Alice Kessler-Harris

A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

In this updated edition of a groundbreaking classic, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of womens wages in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on three issues that capture the transformation of womens roles: the battle over minimum wage for women, which exposes the relationship between family ideology and workplace demands; the argument concerning equal pay for equal work, which challenges gendered patterns of self-esteem and social organization; and the debate over comparable worth, which seeks to incorporate traditionally female values into new work and family trajectories. Together, these topics illuminate the many ways in which gendered social meaning has been produced, transmitted, and challenged.

Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (1935)

Vera Shlakman had an extraordinary effect on my work and on that of a generation of labor historians. Quietly, unobtrusively her interpretive insights and the methodological innovations she introduced paved the way to a more eclectic and integrated discipline. A full seventy years after its publication in 1935, her Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts still provides an intellectual and conceptual guide, not only to a changing field, but to the persistent questions it raises.