The United Front of Women

By the turn of the twentieth century, more than 350,000 women were gainfully employed in New York City. The majority of these women, like the majority of female wage earners in the United States generally, worked in service occupations. Nearly 150,000 were personal servants and domestic workers. Additional tens of thousands labored as retail clerks, waitresses, and laundresses.1 A substantial and rapidly growing minority of female laborers made up New York City's industrial work force. In 1900, 132,535 women worked in the city's manufacturing establishments.2 As a center for the manufacture of nondurable goods and as the home of the women's and men's clothing trades, New York employed more female industrial workers than any other American city.3 Female factory workers in New York City labored in a large number of industries and were involved in a broad variety of work processes. Thousands of women stripped, rolled, and packed cigars. They assembled paper boxes, dipped and wrapped candies, trimmed hats, and created artificial flowers and feathers. The heaviest concentration of female industrial workers was in the needle trades. Approximately 65,000 women were engaged in the manufacture of clothing: over 15,000 were employed in the men's garment industry and over 50,000 in the women's ready-made clothing trades.4 Despite the growing importance of women in New York City's industrial work force, very few of them were organized. Union membership was rare among early twentiethcentury New York City working women. Trade union membership statistics paint a dismal picture of women's record from 1900 to 1909. Although more than 350,000 women were employed in the city at the turn of the century, fewer than 10,000 belonged to unions.5 What was more, although the numbers of female workers increased during the first decade of the twentieth century, the number of female unionists in New York City followed a downward trend from 1900 to 1909, particularly during the economic depression of 1907-1908.6 The experiences of the Women's Trade Union League of New York, a feminist labor organization founded late in 1903, are valuable for understanding the special difficulties involved in organizing early twentieth-century working women. In addition, the history of the New York League is useful for examining the problems feminists faced in synthesizing a commitment to the women's movement with a commitment to organized labor. The New York Women's Trade Union League, like its parent organization, the National Women's Trade Union League of America, was made up of female social

The women's movement and the left confront an urgent political task; to develop a theory of women's oppression and women's liberation that is simultaneously Marxist and feminist. The problem is not new. The contemporary women's movement, now more than ten years old, has always included a strong trend—known as socialist-feminism or Marxist-feminism—that seeks to merge the two traditions so self-consciously linked with a hyphen. Similarly, the left has in recent years been forced to face weaknesses in its own practice and theory, and has begun to look for better answers to what has generally been termed "the woman question." Yet despite considerable searching and some floundering, neither merger nor answers has appeared.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Labor, gender and, class have each been identified as important reconstructive forces of the American constitutional order, but rarely has a single organization provided an opportunity to directly study the interrelationship of all these forces during a critical period of constitutional change. This article examines one such organization during the years leading up to the New Deal: The Women's Trade Union League. The WTUL, which uniquely mixed middle-class and working-class membership, was founded in 1903 to facilitate trade union organizing by women. Its labor approach, however, would ultimately fail, pushing the league to more fully embrace its connections to the middle-class leadership of the women's movement, thereby transforming its strategic approach and constitutional outlook away from the anti-statist voluntarism of the labor movement to the pragmatic and statist maternalism of the women's movement. The WTUL would subsequently become an important contributor to the legislative program of progressive reformers flourishing during this period under the gendered exception to free contract liberty won inMuller v. Oregonin 1908. This strategic organizational transformation would create tensions within the league and between the league and women workers, as well as invite constitutional consequences for women workers that would resonate for years, long past the constitutional revolution of 1937 and the apparent constitutional reintegration of male and female labor. This case study, therefore, provides a unique lens through which to view not only the constitutional tradeoffs of the adoption of the gendered Constitution as an alternative to the labor Constitution, but also the impact of the resource-conscious decision making of social-movement actors that is often overlooked by constitutional scholars preoccupied with judicial decision making.

This article deals with three themes: how industrialization influenced British women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, how the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) organized women to participate in trade unions, and how the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW), along with the Women's Trade Union League, struggled against poor working conditions during this period by promoting unionism as well as legislation. Before industrialization, British women contributed to their families by working in the agricultural sector as well as in textile manufacturing in the putting out system. After the Industrial Revolution, and following the rapid growth that took place in the industrial economy in the nineteenth century, women went out to work in factories instead of working at home. In the Victoria era, it was widely accepted that women were not supposed to work outside unless their families were in desperate poverty. However, the Industrial Revolution created many employment opportunities in modern factories for women. Inevitably, this led to many difficulties in the work place, such as low pay, long work hours, bed working conditions, sex-segregation and so on. Women's trade unions established in the late nineteenth century played a significant part in the trade union movement. The Women's Trade Union League and the National Federation of Women Workers worked hard to develop women trade unions and contributed a great deal to social reform, particularly in modern factories with regard to women workers. Their achievements were not only limited to the improvement they obtained for women workers, but included also the encouragement they gave women to become more independent, and increasing social respect for women workers. The main point of this article is to show the growth in social democracy that was characterized by the history of these two women's groups, the WTUL and the NFWW, both of which were established by women trade unionists.

From 1930 to 1950, the New York and Boston Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) chapters focused on organizing poorly paid female service employees, many of them African American or Hispanic, whom the AFL and CIO largely neglected. Scholars who studied the WTUL generally confined their work to the period before 1920. Drawing on new primary sources, this article challenges previous characterizations of the WTUL as moribund after 1920, revealing the WTUL's vitality and innovative organizing methods. The WTUL maintained that New Deal protective legislation would prove largely unenforceable if workers remained unorganized. The article examines how the WTUL combined energetic organizing and legislative lobbying on behalf of laundry workers, domestic servants, cafeteria workers, hotel chambermaids, textile workers, and teachers, considered among the most difficult workers to organize.

The Women's Trade Union League provides an illuminating historical case study of the response of a certain group of women in the early twentieth century to the issues of feminism and class consciousness. As a mixed-class organization of women concerned about the problems of female workers during a period of an active male-dominated labor movement and a middle-class-dominated feminist movement, the WTUL was structurally in an extremely interesting position. As an organization it was not concerned with theoretical issues of feminism and class identity, but it did explicitly and consistently define itself as the women's branch of the labor movement and the industrial branch of the women's movement.

» Notes from the EditorsIn September 1969 Monthly Review published Margaret Benston's article, "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation"—one of the most important early intellectual contributions to the current wave of feminist struggle in the United States. In the more than three decades since we have continued to publish articles by socialist feminists (along with a steady flow of important feminist texts through Monthly Review Press' New Feminist Library)This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

From the late sixties into the eighties there was a vibrant women's movement in the United States. Culturally influential and politically powerful, on its liberal side this movement included national organizations and campaigns for reproductive rights, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and other reforms. On its radical side it included women's liberation and consciousness raising groups, as well as cultural and grassroots projects. The women's movement was also made up of innumerable caucuses and organizing projects in the professions, unions, government bureaucracies, and other institutions. The movement brought about major changes in the lives of many women, and also in everyday life in the United States. It opened to women professions and blue-collar jobs that previously had been reserved for men. It transformed the portrayal of women by the media. It introduced the demand for women's equality into politics, organized religion, sports, and innumerable other arenas and institutions, and as a result the gender balance of participation and leadership began to change. By framing inequality and oppression in family and personal relations as a political question, the women's movement opened up public discussion of issues previously seen as private, and therefore beyond public scrutiny. The women's movement changed the way we talk, and the way we think. As a result, arguably most young women now believe that their options are or at least should be as open as men's.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Barbara Epstein's answer to "What Happened to the Women's Movement?" (Monthly Review, May 2001) explains much of the decline of the intense, exciting, radical and socialist feminist organizing of the 1960s and 1970s, with its visions of societal transformation and women's emancipation. However, I think that she underemphasizes, or even ignores, some important parts of a comprehensive answer. These have to do with the daunting reality facing revolutionary visions, the strength of opposition to women's equality with men, and changes in economic and political relations that now seem to require new visions and ways of organizing.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

In the September 1969 issue of Monthly Review there is an article by Margaret Benston on The Political Economy of Women's Liberation. She defines women as group of people who are responsible for the production of simple usevalues in those activities associated with the home and family. Further, they are denied an active place in the market and remain a very convenient and elastic part of the industrial reserve army. While agreeing with Benston's analysis of women's role in the home, we feel that the changing sex composition of the labor force since the Second World War belies her emphasis on women as houseworkers, which minimizes their role as wage laborers. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

During the nineteenth century (say from 1820 to 1920) the women's movement in the United States was not a single movement, but rather three movements which were consciously movements for the rights of women. There was an industrial working-class women's movement for economic improvement and equality which began with the earliest factories in the United States, the New England textile mills of the 1830s. Second, there was a black women's movement made up of working- and middle-class black women against racism and for both economic improvement and legal equality with whites. This also had its roots in the 1830s, in the black convention movements. And finally, there was the white middle-class movement for legal equality which had its beginnings in women's attempts to become full legal members of their class, also in the 1830s.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The following is a chapter (slightly abbreviated) from Jack Belden's remarkable book China Shakes the World. First published in 1949, it has now been reissued by Monthly Review Press with a new introduction by Owen Lattimore, who ranks it as one of the three great classics by Americans about the Chinese Revolution (the others being Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China and William Hinton's Fanshen) and calls it a "neglected masterpiece." Jack Belden worked his way out to China as an able-bodied seaman and jumped ship in Hong Kong. "From the beginning," says Lattimore, "he seems to have distrusted the intelligentsia and to have had a fellowfeeling for the disinherited and the down-and-out. He was the man who knew what underemployed peasants, underpaid workers, and sullen soldiery did about sex and drink and drugs." The book which Belden produced, as the Communists were assuming full power throughout all of China, was indeed an unequalled panorama of the revolution as seen by the people themselves. We have chosen this chapter because it deals with the place of the women's struggle in the Revolution, and is therefore of special interest to today's developing movement for women's liberation. In the preceding chapter (too long for inclusion here but one which we hope all our readers will read), Belden has told the story of Gold Flower, a young woman who "turned over" and, aided by the women of her village, drove her husband out. —The Editors.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

On May 11, Charles Bettelheim submitted his resignation as president of the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association, citing growing misgivings about events in China since the death of Mao Tse-tung and disagreements with the attitude of the dominant faction within the association toward the post-Mao Chinese leadership and its political line. Professor Bettelheim's letter of resignation was published in somewhat abbreviated form by Le Monde, and through this and other channels reached a wide international audience interested in developments in the Peoples Republic.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, editors, Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and the Revolt from Below During the Long Seventies (New York: Verso, 2010), 472 pages, $29.95, paperback.Rebel Rank and File is a collection of articles that surveys the building, heydey, and decline of rank and file workers' movement in the fields, mines, auto plants, schools, trucking and phone companies in the late 1960s through the 1970s. What makes this book so valuable is that the first half is devoted to detailing the context of these struggles—the political economy in which they were set. It begs the reader to look deeper into the basis of the book—bureaucratized unions, with leaders hell bent on maintaining power no matter the cost, who serve as buck privates in the Democratic Party army, and who need a compliant base every bit as much as the employers. The authors develop a number of interconnected themes: the single minded union strategy based on endless capitalist growth, parochialism, the private welfare state, pragmatism, anti-communism, influence of anti-war, black power and women's movements—all of which then help the reader to see similarities of the different rank and file experiences, no matter the work or union.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

As an old Marxist and an old psychoanalyst, I have read with interest Margaret Benston's article, "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," in the September 1969 issue of Monthly Review. She rightly approaches the problem by first making the distinction between socialized and private labor, i.e., work for the market giving exchange-value and work for direct consumption having only use-value. The product of the work a woman does in her home has use-value, not exchange value. The author then says: "The material basis for the inferior status of women is to be found in just this definition of women.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.