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 She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers.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 lovingly written celebration of the earlier generation of 'Rosie the Riveter' reveals the role of women in the war industry during World War I, describing the dramatic impact of the conflict on the lives of American women, including their role in promoting women's rights. (History)

Product Description: A social transformation of profound proportions has been unfolding over the second half of the twentieth century as women have turned from household work to wages as the key source of their livelihood. This timely study, a broad comparative analysis of African American women’s and white women’s changing relationships to home and work over the past forty years, at last provides a wide-ranging overview of how this shift is influencing the shape of families and the American economy...read more

Product Description: There is a persistent stereotype that during the 1950's American women had no choice but to be housewives. This book reports on a Survey of the women of Cornell University's Class of 1950 that demolishes this stereotype. Forty-four percent of these women chose to work or go to graduate school for five years or more during the 1950's...read more

Product Description: Focusing on literary authors, social reformers, journalists, and anthropologists, Francesca Sawaya demonstrates how women intellectuals in early twentieth-century America combined and criticized ideas from both the Victorian "cult of domesticity" and the modern "culture of professionalism" to shape new kinds of writing and new kinds of work for themselves...read more

The past is more relevant to the present than we often believe. There are historical roots to seemingly new concerns, frequently raised as social problems, which connect the beginning and the end of the twentieth century. For example, ethnic enclaves, which provided employment networks for women, existed in domestic work long before their recent rediscovery among ethnic men. Female-headed households and single mothers have also been around for a long time, but in 1900 they had to support themselves in the absence of large state or federal welfare programs. By creatively re-analyzing census data, the author explores women's place in the U.S. political economy at the beginning of the twentieth century, viewed from the national level, but also highlighting the variations in women's experiences according to racial ethnic background, class, and geography.Since this past is often used as a baseline for judging changes during the subsequent one hundred years, it is important to understand it on its own terms. Since this was also a period of economic transformation and high immigration, it is a key time to observe women's changing work options. Among them are the large volume of women's uncounted work in the informal economy; the individual, household, and geographic characteristics that predicted their formal employment; and the occupational segregation experienced by women of differing racial ethnic backgrounds. Author note: Christine E. Bose, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, University at Albany, SUNY, is author or editor of five other books, including "Women in the Latin American Development Process" (also published by Temple Press). She is the current editor of "Gender & Society". (view table of contents)

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Product Description: As the twentieth century draws to an end, the changing role of women appears as one of the dominant features of the era. In Now Hiring, historian Julia Blackwelder traces the century-long evolution of the American occupational structure and the ensuing rise in demand for female workers through the closing episodes of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of postindustrialism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Can the welfare system  in the United States accord people dignity? That question is often left out of the current debates over welfare and workfare. In this provocative book, Nancy Rose argues that the United States has been successful in the past––notably during the New Deal and in the 1970s––at shaping programs that gave people “fair work...read more

Provides an oral history of the women who took part in the war effort on the home front putting aside school, families, and peacetime jobs to become riveters, geologists, pilots, and truck drivers (view table of contents)

Product Description: In the popular stereotype of post-World War II America, women abandoned their wartime jobs and contentedly retreated to the home. These mythical women were like the 1950s TV character June Cleaver, white, middle-class, suburban housewives...read more

Product Description: Changes in women s roles & perceptions constitute one of the great watersheds in 20th-century American history. Exploring a large segment of time, the author blends statistics, anecdote, & interpretation to sketch a series of collective experiments by 20th-century women...read more

Examines advertisements and fiction published in the Saturday Evening Post and True Story in order to show how propaganda was used to encourage women to enter the work force