Books in the Working Class in American History series

Explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing both the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism. This title unravels a complex history of how labor leaders accommodated and resisted working women's demands for change.

Mary H. Blewett's award-winning look at the men and women working in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, explores the sexual division of labor and gender relationships in the workplace.

A cogent analysis of North American trade unions' precipitous decline in recent decades

Railroad brotherhoods' dynamic impact on American labor relations and national politics

The rise and fall of America's first truly inter-racial labour union

A classic since its original publication, Women Have Always Worked brought much-needed insight into the ways work has shaped female lives and sensibilities. Beginning in the colonial era, Alice Kessler-Harris looks at the public and private work spheres of diverse groups of women—housewives and trade unionists, immigrants and African Americans, professionals and menial laborers, and women from across the class spectrum. She delves into issues ranging from the gendered nature of the success ethic to the social activism and the meaning of citizenship for female wage workers. This second edition adds artwork and features significant updates. A new chapter by Kessler-Harris follows women into the early twenty-first century as they confront barriers of race, sex, and class to earn positions in the new information society.

A book at the intersection of business, labor, and women's history.

A study of James P Cannon's early years (1890-1928) that details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era.

The transformation of slavery and free labour in the Upper South

A detailed account of labor corruption in the 1930s and the zealous journalist who railed against it