Alice Kessler-Harris Research Articles

Radical Romance in the Piedmont: Olive Tilford Dargan's Gastonia Novels

In 1929, the National Textile Workers Union led a violent strike in Gastonia, North Carolina that caught the attention of the national and international media. At that time, the Piedmont region was particularly resistant to union organizing and the Communist-led NTWU pushed boundaries even further by attempting to unionize across racial divides. Increased violence on the picket line led to the murders of Police Chief Orville F. Anderholt and a popular strike leader named Ella May Wiggins. When NTWU leaders Fred Beal and Vera Buch were accused of Anderholt's murder, the liberal media quickly connected this southern trial to that of anarchists Sacco and Venzetti, two Italian immigrants whose trial and execution solidified their place as labor heroes. The Labor Defender and New Masses featured Wiggins's plight as a single mother, raising her children on her meager salary; her death at the hands of management thugs quickly captured the imagination of the American public. Because women like Ella May Wiggins and Vera Buch became instant heroines, the Gastonia labor struggle became a symbol of the strength, courage, and tenacity of women workers in America. These dramatic events in Gastonia inspired at least six novels, four written by women and two by men. (1) In this article, I will focus on two novels by Olive Tilford Dargan in order to investigate the ways in which Dargan addresses both the political and personal dramas of these uncompromising southern women in the development of her heroine, Ishma Waycaster. (2) The narrative in Dargan's first novel, Call Home the Heart 0932), climaxes during the events of the Gastonia strike, but Dargan continues to focus on labor rebellion in the sequel, A Stone Came Rolling (1935), a novel that affirms Ishma Waycaster's role as leader of her working-class community. While Call Home the Heart has received some critical attention thus far, most critics focus on Ishma's failure to triumph over her latent racism. For example, in her recent assessment of Dargan's literary contributions to proletarian literature, Anna Shannon Elfenbein points to Ishma's regression to base instincts at the end of Call Home the Heart as representative of her failure as a heroine. However, I believe that Dargan made important revisions to the standard proletarian conversion narrative in her construction of Ishma Waycaster, revisions which become clearer when her Gastonia novels are read as one continuous narrative. Moreover, I will focus primarily on the events in Ishma's life as they evolve into what I will call radical romance, a narrative strategy in direct contrast to those employed by male authors in the 1930s. A careful analysis of the literary texts written in response to the Gastonia strike reveals a gendered difference around the issue of sexuality: male authors view the sexual undercurrent of a workers' strike as a threat to masculine agency in the contest between management and workers, while female authors view expressions of female sexuality as a site of potential resistance and political strength. In making this argument, I do not ignore the decidedly masculine tone set by critics like Mike Gold, whose 1928 call to Go was directed at the wild (male) youth, at work in the coalmines (Folsom 188). As the newly minted editor of New Masses, Gold was in the position to set the ideological and theoretical pace for left-leaning writers of the 1930s. His views reflect what feminist critics have since noted about leftist ideologues: they gave lip service to issues involving gender, they often downplayed or ignored the woman question. According to Alice KesslerHarris and Paul Lauter, though leftist ideology in the 1930S recognized the 'special oppression' of women and formally espoused sexual equality, in practice, the Left tended to subordinate problems of gender to the overwhelming tasks of organizing the working class and fighting fascism (Introduction ix). …

A Rich and Adventurous Journey: The Transnational Journey of Gender History in the United States

A Rich and Adventurous Journey:The Transnational Journey of Gender History in the United States Alice Kessler-Harris (bio) In the mid 1980s, I became involved with a group of historians from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway who were intrigued by some of the same questions around wage-earning women that had long fascinated me. Several trips to Scandinavia and a comparative project later, I began to assess the impact of this kind of involvement on my work as a historian of the United States.1 Because that assessment occurred at about the same time as I, like many other historians of women, began to turn toward gender as an explanatory category, it opened the question of how gender, which had so effectively participated in reshaping our national history, could help us to think across national boundaries as well. My experience was probably not unusual. In the 1980s and after, many historians of women in the United States began to turn to gender as one way to understand systems of ideas that shaped national politics. As they—we—did so, it became clear that the only way to hold gender constant was to look at it across cultures rather than within them. In the brief comments that follow, I try to trace the history of a gendered transnational history as it has affected the work of historians of the United States. I argue that historians of women and gender within the United States helped to reframe our discipline even as our increasing awareness of national historical traditions outside the United States shaped the practice of women's and gender history within it. Although transnationalism has opened up a ground for gendered comparisons, gender has been one of the integrative devices that have enabled the practice of an international or transnational history. Women's history in the United States is a huge and unwieldy subfield, so what follows is necessarily idiosyncratic: it constitutes a very personal view of the development of a field. In its modern incarnation, the history of women in the United States dates back to the late 1960s. Although it cannot then be said to have been part of an effort to reshape a discipline, the pioneering work of Eleanor Flexner, Gerda Lerner, and Ann Scott played an enormous role in encouraging young scholars to rethink their work.2 Its expansion over a span of nearly forty years has been shaped and encouraged by three things: prevailing practices in the discipline of history; the structure of academia in the United States; and the influence of a vital women's movement.3 Each of these helped to nurture the new subfield of women's history and its transformation into the history of women and gender. [End Page 153] Historians trained in the United States were in some sense lucky. In the 1960s, the field of history was in flux—some would say crisis—wrought by a controversial war in Vietnam, a powerful civil rights movement, and a widespread cultural revolution. The first demanded a new look at how the history of American domestic politics and foreign, particularly cold war, policy had been written; the second insisted on a reevaluation of how effectively such fundamental values as equality of opportunity had crossed barriers of race; the third raised questions about the imposition of authority and ultimately fostered a history from the bottom up. Each of these contributed to questions about traditional historical wisdom. All of them drew strength from parallel shifts in the structure of American higher education whose dramatic expansion in the postwar period made room in the academy for a new generation of instructors. New possibilities for employment and promotion opened doors to women as well as to men. Now widely known as revisionist, or "new left" historians, the 1960s generation encouraged (although they did not invent) new practices in history, especially in social history, anthropology, quantitative history, material culture, the new labor history, and social movements. All these provided spaces within which to study women and ultimately opened paths toward women's history. At the same time, a newly vibrant women's movement encouraged increasing numbers of young women to seek professional training and to participate in campaigns...

Gendering Labor History by Alice Kessler-Harris

Gendering Labor History by Alice Kessler-Harris

Long Road from Home: An Interview with Alice Kessler-Harris

Other| March 01 2006 Long Road from Home: An Interview with Alice Kessler-Harris Melanie Gustafson Melanie Gustafson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2006) 3 (1): 59–86. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3-1-59 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Melanie Gustafson; Long Road from Home: An Interview with Alice Kessler-Harris. Labor 1 March 2006; 3 (1): 59–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3-1-59 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2006 by Melanie Gustafson2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Commentary: Labor Feminists and a Feminist Labor Movement

Research Article| December 01 2005 Commentary: Labor Feminists and a Feminist Labor Movement Alice Kessler-Harris Alice Kessler-Harris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (4): 54–57. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-4-54 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Alice Kessler-Harris; Commentary: Labor Feminists and a Feminist Labor Movement. Labor 1 December 2005; 2 (4): 54–57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2-4-54 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reading Roundtable You do not currently have access to this content.

Bringing the Welfare State Back In: The Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History

The welfare state—the complex of policies that, in one form or another, all rich democracies have adopted to ameliorate destitution and provide valued social goods and services—is an increasingly central subject in the study of American history and politics. The past decade has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of books on the topic, including, from historians, Alice Kessler-Harris'sIn Pursuit of Equityand Michael Katz'sThe Price of Citizenship, and, from political scientists, Robert Lieberman'sShifting the Color Lineand Peter Swenson'sCapitalists Against Markets. Journals ranging from theAmerican Historical ReviewtoPolitical Science Quarterly(and, with less regularity, even theAmerican Political Science Review) now routinely feature analyses of U.S. social policy. And going back just a few years more, the early 1990s saw the publication of several influential works on the subject, notably Paul Pierson'sDismantling the Welfare State?and Theda Skocpol'sProtecting Soldiers and Mothers, each of which won major book prizes in political science. If any moment deserves to be seen as a heady time for writing on the American welfare state, this is it.

Measuring Economic Citizenship: A Comment on Alice Kessler-Harris

Journal Article Measuring Economic Citizenship: A Comment on Alice Kessler-Harris Get access Ana M. Guillén Ana M. Guillén Universidad de Oviedo, Spain Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 10, Issue 2, Summer 2003, Pages 186–195, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxg010 Published: 01 July 2003

Economic Citizenship: A Comment

The call for economic citizenship in the sense of economic autonomy for women, entailing both economic freedom and security and inscribing caring rights, would meet with the approval of most European feminist writers on social policy. But there are problems, from a European perspective, with the way Alice Kessler-Harris frames and develops her argument. First, economic citizenship is elaborated in contradistinction to social rights and entitlements; economic and social rights are conceptualized as belonging in separate boxes. However, in European welfare states, the work/welfare relationship has always been central to the development of social policies, and it is more a question of unpacking the way this relationship has been reformulated over time. Second, it puts labor market participation firmly in the driver’s seat and then suggests terms and conditions that will facilitate women’s employment. This is, in fact, a pretty fair picture of where policy in many Western European countries (and at the level of the European Commission) has arrived. It is in effect to advocate an adult worker model family with collectively provided supports for families. I argue, however, that such a position is insufficient to ensure gender equality. Indeed, to address the issue of gender equality we need to specify a more complicated policy grid that takes in both employment and workplace-focused policies and care-focused policies.

The story of America: freedom and crisis from settlement to superpower

Exploration and conquest - Cortes and Moctezuma American profile - Francesco-Giuseppe Bressani, James Axtell. The plantation colonies - the founding of Jamestown American profile - Squanto, Elliott West. Puritan New England - the witches of Salem American profile - Anne Hutchinson, Ann Braude. The American Revolution - the Boston massacre American profile - Samuel Adams, Jack N. Rakove. The new republic - the constitutional convention. Jeffersonian America - the Lewis and Clark expedition American profile - John Marshall, Joseph J. Ellis. Jacksonian America - the people's inauguration. Slavery in the Antebellum South - Nat Turner's revolt American profile - William Lloyd Garrison, Ira Berlin. Social reform in Antebellum America - the Seneca Falls Convention American profile - Harriet Beecher Store, Joan Hedrick. The deepening sectional conflict - the compromise of 1850 American profile - Matthew C. Perry, John W. Dower. The road to civil war - John Brown's raid American profile - Harriet Tubman, Catherine Clinton. Civil war and reconstruction - Sherman's march to the sea American profile - Thaddeus Stevens, Eric Foner. The American West - the Battle of the Little Bighorn American profile - Quanah Parker, Elliot West. The gilded age - the Pullman Strike American profile - John Fiske, David Levering Lewis. The crisis of the 1890s - the 1896 election. Becoming a world power - the Filipino revolt American profile - Henry Cabot Lodge, Thomas Fleming. The progressive era - the triangle fire American profile - Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Barone. The new era - Lindbergh's flight American profile - Robert A. Millikan, Daniel J. Kevles. The new deal - the hundred days American profile - Jim Braddock & Joe Louis, Geoffrey C. Ward. World War II - the attack of Pearl Harbour American profile - Wendell L. Willkie, Robert Dallek. The Cold War at home - the Hiss-Chambers Case American profile - Lillian Hellman, Alice Kessler-Harris. Pax Americana - the Cuban Missile Crisis American profile - George F. Kennan, Robert Dallek. The sixties - the march on Washington American profile - Coya Knutson, Richard Reeves. The seventies - the Watergate Crisis American profile - Jimmy Carter, William E. Leuchtenburg. The end of the Cold War - the last days of the Soviet Union. A new millennium - September 11, 2001.

In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy. In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a gendered imagination that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable. In this brilliant account that traces social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs has distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit the freedom and equality of women. Government rules generally sought to protect women from exploitation, even from employment itself; but at the same time, they attached the most important benefits to wage work. To be a real citizen, one must earn-and most policymakers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women were not, and should not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris traces the impact of this gender bias in the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair labor standards, in Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. For generations, she writes, American women lacked not merely the practice, but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom. Only in the 1960s and '70s did old assumptions begin to break down-yet the process is far from complete. Even today, with women closer to full economic citizenship than ever before, Kessler-Harris's insights offer a keen new understanding of the issues that dominate the headlines, from the marriage penalty in the tax code to the glass ceiling in corporate America.

'Not a Man's Union': Women Teamsters in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s

This article traces the transformation of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a labor organization that had formally excluded women, but began to recruit them into membership in the 1940s. Government directives forced the temporary abeyance of the exclusionary policy during World War II, and after the war the union leadership's desire to expand the organization's size and scope led to a dramatic shift; women were then welcomed as members and promised equal treatment. Women Teamsters in this period, however, still faced discrimination and hostility from employers, coworkers, and some of the union leadership. The efforts of a group of women members in Wisconsin illustrate how female Teamsters challenged unfair treatment while acknowledging the benefits of their union. Their efforts exemplify the process of incremental change historian Alice Kessler-Harris has described and offer a window into the history of women in the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions.

Cultural Studies and the Problems of the Political

In 1992 Alice Kessler-Harris wrote a piece for American Quarterly in an attempt find a mediate position for American Studies in the debate between cultural pluralism and American national For Kessler-Harris multiculturalism is best understood part of a process of redefinition of an inherited, static and exhausted shared American The critical attention given the flowering of multiple identities is not inevitably an invitation to abandon the concept of American identity. It may be understood, rather, a process of questioning which encourages us enter into a new conversation about whether there is still a 'we' at the heart of American culture and wonder how that 'we' is constituted . . ..'>I The redefining process, she pointed out in a familiar argument, was necessitated by the 'silencing' of female and minority voices, silences that in effect underwrote the liberal national narrative which American Studies had helped construct in the 1940s. And the attempt reimpose consensus by contemporary conservatives, understandable an attempt recover a lost sense of community or cultural unity, is deplorable in its imposition of a static tradition, a sense of America as fixed and given. Kessler-Harris's piece addresses one of the mainstays of cultural studies (and postmodern politics) the rise of ethnic particularism often defined (positively and negatively) aggressively anti-nation-state. Working against this context, Kessler-Harris attempts ground multiculturalism in

"We Are All Leaders": The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s

We Are All Leaders describes a kind of union qualitatively different from the bureaucratic business unions that make up the AFL-CIO today. From African American nutpickers in St. Louis, chemical and rubber workers in Akron, textile workers in the South, and bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta, packinghouse and garment workers in Minnesota, seamen in San Francisco, and labor party campaigns throughout the country, workers in the 1930s were experimenting with community-based unionism. Contributors to this volume draw on interviews with participants in the events described, first-person narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to tell what workers of the 1930s did. The alternative unionism of the 1930s was democratic, deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based on egalitarianism. The cry, We are all leaders! resonated among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, often ignored by historians, has much to teach us today about union organizing. CONTRIBUTORS: Rosemary Feurer, Peter Rachleff, Janet Irons, Mark D. Naison, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth Faue, Michael Kozura, John Borsos, Stan Weir A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilenz

Class in a Multicultural Age: Organization of American Historians Meeting

The April 1997 conference of Organization of American Historians (OAH) in San Francisco was thematically centered on the meanings of citizenship. Despite relatively expansive body of work by labor histor ians which has directly or indirectly addressed this theme over years, there were relatively few sessions that dealt with labor or working-class history. I attended several of these panels but was most intrigued by a session on Recasting Citizenship: The Uses of Class in a Multicultural Age. The papers and discussion at this panel incorporated both controver sial issues within field of labor history and issues pertinent to future labor and social scholarship?not to mention movements. The panelists represented an impressive cross-section of scholars who have written against grain of a field once centered exclusively on white, male, organized working class. Elizabeth Faue, Robin Kelley, James Horton, Alice Kessler-Harris, and David Roediger have each in their own way challenged and expanded our understanding of class in relation to community, race, and gender. Their observations and comments at this session both sharpened that challenge and generally moved from a schol arly focus to a broader context of academic and social activism. Specifically, issue of uses of class in a multicultural age was approached as a methodological problem, as a political problem within academy, and as a challenge to building a new and vital labor movement. Elizabeth Faue (Wayne State University) opened session with question, What do we do with class in terms of citizenship? She identified a fundamental problem in this relationship by noting that although notions of citizenship have historically been rooted in work and work identities, class and citizenship have been articulated in languages which are both reinforcing and competing. She continued with contention that, gener ally, class has been excluded from national discourse on meaning of citizenship, with a few notable exceptions: rise of American Federa tion of Labor in 1920s, which brought to forefront idea of respectable (white, male) citizen-worker; labor movement of 1930s led by Congress of Industrial Organizations, through which class deter mined scope of claims made on citizenship; and era from 1979 to present, in which class has come into competition with race and gender as a primary determiner of identity. In current era, relationship of class to citizenship and state has remained unclear.

The female economy: the millinery and dressmaking trades, 1860-1930

Hemmed in by work much less than has been thought, women in the late 1800s and early 1900s were the primary entrepreneurs in the millinery and dressmaking trades. The Female Economy explores that lost world of women's dominance, showing how independent, often ambitious businesswomen and the sometimes imperious consumers they served gradually vanished from the scene as custom production gave way to a largely unskilled modern garment industry controlled by men. Wendy Gamber helps overturn the portrait of wage-earning women as docile souls who would find fulfillment only in marriage and motherhood. She combines labor history, women's history, business history, and the history of technology while exploring topics as wide-ranging as the history of pattern-making and the relationship between entrepreneurship and marriage. A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz, and in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Nancy A. Hewitt, and Stephanie Shaw

Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, editors. Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920. Assisted by Jan Lambertz. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1995. Pp. viii, 379. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, editors. <italic>Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920</italic>. Assisted by Jan Lambertz. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1995. Pp. viii, 379. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

World War II, film, and history

The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films-including antiwar films-have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. The image of combat in the Second World War has been shaped by films like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. And despite claims for the alleged impact of widespread television coverage of the Vietnam War, it is actually films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon which have provided the most powerful images of what is seen as the of that much disputed conflict. But to what degree does history written lightning, as Woodrow Wilson allegedly said, represent the reality of the past? To what extent is visual history an oversimplification, or even a distortion of the past? Exploring the relationship between moving images and the society and culture in which they were produced and received, World War II, Film, and History addresses the power these images have had in determining our perception and memories of war. Examining how the public memory of war in the twentieth century has often been created more by a manufactured past than a remembered one, a leading group of historians discusses films dating from the early 1930s through the early 1990s, created by filmmakers the world over, from the United States and Germany to Japan and the former Soviet Union. For example, Freda Freiberg explains how the inter-racial melodramatic Japanese feature film China Nights, in which a manly and protective Japanese naval officer falls in love with a beautiful young Chinese street waif and molds her into a cultured, submissive wife, proved enormously popular with wartime Japanese and helped justify the invasion of China in the minds of many Japanese viewers. Peter Paret assesses the historical accuracy of Kolberg as a depiction of an unsuccessful siege of that German city by a French Army in 1807, and explores how the film, released by Hitler's regime in January 1945, explicitly called for civilian sacrifice and last-ditch resistance. Stephen Ambrose contrasts what we know about the historical reality of the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, with the 1962 release of The Longest Day, in which the major climactic moment in the film never happened at Normandy. Alice Kessler-Harris examines The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a 1982 film documentary about women defense workers on the American home front in World War II, emphasizing the degree to which the documentary's engaging main characters and its message of the need for fair and equal treatment for women resonates with many contemporary viewers. And Clement Alexander Price contrasts Men of Bronze, William Miles's fine documentary about black American soldiers who fought in France in World War I, with Liberators, the controversial documentary by Miles and Nina Rosenblum which incorrectly claimed that African-American troops liberated Holocaust survivors at Dachau in World War II. In today's visually-oriented world, powerful images, even images of images, are circulated in an eternal cycle, gaining increased acceptance through repetition. History becomes an endless loop, in which repeated images validate and reconfirm each other. Based on archival materials, many of which have become only recently available, World War II, Film, and History offers an informative and a disturbing look at the complex relationship between national myths and filmic memory, as well as the dangers of visual images being transformed into reality.

U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays.

This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women's history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, 'intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.' State formation, power, and knowledge have not traditionally been understood as the subjects of women's history, but they are the themes that permeate this book. Individually and together, the essays explore how gender serves to legitimize particular constructions of power and knowledge and to meld these into accepted practice and state policy. They show how the field of women's history has moved from the discovery of women to an evaluation of social processes and institutions. The book is dedicated to pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works. from the book The contributors to this volume grew up into a world in which history was rigidly limited. It paid little attention to social relationships, to issues of race, to the concerns of the poor, and virtually none to women. Women figured in it for their ritual status, as wives of presidents like Abigail Adams or Dolly Madison; for their role as spoilers, from the witches of Salem to Mary Todd Lincoln, or for their sacrificial caregiving, like Clara Barton or Dorothea Dix. Even when women like Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, and Eleanor Roosevelt were named by historians, the radical substance of their work and their lives was routinely ignored. A very few historians of women--Eleanor Flexner, Julia Cherry Spruill, Caroline Ware--worked on the margins of the profession, their contributions unappreciated, and their writing vulnerable to the charge of irrelevance. Contents Part 1. State Formation Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939 Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century Part 2. Power Nell Irvin Painter on 'soul murder' as a legacy of slavery Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health Estelle B. Freedman on women's institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States Part 3. Knowledge Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation's efforts to promulgate women's history Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia

U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar

<i>U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays</i>, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar

General and Miscellaneous - Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States and Australia, 1880–1920. Edited by Ulla Wikander Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. vi, 379. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.

General and Miscellaneous - Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States and Australia, 1880–1920. Edited by Ulla Wikander Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. vi, 379. 19.95, paper. - Volume 56 Issue 4