, could be done by persons of either sex. However, there are a number of good reasons for preserving the present arrangement within the context of a capitalist society. First, the work done by women in the home retains a pre-capitalistic, wageless form, so that the costs of maintaining and reproducing its labor power are borne fully by the working class. Without families, adult men and women could probably fend for themselves, but the twenty-four-hours-a-day job of caring for young children would be very expensive if it were transformed into wage labor. Moreover, while it may be profitable for individual capitalists to hire waged workers to produce the essential personal services otherwise supplied by women in families as a "labor of love," this is not in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, for wages must rise to cover the cost to the worker of such necessities.

Second, the small nuclear family is an optimal unit of consumption, generating much larger demand for household appliances, televisions, and so forth, than would obtain if housework and family activities were socialized. In addition, assigning women the responsibility for making the family into a "haven" from the frustrations of the world of work — at least for men — is tremendously accommodative to the needs of a society in which most jobs are inherently unsatisfying.

The family is, for all of these reasons, an important component of our economic system, and this is the material basis of the cultural definition of women as primarily wives and mothers. And yet, with economic development and growth, increasing numbers of women have entered the paid labor force, in a wide range of occupations. This, in women's real lives, has meant greater opportunity to receive pay for their labor, a development that threatens the culturally prescribed sexual division of labor assigning them the responsibility to work without pay to maintain their families.

There is, then, a real contradiction between the economy's need for women as unpaid family workers and its tendency to draw all available labor power, regardless of sex, into the sphere of production for profit. This creates a disjuncture between the ideology about sex roles, which continues to define women with reference to their family role, and the material reality of their increasing participation in the "male" sphere of paid production. As a result, as Juliet Mitchell has pointed out, women who work for pay tend nevertheless to view themselves as wives and mothers, not as "workers."

Because the economic role of women is obscured (its cheapness obscures it) women workers do not have the pre-conditions of class consciousness. Their exploitation is invisible behind an ideology that masks the fact that they work at all — their work...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252081773
• ISBN 13: 9780252081774
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar