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Full-Text Articles in History
Family Wages: The Roles Of Wives And Mothers In U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880-1930, Ileen Devault
Family Wages: The Roles Of Wives And Mothers In U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880-1930, Ileen Devault
Ileen A DeVault
The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through …
Introduction To United Apart: Gender And The Rise Of Craft Unionism, Ileen A. Devault
Introduction To United Apart: Gender And The Rise Of Craft Unionism, Ileen A. Devault
Ileen A DeVault
[Excerpt] The American Federation of Labor entered the twentieth century ensconced as the primary vehicle for the nation's organized workers. As such, the attitudes of the AFL toward women workers provided the basis for virtually all later attempts at organizing women. The cross-gender strikes that are the basis of this book illustrate both the ways in which men and women would move forward united and the ways in which they would remain apart. That both females and males could at times feel drawn together and at other times feel driven apart, and carry both those feelings into their actions and …
Narratives Serially Constructed And Lived: Ethnicity In Cross-Gender Strikes 1887-1903, Ileen A. Devault
Narratives Serially Constructed And Lived: Ethnicity In Cross-Gender Strikes 1887-1903, Ileen A. Devault
Ileen A DeVault
[Excerpt] The strikes narrated in this paper have illustrated different ways in which individuals' recognition of ethnic identity could interact with their recognition of gender and class identities. In each strike workers' identities developed along with the serial narrative of the particular strike situation. The use of Sartre's concept of the series helps us think about the many possible variations of class, ethnicity, and gender. Though Sartre planned to use his concept of series as a way to examine peoples' class identities, my employment of the concept broadens it to include other categories of identification as well. Using the concept …
White Collar/Blue Collar, Ileen A. Devault
White Collar/Blue Collar, Ileen A. Devault
Ileen A DeVault
[Excerpt] Examining the determinants of class for women and the ways men experienced gender will help clarify some of the ambiguous status of the clerical sector, but it will still not answer all of our questions. To understand the place of clerical work in the class structure, we need to examine more than just clerical work itself. A major argument of this book is that understanding the impact of clerical work on overall social stratification requires understanding stratification within the manual working class as well. The status of clerical work would perhaps be much clearer in contrast to that of …
‘‘Too Hard On The Women, Especially’’: Striking Together For Women Workers’ Issues, Ileen A. Devault
‘‘Too Hard On The Women, Especially’’: Striking Together For Women Workers’ Issues, Ileen A. Devault
Ileen A DeVault
This essay draws upon a larger study of over forty strikes which involved both male and female strikers in the United States between the years 1887 and 1903. Here the focus of analysis is on those strikes which began with demands raised by women workers. The essay examines the nature of women workers’ demands, the ways in which cooperation with male co-workers altered those demands, and the affect that formal union involvement had on women strikers and their strike demands. Because the original set of case studies examines strikes across the United States, the strikes explored here also highlight a …
"Give The Boys A Trade": Gender And Job Choice In The 1890s, Ileen A. Devault
"Give The Boys A Trade": Gender And Job Choice In The 1890s, Ileen A. Devault
Ileen A DeVault
[Excerpt] It seems redundant (but is unfortunately not unnecessary) to say that this response emphasizes the gendered nature of the famed "manliness" of turn-of-the-century skilled workers. Davis Montgomery has described how "the workers' code celebrated individual self-assertion, but for the collective good, rather than for self-advancement." The process by which these skilled workers chose their jobs suggests an intermediate step: between the "collective good" of the union and the "self-advancement' of the individual stood the smaller collective unit of the male-headed household. The sense of what it meant to "be a man" thus not only holds the potential of explicating …
Organizing And Representing Clerical Workers: The Harvard Model, Richard W. Hurd
Organizing And Representing Clerical Workers: The Harvard Model, Richard W. Hurd
Richard W Hurd
[Excerpt] The private sector clerical work force is largely nonunion, simultaneously offering the labor movement a major source of potential membership growth and an extremely difficult challenge. Based on December 1990 data, there are eighteen million workers employed in office clerical, administrative support, and related occupations. Eighty percent of these employees are women, accounting for 30 percent of all women in the labor force. Among private sector office workers, 57 percent work in the low-union-density industry groups of services (only 5.7 percent union) and finance, insurance, and real estate (only 2.5 percent union). With barely over ten million total private …