Give the Boys a Trade : Gender and Job Choice in the 1890s

[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\u27 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\u27 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 workers\u27 relationships with their employers and supervisors but also redounds back to their original choices of occupations, and in so doing prefigures family roles and relationships. These examples only begin to touch on the ways in which exploring male workers\u27 job decisions may open up new areas for research. Just as it has done for women\u27s labor history, raising these issues holds the potential of uncovering new insights into the connections between men\u27s workplace concerns and their family and community experiences. A labor history that fully takes gender into account in this way will be that much richer and, perhaps, that much more true to the realities of working-class life in the past

White Collar/Blue Collar

[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 the working class if that working class were itself a monolithic group. However, as the new labor history has demonstrated over the past twenty years, the working class did not act or see itself as a seamless whole. The ways in which divisions within the working class affected workers\u27 perceptions of clerical occupations—and clerical workers\u27 perceptions of manual work—highlight many of the ambiguities of the social status of clerical work

Narratives Serially Constructed and Lived: Ethnicity in Cross-Gender Strikes 1887-1903

[Excerpt] The strikes narrated in this paper have illustrated different ways in which individuals\u27 recognition of ethnic identity could interact with their recognition of gender and class identities. In each strike workers\u27 identities developed along with the serial narrative of the particular strike situation. The use of Sartre\u27s 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\u27 class identities, my employment of the concept broadens it to include other categories of identification as well. Using the concept this broadly highlights the importance of three key issues: historical narrative, historical materialism, and the agency of individuals and groups within both of those. In each of the strikes retold here, individuals act out of identities formed by both specific material circumstances and specific events. By thinking of these identities as representative of memberships in different series we keep alive the possibilities of change inherent in individuals\u27 lives. Each individual has at her disposal an array of experiences from which she can and must construct her own responses to the events in which she finds herself. Thinking of these experiences as the formative materials of membership in different series aids the historian in thinking about class, gender, ethnicity, race, and other categories less as one-time choices of identity made by individuals and more as part of an array of choices out of which individuals act

Family Wages: The Roles of Wives and Mothers in U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880-1930

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\u27 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 formal workforce participation; through home work of various sorts; and through selling subsistence, providing in-home services to nonfamily members in exchange for cash. Unlike earlier works which focused on single locations or ethnic or racial groups or female occupations, I tell a national story of ever-married women’s cash-producing work. Working-class wives and mothers filled in the economic gaps existing in the interactions of their families with the capitalist marketplace through a range of different methods. While early 20th-century unions called for the establishment of a “living wage” for male workers, the world in which those workers lived required both family wages and family strategies to bring in other forms of cash for their survival

Samuel Gompers

[Excerpt] Samuel Gompers, founder and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for 37 years, was both extraordinary and exemplary of many skilled workers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

‘‘Too Hard on the Women, Especially’’: Striking Together for Women Workers’ Issues

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 variety of geographic locations. The insights gained suggest future paths for research on the distinction between women’s and men’s strike demands

Families and the Collar Line

[Excerpt] Social mobility studies begin with the assumption that movement from any blue-collar job to any white-collar job represents unmitigated betterment of an individual\u27s or generation\u27s social status. These studies represent this movement across the collar line in a linear fashion, following the movement from fathers\u27 occupations to sons\u27. This is the basic method that Jiirgen Kocka suggested historians could use to illuminate the relevant lines of distinction, tension and conflict segmenting and dividing the emerging working class internally and the outer boundary of that working class, the visibility and rigidity of the distinction between workers and those who own and control. However, the linearity of traditional social mobility studies conceals diversity among siblings within a single family and ignores altogether the significance of women\u27s changing roles in the paid labor force

Introduction to <i>United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism</i>

[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 their organizations, is the ultimate lesson I hope this book conveys. That workers strove to unite in strike situations is an old lesson taught by labor history; that they often fragmented along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, or other categories is a lesson often hammered home by the new labor history. Both these tendencies are evident in the strikes discussed in this book, and the reverberations of those tendencies appear in the very structure of the unions that attempted to mold their members' fragmented experiences into a sense of national unity.De_Vault8_Introduction_United_Apart.pdf: 181 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020