Treating the male as “other”: Redefining the parameters of labor history

Labor History

Volumn 34, Issue 2-3, 1993, Pages 190-204

  Kessler Harris, Alice ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84963203549     PISSN: 0023656X     EISSN: 14699702     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00236569300890121     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Alice Kessler-Harris is Professor of History and Director of the Women's Studies Program at Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick. Among her books is A Women's Wage (1990). Her article “A New Agenda for American Labor History: A Gendered Analysis and the Question of Class” appears in Kessler-Harris and J. Carroll Moody, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History (1989).
2. This is a revised version of remarks presented at the 13th Annual North American Labor History Conference, October 17-19, 1991.
3. Cited in Theresa Wolfson, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions (NY, 1926), 77-78, from Proceedings of Journeyman Barbers' International Union Convention, 1924.
4. Richard Oestreicher, “Separate Tribes? Working-Class and Women's History?” Reviews in American History, 19 (1991), 228.
5. Oestreicher, 229.
6. For examples of how this has happened see Ava Baron's introduction to her edited collection of essays, Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY, 1991)
7. Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1992).
8. See the report of this conference and some of the papers published in J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History: Towards a New Synthesis (DeKalb, 1987).
9. One could as easily engage in the same exploration around race. I focus on gender here because that is my charge, but just as I have come to many of these formulations by reading the literature on racism, so I hope that many of the conclusions I reach here will speak to issues of race as well as gender.
10. The clearest articulation of standpoint theory is in Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge (Ithaca NY, 1990), but see as well Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the 'Outsider Within': The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems, 33(1986), Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London, 1991), chapt. 10
11. Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (NY, Longman, 1983), chapt. 10.
12. Harding, p. 123.
13. Joan W. Scott, “Women and the Making of the English Working Class” in Gender and the Politics of History (NY, 1988), 89.
14. Even when the workplace is female-centered, we debate whether it can be the source of female identity. For example, Leslie Tentler takes an extreme position on the importance of a narrowly circumscribed domesticity in Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930 (New York, 1979). Other sources that focus on women's relation to wage-work as a product of domestic life include Louise Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Community (Ithaca, NY, 1987), and Sally Westwood, All Day, Every Day: Factory and Family in the Making of Women's Lives (Urbana, 1985).
15. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, 1991), 1-7.
16. Henry Ford understood this fully when he adopted the $5 day and conditioned it on the respectable home lives of his employees. See Stephen Meyer, The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany, NY, 1981), 124-147.
17. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American WorkingClass (London, 1991), see also Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (NY, 1982), 143-177.
18. Several historians have explored how the workplace constructs gender. See especially Ava Baron, “Questions of Gender: Deskilling and Demasculinization in the U.S. Printing Industry, 1830-1915,” Gender and History, 1 (1989), 178-199; and Cynthia Cockbum, Brothers, Male Dominance and Technological Change (London, 1983). This is a useful but partial response to the question I raise here, for it continues the separation of class and gender. Rather, I want to suggest that our project is to explore how class is constructed in the household.
19. This view is informed by Jurgen Habermas' notions of public space as described in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: A n Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA, 1989), part 5, and the difficulty of locating spaces in which women are enabled to shape public opinion. Historians are just beginning to come to grips with how women exercised their public voices. See especially Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988)
20. Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, 1990).
21. P. D. Anthony, The Ideology of Work (London, 1977), traces the history of workers' relationship to work; Alice Kessler-Harris and Bertram Silverman, “Beyond Industrial Unionism,” Dissent (Winter 1992), 61-67, summarizes arguments about the contemporary transition in attitudes towards work and suggests its relationship to changing trade union practices; Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (NY, 1991), discusses the effects of the desire for increased consumption.
22. One superb illustration of the uses of early 20th century consumption to reconcile issues of workplace exploitation and immigrant adaptation. Andrew J. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (NY, 1990).
23. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (NY, 1990).
24. Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, 1986).
25. For the language of republicanism as invoked by women workers see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (NY, 1979)
26. Mary Blewett, Men, Women and Work: Class and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana, 1988).
27. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana, 1987); and Ryan.
28. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare Knuckles Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY, 1986)
29. Joe William Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana, 1988).
30. See the pioneering work of Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (Cambridge, 1982).
31. Carole Turbin, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 (Urbana, IL, 1992)
32. Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 (forthcoming).
33. Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991).
34. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, 1990).
35. Montgomery, Workers' Control in America (Cambridge, 1979).
36. Ava Baron, “Acquiring Manly Competence: The Demise of Apprenticeship and the Remas culinization of Printers' Work,” in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990), 152-163
37. Baron, “The Masculinization of Production: The Gendering of Work and Skill in U.S. Newspaper Printing, 1850-1920,” in Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds., Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women's History (Ithaca, 1992), 277-288.
38. See also David Bensman, The Practice of Solidarity: American Hat Finishers in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1985)
39. Patricia Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (Urbana, 1987).
40. Heidi Hartman, “Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs, 1 (1976), 137-69
41. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender and Fraternalism (Princeton, 1989).
42. See Amy Dru Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation,” Journal of American History, 75 (1988), 471-500
43. Susan Levine, Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1984).
44. Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 1982), and Faue, chapt. 3.
45. Mary Blewett, “Manhood and the Market: The Politics of Gender and Class among the Textile Workers of Fall River, Massachusetts, 1870-1880,” in Baron, ed., Work Engendered, 92-113.
46. The work of Cynthia Cockburn is useful here, especially “The Material of Male Power,” Feminist Review, 9 (Oct. 1981), 41-58, and see also Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work (London, 1989).
47. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in TUrn-of-t he-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1988).
48. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing it Out: Waitresses and their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1991). The importance of the positions of women within households is also emphasized by Mary Blewett, Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1830-1920 (Urbana, 1988).
49. Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, KY, 1990).
50. See the essay by Larry Glickman in this volume.