Historians and the Working-class Woman in America

Abstract

In the past two decades American social history has shifted its emphasis from institutions and personal leadership to the collective experience and structure of people's daily work and home life. This broader social approach has in turn reshaped the field of labor studies, stimulated the systematic investigation of the family, and drawn special attention to the variety of women's experience. A number of excellent studies on women workers, in and outside the home, have happily been anthologized by Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie in Class, Sex and the Woman Worker, Mn a manner which suggests lines of synthesis for the previously more segmented approaches to labor, family, women, and related topics. It is useful to characterize the new scholarly directions which Cantor and Laurie seek to exemplify through this collection of essays. Until recently, American labor history had been studied mainly from the point of view of institutional economics, to the neglect of the social history of working people. The study of union organization and major events has been replaced in recent years by an interest in working-class culture, in workers' values and attitudes, as expressed in their rhetoric, symbols, rituals, and job actions. The new field of family history, originally preoccupied with determining the nature of household structures, has turned to an assessment of variations in family economy, the division of labor within the home, and the adaptability of family life to changing patterns of work and leisure under the impact of different stages of industrialization. In similar fashion, the study of women's work has shifted its focus from the oppression and subordination of women in industrial capitalist enterprises to the attitudes, expectations, and responses of women to their various kinds of work over time. Attention has also come to be concen