Gendering Labor History

This collection represents the thirty-year intellectual trajectory of one of today's leading historians of gender and labor in the United States. The seventeen essays included in Alice Kessler-Harris’s Gendering Labor History are divided into 4 sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of her central project: to show gender’s fundamental importance to the shaping of U.S. history and working-class culture. 

The first section considers women and organized labor; the second pushes this analysis towards a gendered labor history as the essays consider the gendering of male as well as female workers and how gender operates with and within the social category of class. Subsequent sections broaden this framework to examine U.S. social policy as a whole, the question of economic citizenship, and wage labor from a global perspective. While each essay represents an important intervention in American historiography in itself, the collection taken as a whole reveals Kessler-Harris as someone who has always pushed the field of American history to greater levels of inclusion and analysis, and who continues to do so today.

The role of gender in the history of the working class world.

Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University. Her books include Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences, and most recently In Pursuit of Equity: How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship, which won the Joan Kelly, Phillip Taft, and Bancroft Prizes.