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On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

Published by: University of Illinois Press

10 black and white photographs

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9780252098581
Published: July 2016

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Contents
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Praise

Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define.

Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.

A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.

Cover

Title

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression

2. Redefining “Women’s Work”: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II

3 Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor: Historical Perspectives on “Women’s Work” and the America

4. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Management’s Postwar Purge of Women Automobile Workers

5. Women’s History and the Sears Case

6. Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective

7. Union Responses to Workforce Feminization in the United States

8. Two Worlds of Unionism: Women and the Twenty-First–Century Labor Movement

9. The Macrosociology of Paid Domestic Labor Co-authored with Ellen Reese and Benita Roth

10. Class Disparities, Market Fundamentalism, and Work–Family Policy: Lessons from California

11. Women’s Work and Economic Crisis Revisited: Comparing the Great Recession and the Great Depression

Index

Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at The CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement and Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II.

"Milkman's book is a must read, not only to remind those of us influenced by her excellent work how significant her scholarship was and is, but also for new scholars who can trace the intellectual evolution of a labor studies author whose writing has always been grounded in painstaking empirical research, and simultaneously dedicated to analyzing the origins and operation of social inequality, even as specific topics, theories, and approaches have shifted over time."--Labour/ Le Travail

"Milkman's collection will well serve scholars of the Great Plains with its comprehensive coverage, from a 1976 study of Great Depression female workers to an essay written for this volume that reprises the same questions for the 2008 Great Recession. The 11 essays constitute a history of women's relationships to both the workforce and unions across the twentieth century. . . . Milkman's decades of study provide a solid foundation for new work in Great Plains labor history."--Great Plains Quarterly

"A fascinating and timely set of articles. . . What Milkman's four decades of illuminating scholarship reveals is both the uphill battle the movement will face precisely because many of these fast-growing occupations have been sex-typed as 'women's work.' But there is hope in these chapters too."--Dissent