On Gender, Labor, and Inequality

Ruth Milkman

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780252081774, 9780252040320
• eBook ISBN: 9780252098581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

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 She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 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 American Labor Movement
• 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