Gender at Work

Abstract

This stunning collection of previously published essays demonstrates a life's passion for advancing economic justice through historical scholarship. For over three decades Alice Kessler-Harris has sought to tackle the question asked by economist Theresa Wolfson in 1925, ‘Where Are the Organized Women Workers?’, by exploring the gendered dimensions of work, and the roles played by state policy and labour organizations in diminishing women's economic citizenship relative to men's. To reread these essays is to journey into intellectual biography, to chart the major trends in the study of women, gender and the working class that Kessler-Harris has done so much to pioneer. It is to remember with delight her insights into sex segregation, the domestic ideal, family wage and gendered imagination – terms many historians now take for granted. Gender as both ‘a material construct’ and ‘a meaning system’ (p. 137) provided her with building blocks in the 1980s when the writing of labour history in the United States had fragmented into studies of discrete communities and occupations. She turned to gender not to bypass class but to understand better its workings.