Authors: Alice Kessler-Harris
ISBN-13: 9780195157093, ISBN-10: 0195157095
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: February 2003
Edition: 20th Edition
Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University, where she also teaches in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is the author of A Woman's Wage, Women Have Always Worked and In Pursuit of Equity.
First published in 1982, this pioneering work traces the transformation of "women's work" into wage labor in the United States, identifying the social, economic, and ideological forces that have shaped our expectations of what women do. Basing her observations upon the personal experience of individual American women set against the backdrop of American society, Alice Kessler-Harris examines the effects of class, ethnic and racial patterns, changing perceptions of wage work for women, and the relationship between wage-earning and family roles. In the 20th Anniversary Edition of this landmark book, the author has updated the original and written a new Afterword.
I | Forming the Female Wage Labor Force: Colonial America to the Civil War | |
1 | Limits of Independence in the Colonial Economy | 3 |
2 | From Household Manufactures to Wage Work | 20 |
3 | Industrial Wage Earners and the Domestic Ideology | 45 |
II | The Idea of Home and Mother at Work: The Civil War to World War I | |
4 | "Why Is It Can a Woman Not Be Virtuous If She Does Mingle with the Toilers?" | 75 |
5 | Women's Choices in an Expanding Labor Market | 108 |
6 | Technology, Efficiency, and Resistance | 142 |
7 | Protective Labor Legislation | 180 |
III | Transforming the Notion of Work for Women: World War I to the Present | |
8 | Ambition and Its Antidote in a New Generation of Female Workers | 217 |
9 | Some Benefits of Labor Segregation in a Decade of Depression | 250 |
10 | "Making History Working for Victory" | 273 |
11 | The Radical Consequences of Incremental Change | 300 |
A Note of Acknowledgment | 320 | |
Epilogue | 325 | |
Notes | 337 | |
Index | 403 |