This page includes two sections of scholarly works on U.S. women and labor, broader overviews
and more focused studies on particular topics. Please select from the following, or scroll down, for a
brief description of Tamiment's holdings in each category and an annotated list of works:
HISTORICAL SURVEYS & ANTHOLOGIES
SCHOLARSHIP ON WOMEN & LABOR IN PARTICULAR ERAS, INDUSTRIES, REGIONS, ETC.
The historical scholarship on U.S. women workers and on gender and labor (as well as race and class) has mushroomed in the last thirty years, collectively offering a rich and increasingly diverse body of work. The following are surveys that have synthesized and interpreted empirical data and analyses as they have developed, and anthologies of research articles in history, sociology, and economics. These works offer important introductions to the history of women and labor and, as products of particular moments themselves, highlight trends in scholarship over the past few decades.
HD6060.65.U5 W67 1991 Baron, Ava, ed. Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Important recent collection of scholarship on work and construction of gender roles. Baron's introduction provides helpful overview of debates and trends in analysis of gender in working-class history.
HD6095 .B57 1997 Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. Recent survey that traces changing places of women's paid and unpaid work in US occupational structure with quantitative data and diverse oral histories. Uses a case study of the Girl Scouts of America as a lens for changing ideologies.
HD6052 .W56 1976 Blaxall, Martha, and Barbara Reagan, eds. Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Papers from 1975 conference of economists and other social scientists. Explores social institutions, historical roots, and economic dimensions of occupational segregation, and presents proposals for change.
HD6057.5.U5 L37 1999 Browne, Irene, ed. Latinas and African American Women at Work: Race, Gender, and Economic Inequality. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Sociologists and economists investigate the eroding progress of Latina and African American women at various levels of US labor markets in the last three decades of the 20th century.
HD6095 .C54 Cantor, Milton, and Bruce Laurie, eds. Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Collection of essays, many of which have become landmarks themselves or part of seminal monographs, that show early efforts at connecting scholarly interest in women and working-class history in the "new social history."
HD6079.2.U5 W63 1993 Cobble, Dorothy Sue, ed. Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, Cornell University, 1993. Anthology of more than forty scholars' and activists' views on how women and unions can better serve each other in a changing economy.
HQ1426 .F758 1996 Dujon, Diane, and Ann Withorn, eds. For Crying Out Loud: Women's Poverty in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1996. An interdisciplinary anthology on the history of women and poverty preceding recent welfare "reforms," emphasizing the interconnectedness of "welfare" and "work."
HD6079.2.U5 F65 1979 Foner, Philip S. Women and the American Labor Movement: From
Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I. New York: Free Press, 1979.
HD6079.2.U5 F65 1980 _____. Women and the American Labor Movement: From
World War I to the Present. New York: Free Press, 1980. Important, two-volume survey of
working women's activism throughout American history, from the exceptionally prolific labor
historian Foner. Based on extensive, pioneering primary research.
HD6095 .T6 1987 Groneman, Carol, and Mary Beth Norton, eds. "To Toil the Livelong Day": America's Women at Work, 1780-1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Important anthology of feminist labor history scholarship of the 1980s.
HQ1426 .W6365 1990 Hansen, Karen V., and Ilene J. Philipson, eds. Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Extensive collection of scholarship, including pioneering articles from the 1970s, reevaluations of those earlier analyses, and newer research from recent years.
HQ1410 .W645 1997 Higginbotham, Elizabeth, and Mary Romero, eds. Women and Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity, and Class. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 1997. Recent collection of research essays from feminist scholars across several disciplines on women's work and activism in various geographical and occupational settings.
HD6057.5.U5 J66 1985 Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Four hundred-page overview of changing patterns of African-American women's employment and their interplay with community and family formations, economic structures, and public policy debates.
HD6079.2.U5 K45 Kenneally, James J. Women and American Trade Unions. St. Albans, Vt.: Eden Press, 1978. Survey focused on tensions between working women and labor organizations in the U.S. since 1865.
HD6095 .K449 Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the
United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pathbreaking, influential interpretive
survey interweaving broad primary research and secondary scholarship. Still a great scholarly
introduction to U.S. women's labor history.
HD6095 .K45 _____. Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview. Old Westbury,
NY; New York, NY: Feminist Press; McGraw-Hill, 1981. "Both parent and child" of Out to Work (see preceding listing), which was published soon after this work. Intended as a college or high
school text, it is thematically, rather than chronologically, organized and less detailed than Out to
Work, and its broader scope draws in more directly non-waged work, such as household labor and political activism.
HD6095 .L56 Lloyd, Cynthia B., ed. Sex, Discrimination, and the Division of Labor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Essays by economists showing new directions in the early 1970s in economic research on women's paid and unpaid labor.
HD6079.2.U5 W66 1985 Milkman, Ruth, ed. Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Anthology of articles representing important work from the 1980s on gender and working-class activism in the 20th century.
HD6095 .W39 1985 Weiner, Lynn Y. From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985. Traces history of interplay between demographic changes and ideological struggles over "women's work" in the 19th and 20th century.
HD6095 .W47 1977 Wertheimer, Barbara M., with Ida Goshkin and Ellen Wertheimer. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Pioneering survey from academic and long-time union activist. Covers diverse subjects and emphasizes importance of labor organizing.
Thanks to the efforts of many scholars, there is an ever-growing and ever-more impressive body
of historical research and analysis on U.S. women workers and on the interconnections among
gender, labor, race, and class. The titles here were selected from Tamiment's holdings to provide scholarly points of entry to a
diverse array of specific historical subjects — from antebellum housewives to modern-day
women firefighters — and to include many of the influential, ground-breaking studies in the field
over the past few decades. The bibliographies and notes in secondary works like these also often
provide the best guides to primary source materials on specific topics.
HF5465.U5 B45 1986 Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Examines saleswomen's gendered and class-based alliances and struggles with both managers and customers as they sought better working conditions and defended their occupational culture in the new "palaces" of the burgeoning culture of consumption.
HD8039.B72 U63 1988 Blewett, Mary H. Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Traces conflicts and collaborations among men and women shoe workers over issues of work, family, and protest as the industry evolved from hand-craft to mechanized production.
HD2336.U5 B67 1994 Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Places homeworkers at center of historical debates among reformers, trade unionists, and government officials, among others, over separation of "home" and "work" and working women's exploitation from the late 19th century to recent years.
HD6073.H842 U625 1990 Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Examines how the growing invisibility of women's unpaid household work was central to changing ideologies of gender and labor during early industrialization.
HD6073.T42 U518 1993 Cameron, Ardis. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Comparative history of the textile strikes of 1882 and 1912 that argues for importance of women's neighborhood-based networks in shaping worker militancy.
HD6515.R362 B763 1998 Chateauvert, Melinda. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Shows importance of previously overlooked activities of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the BSCP in shaping public debates over race, gender, and unionization, and campaigns for racial and economic justice.
HD6073.F52 U63 1997 Chetkovich, Carol A. Real Heat: Gender and Race in the Urban Fire Service. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Explores impact and failures of affirmative action on Oakland Fire Department and how firefighters' work culture is shaped by gender and race.
HD6067.2.U6 C55 1997 Clark, Claudia. Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. On the pathbreaking industrial health campaign of women watch dial painters poisoned by radium-laced paint.
HD6073.H82 U53 1991 Cobble, Dorothy Sue. Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. A history of waitresses' work, occupational culture, and unionism that uses waitresses' militancy to offer a gendered redefinition of "craft" unionism.
HD8039.C542 U63 1987 Cooper, Patricia A. Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Examines work cultures of and relations between skilled, unionized men and unskilled, unorganized women in cigar industry as it shifted from hand craft to mass production.
HD8039.T42 U6425 Coyle, Laurie, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig. Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story. El Paso, Tex.: Reforma, El Paso Chapter, 1979. Sixty-six-page booklet on garment workers' strike in El Paso from 1972-74, based on interviews. Discusses predominantly Chicana women's experiences in workplace, union, and border community.
HD6095 .D37 1982 Davies, Margery W. Woman's Place is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. One of the first studies to focus on how clerical work became feminized in the late 19th and early 20th century.
HT1521 .D38 1981 Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, & Class. New York: Random House, 1981. Important analysis of interlocking structures of gender, class, and racial subordination, which includes important, pioneering chapter on women and slavery.
HD6096.A11 D83 1994 Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Traces how women's wage- earning was increasingly incorporated into the family economy over the 19th century, lessening the possibilities for economic independence.
HD6079.2.U52 N483 Dye, Nancy Schrom. As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women's Trade Union League of New York. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Study of wealthy women's and working women's alliance in the New York WTUL, and their efforts to forge cross-class solidarity, merge feminism and unionism, and organize female wage-earners from 1903 through the 1930s.
HD6058 .E57 1999 Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Examines how young working women used consumerism (dime novels, movies, ready-to-wear fashions) to define their culture and their identities as "ladies," workers, and political actors.
HD6519.M6 F38 1991 Faue, Elizabeth. Community of Suffering & Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Uses case study of Minneapolis to show how gendered culture of unions and women's increasing marginalization within them, despite their growing numbers, reflected and shaped the US labor movement's transformation from communal forms of solidarity to bureaucratic unionism.
HD6073.M392 U524 1990 Fine, Lisa M. The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. A social history of early generations of women office workers in Chicago, and a cultural history of the feminizing of clerical work.
HD8085.S413 F7 1994 Frank, Dana. Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Reexamines decline of US labor movement in the 1920s through lens of consumer organizing. Looks at how male unionists sought to mobilize women as consumers and marginalize non- whites through boycotts, but how women, in turn, set their own consumer agenda.
HD6068.2.U6 F72 1982 Frank, Miriam, Marilyn Ziebarth, and Connie Field. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter: The Story of Three Million Working Women During World War II. Emeryville, Calif.: Clarity Educational Productions, 1982. Lavishly illustrated companion volume to the videorecording of same name (listed in Videos).
HD6079.2.U5 G33 1990 Gabin, Nancy F. Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Shows how militant women activists in the male-dominated but relatively progressive UAW pushed for gender equality in the workplace and laid important groundwork for the women's liberation movement in the US.
HD6054.4.U6 G355 1997 Gamber, Wendy. The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Looks at women's entrepreneurial efforts in these fields of "women's work" before the rise of mass production.
HD6073.C62 U54 1990 Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Examines work culture and militancy of Jewish immigrant women garment workers who helped build two major garment unions in the early 20th century and defined an ethnic, working-class vision of the "New Woman."
HD6073.C62 F734 1997 Green, Nancy L. Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Far-reaching comparative study of garment industry in "fashion capitals" of New York and Paris from late 19th to late 20th century, including production and consumption of clothing, impact of labor organization (small shops and homework) on successive generations of immigrant workers, and their experiences in shops and unions.
HD6079.2.U5 G55 1983a Glick, Phyllis S. "Bridging Feminism and Trade Unionism: A Study
of Working Women's Organizing in the United States." Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1983.
Cases studies of 9-to-5 and the Coalition of Labor Union Women, important organizations
founded by working women in the 1970s.
HD5854.2.U6 H46 1996 Henson, Kevin D. Just a Temp. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Analysis, based on participant observation, of workers' exploitation and experiences in the expanding and increasingly important temporary labor industry.
LD2120 .H64 1997 Hoerr, John. We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. A history of the long recent drive by predominantly female clerical and technical workers to establish a self-consciously feminist, democratic union despite resistance and patronizing attitudes from elite university administrators and some national union officials.
HQ1420 .H66 1984 Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Examines ideological forces (popular culture and government, e.g.) that encouraged women to take previously "male" jobs, but framed their efforts as temporary and urged them to return home after the crisis.
HD6057.5 .U52G45 1997 Hunter, Tera W. To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Uses African-American domestic workers in Atlanta and their survival strategies as central lens for understanding the New South and transition from slavery to freedom.
HD6073.T62 U65 1985 Janiewski, Dolores E. Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985. Study of the cross-racial organizing attempts of the African-American and white women workers in tobacco and textile production in Durham, North Carolina.
HD6072.2.U5 K37 Katzman, David M. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Survey of domestic service from 1870-1920, when the work generally was transformed from live-in to live-out positions and white immigrant women increasingly took work in other fields.
HD6073.S52 U64 1990 Kesselman, Amy. Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver during World War II and Reconversion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Details persistent employer and union discrimination faced by shipyard "Rosie the Riveter"'s as they took advantage of opportunities created by wartime labor needs.
PN1968.U5 K53 1999 Kibler, M. Alison. Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Examines how women in audiences and as performers were instrumental in legitimizing vaudeville, but were eventually blamed for its demise.
HD5325.M73 1983 M675 1989 Kingsolver, Barbara. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1989. Account of women's crucial participation in eighteen-month strike against Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation.
HD6068.2.U6 S57 1984 Kornbluh, Joyce L., and Mary Frederickson, eds. Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers' Education for Women, 1914-1984. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Essays and excerpted documentary material on nine innovative programs in education for U.S. women workers over the twentieth century.
HD6073.R942 U65 1984 Levine, Susan. Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Looks at growing presence of women workers and labor organizing by the Knights of Labor in the post-Civil War carpet industry, the rapid mechanization of which anticipated broader, related patterns of deskilling and feminization of work in the U.S. industrial economy.
HD6515.C6 M34 1985 McCreesh, Carolyn D. Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880-1917. New York: Garland Pub., 1985. History of female garment workers' role in organizing their industry and establishing the first major female-majority union in the AFL, the ILGWU. Examines women's cross-class alliances and male workers' ambivalence or hostility to their efforts.
HD6096.C4 M49 1988 Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Study of single, working women who fought to obtain decent work, living wages, and legitimacy and privacy of living alone, in face of cultural anxieties about their independence.
HD6060.65.U5 M55 1987 Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Influential study of the process of sex segregation in industrial work, based on comparison of women's war work in auto and electric plants.
HQ1904 .M87 1997 Murolo, Priscilla. The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls' Clubs, 1884-1928. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Examines cross-class cultural organization among women in a context in which "working girls" participated on basis of cooperation, self-government, and self-support, vs. more unequal alliances in groups like the YWCA, etc.
LB2844.53.U6 M87 1990 Murphy, Marjorie. Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. History of teaching and of teacher organizing within competing models of a trade union and a professional group.
F739.B8 M87 1997 Murphy, Mary. Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Traces the evolution of Butte from a male-dominated mining enclave to a more heterosocial community in which men and women together participated in and shaped the growing consumer culture.
HV854 .N45 1990 Nelson, Margaret K. Negotiated Care: The Experience of Family Day Care Providers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Blends surveys and interviews with feminist analysis to explore lives of family day care providers seeking to reconcile need for income with their own child care responsibilities, and enduring public scrutiny while receiving little support from public policies. Examines day care providers' relationships to client parents and children, and to their own families and state regulatory authorities.
HD6079.2.U5 N53 1982 Nielsen, Georgia Panter. From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant: Women and the Making of a Union. Ithaca: ILR Press, Cornell University, 1982. Organizational history of the United Airlines flight attendant union, established in the late 1940s as a subordinate affiliate of the powerful pilots' union and the largest group within what has become a leading female-majority and female-led union in the AFL-CIO, the Association of Flight Attendants. See also Turbulent Romance, a documentary videorecording based on this book, listed in Videos.
HD6073.T32 U56 1990 Norwood, Stephen H. Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Examines work culture and successful unionization of female operators at the Bell System, the largest employer of women in the US in the early 20th century.
HD6072.2.U5 P35 1989 Palmer, Phyllis M. Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Uses popular cultural images, legislative reform debates, and other sources to examine unequal relationship between white, middle-class women and the typically non-white, working-class women whose paid household labor enabled their "mistresses'" attempts to meet dominant standards of respectable, domestic femininity.
TX925 .P38 1991 Paules, Greta Foff. Dishing It Out: Power and Resistance among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Sociological portrait of contemporary food servers' work culture and strategies for resisting exploitation.
F124 .P38 1986 Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Explores how working-class women redefined "respectability" and mixed-sex socializing in new commercial cultural spaces of dance halls, movie theaters, and amusement parks.
HD6072.2.U5 R67 1985 Rollins, Judith. Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985.
HD6072.2.U5 R675 1992 Romero, Mary. Maid in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge, 1992. Study of Chicana domestics that pays particular attention to the work process and how workers have tried to redefine their role as that of tradesperson providing specific services, rather than servant providing labor power.
RA982.D84 D847 1988 Sacks, Karen Brodkin. Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Examines how work culture and community shaped 1970s unionization efforts of service, technical and clerical support staff, in a movement driven by women's activism in general and African-American women's leadership in particular.
HD6079.2.U52 M567 1994 Schleuning, Neala. Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike of 1985-86. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Foregrounds the central place of women outside formal union roles in sustaining this long and bitter strike of the mid-1980s.
RA971.35 .S48 1982 Sexton, Patricia Cayo, for the Coalition of Labor Union Women. The New Nightingales: Hospital Workers, Unions, New Women's Issues. New York: Enquiry Press, 1982, ©1981. Explores through oral interviews women hospital workers' experiences at work and in unions and their views on "women's issues." See also the oral histories with women hospital workers Sexton conducted for this book and donated to the Wagner Labor Archives, under Oral History Collections.
HV1447.M56 S73 1992 Stadum, Beverly. Poor Women and Their Families: Hard Working Charity Cases, 1900-1930. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Looks at 300 poor women in Minneapolis as mothers and home-makers, wage-earners, wives, and charity recipients.
HD6096.N6 S8 1987 Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Examines survival strategies, sociability, and conflicts among wage-earning and poor women in antebellum New York, and their central role in maintaining families and communities amid economic hardship and reformers' intrusions.
HF5547.5 .S816 1992 Strom, Sharon Hartman. Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Explores how scientific management and its feminized counterpart, personnel management, vocational education, and clerical workers' own work culture shaped working conditions in early corporate offices.
HD6079.2.U5 T39 Tax, Meredith. The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980. Examines in particular how working women built alliances in the Illinois Women's Alliance, the 1909 shirtwaist strike (which gave birth to the ILGWU), the Women's Trade Union League, and the 1912 Lawrence strike involving the IWW.
HD6095 .T44 Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Emphasizes importance of domestic realm in shaping women workers' consciousness on the job and off.
HD6073.L32 U58 1992 Turbin, Carole. Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, New York, 1864-86. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. History of laundresses in collar industry who established first official working women's union. Explores roles of gender, ethnicity, and family in shaping their solidarity.
HT690.U6 W35 1999 Walkowitz, Daniel J. Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Uses history of social workers, who daily negotiated borders of class, to trace changing identity of the U.S. middle class over the 20th century, and how understandings of race and gender underlay growing ambiguity of the category of "middle-class."
HD6055.2.U6 W453 1998 Wells, David R. Consumerism and the Movement of Housewives into Wage Work: The Interaction of Patriarchy, Class, and Capitalism in Twentieth Century America. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Pub., 1998. Examines implications of married women's mass movement into the workforce and of the culture of consumption for women's class-stratified roles as "homemakers," workers, and consumers.