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This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of Thai women workers' experience during the economic boom between the 1960s and 1990s. Specifically, the paper focuses on the working conditions of female factory laborers located in Bangkok and neighboring provinces during this transformative period. To accomplish this, the paper utilizes a variety of previously unused primary sources: quantitative data from a series of surveys conducted by the Department of Labor and other governmental organizations, along with qualitative evidence from ethnographies, recorded interviews, and reports by non-profit organizations. Three aspects of working conditions are considered: health and safety, remuneration, and working hours. It is argued that women workers faced unsafe work environments and long hours, while the growth of their real incomes lagged behind that of GDP per capita. Despite socioeconomic and cultural obstacles to unionizing, this paper finds that collective action empowered women workers and gave them a voice in addressing these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal policies and decentralization of production activities in developing countries have been blamed for the ever-increasing precarity of labor in India since the late twentieth century. Precarious labor, however, had long been a characteristic feature of the Indian garment industry before it actively participated in neoliberal global garment trade in the 1970s and 1980s. This study examines policies that shaped the Indian garment industry in the post-colonial period from 1947 and their effects on production, employment patterns, and women's work. It employs the Indian Government's official industry censuses and employment survey reports. Accordingly, the policy of small-scale garment production was backed by benevolent aims of reviving traditional Indian crafts and maximizing employment. However, it yielded a fragmented industrial structure and a pool of precarious labor from a poverty-stricken population. Gender-based social stereotypes further enabled a socio-economically disempowered female workforce. The neoliberal policies that gained ground with the industry's increasing export orientation exacerbated the precarious working conditions rooted in indigenous policy-making and social mindset. Locating labor precarity and women's vulnerability within this complex mesh of local and global factors offers an improved framework for testing how neoliberal policies maneuver them to influence production and employment patterns in today's garment industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent developments in the evolution of 'labor history' as an academic field have injected new direction into theories of Gender, Sex and Bodies. Incidents of sexual violence and gender oppression have long been a brutal part of human history. In contemporary times, plantation societies are finally receiving critical attention as historians embark on gendered reappraisals of history, especially in countries like India. This article sets out to retrieve several accounts of sexual violence in the tea plantations of Assam during the colonial period. It also shows how the colonial masters (Sahibs) of the tea gardens have oppressed/sexualized the bodies of men/women workers in the tea gardens of Assam. An attempt is also made to reconstruct the forgotten stories of two tea-garden working-class women, Mangri Orang alias Malati Mem and Durgi Bhumij alias Durgi Mem, who were sexually abused by the European tea planters. From their objectification as sexualized bodies, the duo later showed their abilities of agency when they joined India's freedom struggle and transformed into freedom fighters. The paper analyzes the connections between oppressed/sexualized bodies of women tea plantation workers and the colonial capitalist patriarchy in the history of Assam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses labour relations and management strategies in the Hex River Textiles factory in Worcester, South Africa, from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The factory was established by a French textile manufacturer in 1946, who relocated an entire mill from Bradford in England, to exploit the low wage labour provided by primarily coloured women. The strategy also included investments in new technology. The workers who were drawn into capitalist production resisted exploitation despite government attempts to crush the trade unions. In the late 1980s, trade union activity was rekindled, not least because there was a core group of coloured workers, who carried on the tradition. The strategy in the 1980s was less militant than in the 1950s, but, arguably more successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the devaluation of women's industrial work during the transition from market socialism to capitalism in Croatia. On the basis of oral history interviews with former workers from the Arena knitwear factory in Pula, it explores the gendered structure of feeling created by socialist industrialisation, and its transformations during post-socialist deindustrialisation. In socialist Yugoslavia, female industrial workers participated in the discourses and practices of workers' self-management. Despite their hard work and their low wages, most workers fondly remember the factory as a space of socialisation, solidarity and empowerment. The factory functioned as a redistributive centre for accessing welfare rights. After post-socialist transition, workers experienced worsening social rights, precarity and exploitation as a result of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the neo-liberal withdrawal of the welfare state. Workers' nostalgic narratives about their work experiences during socialism are mobilised to reclaim the dignity and value of work in post-socialist times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unemployment statistics of the 1930s' Great Depression have often been used as a way of estimating the endurance and severity of the economic crisis in different countries. The Swedish unemployment data have, among other things, been used in comparison with the American data to describe the different economic development that these two countries experienced during the twentieth century. Sweden's 'work approach' to unemployment during the Great Depression has also been highlighted in earlier research as an answer to the question of why Sweden managed the Great Depression quite well and was able to kick-start the development of the welfare state. Unfortunately, the official unemployment data mainly covered men; female unemployment has been neglected both in the official records and in earlier research, and the praised 'work approach' only targeted male unemployment. In this paper, a new and previously neglected source of unemployment data is brought into the light in the form of poor relief statistics. From this information, a new estimation of the female unemployment during the Great Depression is made, which questions the grand conclusions that have been reached regarding the connections of the crisis and the later welfare state construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines local labor insurgency in Philadelphia between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Drawing on alternative press sources, it traces the efforts of Black, Puerto Rican, and female workers to reshape their unions as stable employment opportunities declined. Across industries and job sites, workers pressured both their unions and their employers through public criticism, running slates of candidates in union elections, and taking part in picketing and wildcat strikes. Existing scholarship has privileged rank-and-file activism among White men focused on wages and working conditions. Enlarging our view to include a more representative workforce at the local level while following workers' resistance forward through time recharacterizes the rank-and-file rebellion to include defiant, multiracial coalitions demanding progressive reform. That broader rebellion, in turn, challenges some long-held assumptions about US labor during the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of studies using contemporary data report that women have a higher job satisfaction than men, and even more so in the occupations with a greater female share. This pattern, paradoxically given the lower pay of female-dominated jobs, is often attributed to women's voluntary sorting into these occupations. In contrast, historical scholarship emphasizes the societal restrictions which shaped women's vocational choices and the dissatisfactions with wages which led to the comparable worth movements around the world. During the 1980s, the Canadian comparable worth movement achieved momentum and instigated many legislative changes. By 1989, 6 out of 10 Canadian provinces had laws prescribing 'equal pay for work of equal value.' Using nationally representative Canadian data from 1989 to 1991, we examine how these legislations affected job satisfaction in pink and blue collar occupations. We find strong evidence for the higher job satisfaction of pink collar women in jurisdictions with a comparable worth legislation. The findings are discussed within the sociocultural context of the late twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores control and gendered resistance strategies of female low-level hospitality workers and nineteenth-century black enslaved females by linking resistance patterns in historically documented slave narratives with oral narratives of current female hospitality workers. Emerging narratives document parallel stories of oppression, abuse, devaluation, and exploitation and focus awareness on the subordinate position of low-level workers in an oppressor/oppressed relationship. Functioning under two different economic systems, slavery and capitalism, these low-level workers’ narratives allow similar patterns of resistance to surface and help us expand our understanding of worker exploitation, female resistance, and narrative as possessing liberatory potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Equal pay for equal work' is a longstanding feminist claim. In this regard, the 1975 Equal Pay Directive of the European Economic Community has generated momentum for women at the national level. Based on the Belgian case, we explain how national actors - and more specifically trade unions and their women's committees - have used European law to foster wage equality. Despite the existence of binding norms since the 1950s, this principle of equal pay has been poorly applied. The implementation of the directive in the Belgian neo-corporatist institutional framework has given trade unions the possibility to secure an extensive interpretation of the directive's general provisions. The assumption driving this paper is that this directive has generated momentum for change - though this is not a synonym of 'a miracle solution' - in Belgium regarding wage equality. More fundamentally, this study is about the intertwining of European and national laws and the way in which European norms can offer instrumental opportunities to national actors to impact their domestic polity and policies, here on social and gender matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a new area of women's leisure; women's participation in work-related sport. The growth and development of industrial welfare in Scotland in the interwar period will be discussed. Within broader studies, Stephen Jones, Helen Jones and Melling have all indicated that there was a growth in industrial welfarism in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. This development of welfarism, which included provision of educational classes, pensions and medical support, increasingly also encompassed a variety of sports and physical activities. By looking at case studies, developments in provision across a range of industries will be examined. This discussion will draw on a wide range of sources from a variety of women's employment, from factories to clerical positions and from the retail sector to the civil service. This article will examine the types of sporting opportunities open to women through their workplaces, including organised welfare schemes and independent employee-led activities. Moreover, it will explore working women's experiences of these activities and the ways in which they chose to participate in sport. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on western Canada and US Pacific Northwest industrial communities during the mid-twentieth century, Laurie Mercier explores how myths about place and work have intertwined to reinforce gender inequalities in logging, mining, and longshoring. Through examining the activities of women's auxiliaries of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, the International Woodworkers of America, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the author traces how women actively reshaped the class politics, cultures, and spatial arrangements of their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using accounts from the Old Bailey Proceedings, this article examines the economic side of military marriages in eighteenth-century London, outlining a fundamental disjuncture in eighteenth-century attitudes to working wives. While all wives were expected to work, state and parish records of military wives repeatedly stress their total dependence on men's wages and bounty money. In actual fact, soldiers, sailors and their wives made use of a much wider range of survival strategies. By stealing, taking odd jobs, pawning goods, and accepting aid from kin or friends, both husbands and wives might significantly augment military pay and/or poor relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on one survival strategy employed by the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, a strategy rooted in an essentialist perspective of women's differences, which has served the Bureau's purposes in times of political change, but, as this paper also argues, this rationale has disappeared. The Bureau is the oldest and only public institution dedicated to serving the needs of working women as of February 2004. Its survival can be attributed to its structure and functions. The Bureau's structure as an entity within the Department of Labor with an appointed director allows it to reflect the larger political and societal contexts, but keeps it from operating on the forefront of change in those contexts. Its function as a research and information-gathering entity rather than an enforcement agency further maintains it as a backstage activist rather than a spotlight activist. However, when political and societal contexts are amenable, the Bureau possesses the flexibility to operate in the spotlight as necessary, to act as an agent for change on behalf of working women. While the structure and function of the Bureau have allowed it to survive for several decades, they have also prevented it from operating on the leading edge of working women's issues. Political survival and reflecting ideological currents at the grassroots have been two influences on the Bureau. Essential difference is perhaps the most interesting example of how these two influences have diverged, and the Women's Bureau is the most appropriate locus within which to analyze this diversion.

In January 1919, William McAdoo, director general of the United States Railroad Administration, the government agency set up to run the railroads during the First World War, received an anonymous letter from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This letter, although badly spelled and at times incoherent, was a forthright female expression of hostility towards women workers at the Lucknow Yards. It stated that "There is not a happy home since they are up there for they are a pack of dirty trash: all they get done is love the men ... Right in front of the bosses they love each other. They lay in box cars together. The men and women goosie each other; there is nothing too bad for them to do ... its outrageous the way they are acting. The men keep money back from their pay and give it to them things. The bosses would get rid of them but they have good times with them too." After accusing the women workers of rampant sexual impropriety, the letter ended with a plea and a threat: "Half the men are trying for divorces now that work at Lucknow shops ... we can't stand it for any longer we will make trouble if they are not dismissed soon. For God's sake will you help us for our hearts are broken our homes are sad." This anonymous letter could be easily read as an oddity, as an isolated and strange view of railroad workers or as the random and envious spewings of a railroad employee's wife.

This article focuses on the history of women office worker movement and occupational health in the late capitalist office. Compared to the chemical and mechanical hazards of industrial work that led to loss of limb and life, the carpeted, air-conditioned, clean interiors of late-capitalist office work appear benign refuges from occupational disease and explicit exploitation, offering working women a sanctuary from industrial work. The successful feminization of the lowest ranks of office work was dependent on the genteel etiquette, safety, and middle-class dress codes that at first operated to cover over class stratifications, and eventually became expectations associated with the job. Conditions that factory or mine workers regularly tolerated would be absolutely unacceptable to an office worker, regardless of her rank. Though hazards were hard to perceive for many reasons, the women's office worker movement of the 1970's and 80's argued that, despite its genteel veneer, the office harbored dangers.

This article focuses on the layoffs in United Automobile Workers. There were many female war workers working in this factory, who now hoped to reclaim their jobs after reconversion. These females were appealing to the union leader, and sense of solidarity with the working class. Many girls have been called back already and they have husbands to support. Demonstrating the complexity of the relationship between women workers and their unions in the postwar era, Helen Miller and Louise Zahrooge, a worker, asserted a number of direct claims-seniority rights, the right to a job which paid a family wage, and the recognition of wartime sacrifice among them-that appealed to working-class and union solidarity, economic justice, and patriotism. For scholars who recognize the importance of the labor movement as an early training ground in the issues and strategies that later energized the women's movement, the answer to this question is vital. The growth of the United Auto Workers union represents one of the greatest changes that America witnessed as it left the Great Depression and entered the Second World war.

Rural New England farm daughters who left home to apprentice in tailoring frequently were exploited as cheap labor and never taught the requisite skills. Without certain critical skills these women were forced to remain nothing but a shop girl. Unable to achieve their goal of learning a trade, they were forced to continue working for the tailor for wages comparable to and sometimes lower than those paid to female textile workers. And unlike female textile workers, shop girls had no opportunities for collective resistance except in the large semi-industrial shops in urban areas. Most tailoring shops of this period had fewer than half a dozen workers. This employment situation represents an early stage in the proletarianization of female garment workers. In the 18th century system of household manufacturing, women designed, cut out, and sewed the entire garment; in the early 19th century shops women sewed together garments cut out for them by the master tailor. Thus, they no longer worked for themselves, moreover, they held the lower paying, lower status positions.

Few of those who have seen the film "The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter" would deny its value as entertainment. Reviewers have come away impressed. Pitting good against evil, truth against myth, director Connie Field takes on the task of rewriting the history of women in World War II. Women, these clips show, responded gallantly and self-sacrificingly to a country in need. They pitched in for the duration and then returned gracefully to homes from which they had come, a nation's gratitude for a job well done ringing in their ears. Far from being willing pawns in a labor market that badly needed them, the real Rosies say that they saw the main chance and took it. Though they worked hard, sometimes too hard, they recall their wartime work experiences as satisfying and demanding and, for a change, appropriately lucrative. They fought racism and wage discrimination where it appeared and, having for once a little clout, they won such things as an end to segregated changing rooms and to racial abuse on the job. But the story ends with the apparent defeat of the good guys as they are driven out of the job market at war's end.

The article focuses on the role of working class women as labor organizers and discusses their background in context to a case study by Leonora O'Reilly. One period in which a number of these women were active was the progressive era, a time when a strong and vital woman's movement existed along with a multitude of social reform activities and a growing labor movement. The large number of Irish women in the female labor force in the 19th century may be one reason for the prevalence of women of Irish descent among the early women organizers. The acceptance of the single woman as worker, rather than maintenance of a tradition which tried to keep all females out of the labor force is the reason of large number of Irish female labor activists. Much of the history of Irish-America stresses the conservative, catholic, and anti-reform traditions of the group, yet in the labor movement social radicalism merged with Irish nationalism. Many of the working class women were socialists who felt that class meant one's relationship to the means of production.

Belle Moskowitz is best remembered as a key figure in New York governor Alfred E. Smith's kitchen cabinet. After an early career in settlement work and progressive reform, she joined Smith's first gubernatorial campaign in 1918 to organize the women's vote. From 1919 until her premature death in 1933, Moskowitz was Smith's political strategist, organizing supporters, managing campaigns, drafting speeches, messages, and press releases and advising on legislation. She accepted only one job from Smith's hands, that of Publicity Director for the state Democratic committee, a post she held from 1924 to 1928 when she became the sole woman on the national committee's advisory body. When she died, the press eulogized her as the most powerful woman in American politics. Moskowitz had a unique experience as a mediator and industrial reformer in New York's garment industry during the era of the protocols. These were agreements between garment workers' unions and manufacturers' associations that began in 1910, lasting about six years in various parts of the trade. Moskowitz's experience was the turning point of her career. It permitted her to develop from a reformer agitating for change in peripheral areas of industrial life, such as decent recreation for working girls, into a multifaceted expert in the central concerns of the workplace.

In the 1960s, two Federal steps against sex-based discrimination, the Civil Rights Act and the "Equal Pay" amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, signaled victory for the heirs of the women who had fought for both equal pay and equal employment opportunities during World War I. The wartime government had embraced cautiously the demand for equal pay, had equivocated on the rights of working women, and in the end, had left a checkered legacy. Among the government's most important agencies, which dealt with women workers, was the National War Labor Board (NWLB). The NWLB administered America's first comprehensive experiment in labor-government-management relations. The American Federation of Labor named five labor leaders to represent employees, and the National Industrial Conference Board selected five industrialists to speak for the nation's employers. From the outset, the NWLB employee members urged sweeping reforms and the employer representatives stood firm against change. The board's principles, which had been drafted in an effort to reconcile the two groups' conflicting demands, were themselves ambiguous.

The article focuses on problems that many women in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) local union confronted in the post-World War II. Josepine DiChiera statement describes the effort made by management to remove women from the jobs they held during the war. It indicates that men in the union not only shared management's attitudes toward women but often actively assisted in its efforts to deprive them of employment and it further illustrates the degree of frustration and bitterness women could feel when the union, which claimed to defend its members regardless of sex, acted against the interests of women members. The auto industry had not been eager to employ women during the war's first years. When management complained of labor shortages, the UAW and other unions responded that the cause was the employers' refusal to hire qualified women and blacks. By 1943, however, it was apparent to management everywhere that women would have to be employed to meet the nation's wartime needs. Most dramatic was the increase in the number of women newly employed in manufacturing industries.

Female industrial labor is generally understood to have been unskilled, low-wage, young, unmarried, living with their families and foreign-born or of foreign parentage in the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Women in the shoe industry in eastern Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York established a long history of union and strike activity beginning in the 1830s. The women workers in the shoe industry depended strongly on a linkage between sex and craft to provide a power base for their unions. The women who led the strike action also led efforts by the community of Haverhill to resist changes in its factory system and in its relationship with the native-born shoe workers. Their militant support for an industry-wide federation of crafts was reinforced by an unusual pattern of geographical mobility for a female work force, a mobility shaped by the economic requirements of an extremely seasonal industry. The work in the shoe industry was highly sex-typed. No women worked as cutters, lasters, or bottomers, a very few men worked as vampers, attracted by the wages, and a few women worked as finishers, trimmers and packers.

This article focuses on failure of female factory labor in colonial Boston. Due to poverty many woman were forced to work in industries. The author says that due to the war women started working in factories. Most of the men were sent to war and lost their lives. Reports of the widowing of Boston's population indicate the magnitude of the town's losses. In 1742, when a census was taken, town officials reported 1,200 widows, one thousand whereof are in low circumstances. About 30 percent of the town's married women had no spouses to contribute to the support of their households. Three years after the war ended the tax assessors reported that Boston contained 1,153 widows of which at least half are very poor. The social derangement caused by Boston's extraordinary contribution to the war effort can also be seen in the rapid decline of taxable polls during this period. They fell from 3,395 in 1738 to 2,972 in 1741, to about 2,660 in 1746. The children of the poor were bound out to financially secure family. By 1723, when workhouses were operating in almost every sizable English town, thousands of impoverished persons were taken off out-relief and forced to move from their homes.

Arno Press has recently printed some 53 volumes of literature pertaining to women and some 105 volumes pertaining to labor in the U.S. Among these are a dozen or so, originally published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and having to do with the lives of wage earning women. They are an impressive collection. Written and compiled by sociologists, economists, and interested observers, they are replete with statistical tables, firsthand observations, and documents written by working women themselves. Their rich data offer irrefutable testimony to the consistency of women's collectively unfortunate experience as wage laborers. But in the years before the First World War, such data were not unusual. Almost anyone during those years could have told, if asked, that more and more women-married and unmarried, immigrant and native born, poor and not-so-poor-were entering the paid labor force. And almost everyone would have agreed with the popular wisdom, women's natural role was to take care of home and children. Wage work, sometimes an unfortunate necessity, ought to be regulated and controlled so that women's family roles were not impaired.

Allis Rosenberg Wolfe's publication of five "Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends: 1845-1846," represents an important contribution to the study of the New England factory women. These letters, sent to the 22 year-old Harriet Hanson by her friends Maria and Lura Currier and H.E. Back and now in the Harriet Hanson Robinson papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are among the only surviving manuscript materials that document the perceptions of the Yankee mill women of the 1840's. The following remarks are designed to clarify and extend our understanding of the letters' contents, now that they have at last been made more accessible. Wolfe publishes perhaps two-thirds of the letters, an unfortunate if possibly necessary, for reasons of space editing of such rare documents. The portions retained are well chosen, but the general character of the letters is inevitably blurred. In short, all five letters in the Robinson papers must be seen as representing the complex experience of those mill women who went back and forth between factory town and rural community.

The article presents a bibliography on American labor history in 1975, which consists of periodicals, dissertations and research in progress. Some of these are as, "The Fellowship of Reconciliation: Pacifism, labor, and Social Welfare, 1915-60," by Betty L. Barton; "W. Jett Lauck: Biography of a Reformer," by Carmen B. Grayson, "Women at work: the Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusettes, 1826-1860," by Thomas L. Dublin; "The independent mechanics: the Tradesmen of New York City in Labor and Politics During the Jeffersonian Era," by Howard B. Rock; "Beyond the Jacksonian Era: a comment on the Pessen Thesis," by Donald M. Roper; "The Pessen thesis:' Brief Reflections by its Author," by Edward Pessen; "Samuel Slater and Sons: the Emergency of an American Factory System, 1790-1860," by Barbara M. Tucker; "The Covert Themes of American Anarchism, 1881-1908: Time, Space, and Consciousness as Anarchist Myth," by Matthew J. Mnacini and "Mormon Co-Operatives in Paris, Idaho, 1869-1896," by Dean L. May.

American society's emphasis on the role of women as wives and mothers, coupled with the historian's usual focus on organized labor have led to the neglect of women as workers. Female employment outside the home has been viewed as an aberration rather than a cultural pattern. Yet recent sociological findings reveal that a woman's decision to work often results from a favorable life-long attitude toward employment. Women's life cycles influenced their participation in the labor force and it is true that young single women were always the most likely to work despite their ethnicity, but some groups consistently had fewer women encumbered with children and subsequently always had a large proportion of their women working. Women worked because of a need for more income but the perception of what a family needed was relative, reflecting their concept of life style, material possessions, and ambitions for their children. Not only did a woman's ethnic background determine what her own ethnic group expected her to do, but society as a whole had certain expectations of different ethnic groups.

From October, 1845, to September, 1846, Lowell mill girl Harriet Hanson Robinson received four letters from her friends Marie and Lura Currier of Wentworth, New Hampshire, and one letter from Miss H.E. Back, a mill worker. These five letters give a rare glimpse into the world of the New England women who went or wanted to go to the mill towns. They shed light on the rural communities from which the mill girls were recruited and upon life in the mills. According to Wentworth's historian, George Plummer, the years between 1820 and 1850 were a period of expansion and development for the town. In those years a district school system was established and the town church was built. Agriculture prospered and many shops, mills and small industries were opened. Members of the Currier family shared in the town's prosperity. But the constricting of opportunities was the predominant experience of Marie and Lura. In 1845, they wrote to Harriet of their loneliness and of the absence of a satisfying social life. Most of their friends had left or were leaving for the mill towns of Manchester, New Hampshire and Lowell, Massachusetts. Their church activities were curtailed as their favorite minister left town to seek a better position and the leader of their choir moved to Manchester.

Sources on Maine working women have been singled out for examination for a variety of reasons. The highly rural-agricultural and coastal-fishing nature of the state's economy necessitates a concept of "worker" broad enough to encompass those employed in non-industrial pursuits. Both published and unpublished secondary works indicate that women have played a varied and significant role in Maine's economy from the colonial period to the present. James Douglas "The Status of Women in New England and New France,"is a brief social and demographic survey of women's conditions in seventeenth century New England and French Canada.In contrast, Helen Coffin Beedy's "Mothers of Maine," contains a wealth of social and economic information on women in Maine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It includes descriptions of their roles as physicians, teachers, and authors. It also provides biographical sketches of famous Maine-born women as well as data on when and where Maine women first entered previously all-male organizations.

Women who were actively engaged in the labor struggles of the first part of this century faced a continual dilemma. They were caught between a trade union movement hostile to women in the work force and a women's movement whose participants did not work for wages. The wage-earning women who undertook the difficult task of organizing their coworkers also faced yet another problem: they had to reconcile active involvement in labor unionism with community traditions that often discouraged worldly roles. Understanding how women who were union organizers experienced these tensions tells much about the relationships of men and women within unions and throws into relief some of the central problems unionization posed for many working women. Among immigrant Jews in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and other large cities only the exceptional unmarried woman did not operate a sewing machine in a garment factory for part of her young adult life. In the old country, where jobs were scarce, daughters were married off as fast as possible. In America they were expected to work, for the family counted on their contributions. Many young girls emigrated as teenagers to go to an uncle or older sister who would help them to find a job so that a part of their wages could be sent back to Europe. Expectations of independent self-assertion were frustrated when marriage intervened and women were confined to more restricted roles.

Most examinations of working class women focus on wage earning women in textile towns and in mixed industrial and commercial centers. However, historians need to expand their examination of working class women to include those living in cities which had few employment opportunities for women such as Pittsburgh, and to study women's unpaid work in the home as well as paid labor outside it. A study of domestic and municipal technology, who benefited from it, and who could not afford it illustrates the deprivation of the working class vis-a-vis other groups in the city and shows how urbanization and technological innovation affected working class lives. Such a study provides a microcosm of governmental attitudes toward the working class and shows the ways in which urban government could improve or ignore the quality of life of different socioeconomic groups within the city. The lack of services in working class neighborhoods was all the more critical since these areas were precisely the ones which suffered most from the pollution of the mills and had the most traffic.

The article focuses on cotton textiles and the federal child labor act of 1916 of the United States. According to the author, proposals for the federal regulation of child labor within the textile industry did not occur at once, but crystallized through the years 1895 to 1916 as New England cotton industrialists shifted from fighting such legislation in the states to demanding uniform regulation on the national level as a means of eliminating one advantage of their Southern competitors. It was early realized that looser child labor laws were only part of the overall advantage the South enjoyed. Consequently, many New England cotton manufacturers felt that if any meaningful gains were to be attained, the hours and wages of the operatives throughout the textile industry would have to be made uniform through federal law. Representative John Jacob Rogers of Massachusetts proposed amending the Constitution and giving Congress the power to regulate the employment of women and children under twenty-one years of age, as a means of modifying the terms upon which the South could compete with New England.

This article focuses on the oppressive measures of the early textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts and mentions protests made by women labors against those measures. In the years before 1850 the textile mills of Lowell were a celebrated economic and cultural attraction. Foreign visitors invariably included them on their American tours. Interest was prompted by the massive scale of these mills, the astonishing productivity of the power-driven machinery, and the fact that women comprised most of the workforce. As Lowell expanded, and became the nation's largest textile manufacturing center, the experiences of women operatives changed as well. The increasing number of firms in Lowell and in the other mill towns brought the pressure of competition. Wages were declined and so, too, did conditions for the mill operatives. Wages were reduced and the pace of work within the mills was stepped up. Women operatives did not accept these changes without protest. The major factor in the rise of a new consciousness among operatives in Lowell was the development of a close-knit community among women working in the mills.

The book "Home to Work," by Eileen Boris fills a big gap in the literature on wage-earning women by offering the first book-length history of industrial homework in the United States. By examining homework as a form of gendered labor that spans boundaries of public and private, home and market, Boris builds on and extends the work of feminist scholars who have uncovered other forms of invisible and boundary-spanning labor for which women are responsible. These include kin work, domestic service, paid child care, unpaid labor in family business and involuntary unwaged labor for capital. Industrial homework has existed alongside these other forms of gendered labor that requires that meanings of home, work and worker be expanded. before. It is surprising that the subject remained neglected for so long. Reasons for the neglect appear to be twofold. First, like domestic service, which was similarly neglected by social historians until the 1980s, homework has been hidden because of its location in the so-called private household and because much of it has taken place outside the official economy, performed off the books. A second reason for the neglect was the assumption that homework was dying out, and that instances of it represented minor deviations from the main thrust of economic development.

The book "Home to Work," by Eileen Boris exemplifies the many directions labor history might take, from the integration of gender to the study of labor and the state, to the role feminism in labor issues, to working out the contested meanings of the woman worker. Following her leads on the application of legal studies to labor history and the feminist legal question of equality and difference will yield for labor historians a multitude of fruitful directions. Boris shows how recent studies of the welfare state would benefit from attention to labor issues. In the early 20th century, the traditional divide between those who were employed and those who were unemployed did not hold, and the U.S. government served the working poor through welfare state policies that regulated the economy. National Consumers' League leaders legislated and litigated into this new kind of state, the regulatory state, an important and often ignored arm of the welfare state. The regulatory state, especially, should be the purview of labor historians, for it is at the core of state intervention into work.

This article examines the impact of seniority rights on the labor force and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) during a period of industrial restructuring and job scarcity. Historians have shown how gender was entrenched and maintained in production systems through sex-based job classifications, differential wage rates or dual seniority. In addition, they have explored the ways in which male union officials, as well as rank-and-file, participated in the creation and maintenance of gendered work structures. Furthermore, several historians have demonstrated that women sometimes joined men in the protection of sex-based occupational arrangements. UPWA women, as they lost jobs in the 1950s and 1960s, used women's activities committees to analyze the ways industrial transformation made them especially vulnerable to job displacement. At local, district and international conferences, they announced that the machine menace is stalking all union members and demonstrated how the menace attacked women's jobs first. In addition, women were confined to the first three or four slots of a wage scale that contained between 20 and 30 brackets. These unskilled or semi-skilled jobs were more susceptible to replacement by machines and job combinations than skilled men's positions. UPWA women focused on dual seniority as the key source of their disproportionate vulnerability to job displacement.

The article analyzes historian Philip S. Foner's contributions to the 20th century American literature, emphasizing his coverage of women workers in his works on labor and Afro-American history. Foner published his first book entitled "Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict" in 1941. Interestingly, Foner in his first book did not consider the role of labor. His succeeding publications began to focus directly on labor. He wrote from a Marxist point of view. After a quarter-century of publishing various histories of labor and the left, in the 1970s Foner expanded his perspective, and began to emphasize the history of marginalized workers. In 1974, he produced the first of dozens of titles in this area when he published "Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973. A few years later in that same decade, he again widened his definition of labor, and undertook what became a two volume history of women workers, "Women and the American Labor Movement." In both instances, responding to the events of his own times as were other students of history, Foner made room for formerly overlooked groups, fitting blacks and women into his writings about unions and unionization efforts.

World War II has traditionally been viewed as an important watershed for working women. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to assess the long-term impact that the wartime experience had on women workers particularly in light of the rapid defeminization of basic industry that took place during the late 1940's and early 1950's. Writer William Chafe's book "The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles," represents the traditional view. In his 1972 book he asserted that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor swiftly erased opposition to hiring women workers and cleared the way for a massive expansion of the female labor force. Chafe in fact claimed that the war caused a greater change in women's economic status than a half-century of feminist rhetoric and agitation had been able to achieve. Writer Karen Anderson's 1981 book, "Wartime Women," supports the Chafe approach. The writer Leila Rupp, on the other hand, has argued that the war had no permanent impact on female labor market participation.

In 1905 in Lochner v. New York the U.S. Supreme Court voided a law setting 10 hours as the maximum work day for bakers on the ground that it violated the constitutional right of both employee and employer under the 14th Amendment to contract concerning hours of labor. In 1908 in Muller v. Oregon the same Court unanimously upheld a 10 hour law for women workers in factories and laundries. It should not be surprising to discover that the liberty of contract doctrine was always one that pertained exclusively to adult males. The view that women, especially married women, needed the special protection of the state was certainly no stranger to the common law. However, rationales for that paternalism changed over time. The original common law view of women classed them with children and sometimes mental incompetents, all of whom needed the special protection of the state because they were supposedly unable to fully care for themselves. In the late 19th century cases and treatises there was a transition to a different rationale, the biological differences between sexes, particularly the need to protect the health of women as childbearers.

The primary concern of working class women (and working class men as well) was to avoid becoming casualties of the Depression. In order to accomplish this, and because so many men were unemployed, working class women entered, re-entered, and remained in the labor force although some of them would not have expected to be working for wages. Once in the labor force, women remained employed by moving down the occupational hierarchy into less desirable jobs. However, downward mobility was not a strategy which could work for everyone. The workers at the bottom of the employment hierarchy, specifically black women and older white women, were forced out of employment altogether as their jobs were filled by younger and middle-aged white women, including married women. The women in these samples are a cross-section of urban working class women in the northeast and midwest during the Depression, particularly with regard to occupational histories. The Women's Bureau conducted the studies to answer a variety of questions and thus the sample groups are diverse: employed women in working class neighborhoods in South Bend questioned in a house-to-house survey in 1930 and again in 1932. The majority of the black population lived in the South during the Depression.

This article focuses on the National Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and protective labor legislation from 1903-1923 in the U.S. In response to lobbying from a coalition of progressive reformers, 26 states between 1896-1923 enacted laws governing the hours, wages, sanitary and safety conditions of women working in most manufacturing industries. Paradoxically that legislation was achieved with the support of many wage-earning women. Yet its effect was either to exclude them from the labor force, or to restrict their employment to highly specific categories, this confirming their places in those jobs most conducive to exploitation. These effects, however, were not the intention of the industrial legislation movement. Wage-earning women who supported the protective labor legislation did so because they saw particular economic advantages for themselves in doing so. They may have thus achieved the objectives of employers and male workers, but their motive for doing so was not on of acquiescence to other's objectives. Furthermore the support given to such legislation by many middle class reformers was not a simple straightforward one of helping to preserve home and motherhood. This can be seen most clearly in the policy of the WTUL, an organization which brought together wage-earning and middle class women, trade unionists and social reformers.

This article deals with the gender issues, white collar work and grievances of women in the 19th century in the U.S. The distinctive character of 19th century women workers is that they expressed wage and hour issues in terms of gender. Wage concerns were articulated as grievances over sex-based salary differentials for similar work while worktime grievances were expressed in the discourse of leisure and family values in many ways particular to women's social needs. The casting of these traditional issues in gender forms may explain why they received so little attention in male-dominated institutions. The modern notion of comparable worth was not likely to be articulated by male-controlled unions espousing the doctrine of the family or living wage. The issue of worktime was perhaps less divisive than wage equality. The movements for the eight-hour day and early shop closing had animated unions throughout the 1880s. Attempts to explore working women's consciousness have generally been filtered through the yes of atypical working women, or more frequently, through those of middle class women who often simply observed the labor process. The investigation of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics in 1894 is an exceptional document for it provided an unusual opportunity for women to describe their work experience.

The article comments on the story of three women who left their homes in rural Vermont to seek employment in the burgeoning New England textile industry. The letters which the three women wrote from the mills are an important addition to the growing literature of antebellum textile operatives' correspondence. Most of the previously published letters have come from workers in the large cotton textile centers such as Lowell and Manchester, New Hampshire. There are also occasional writings from young women in mills scattered throughout rural Massachusetts and Connecticut. Mill work must have remained a viable option for over a decade for these women. Their letters span the period from 1838 to 1848, as the women went from their 20s to their 30s, giving a portrait of daily life in a Vermont mill town. The letters, however, also contain criticisms of factory labor. Lay-offs were a frequent problem in their mill repairs, spring floods, and business failures could all close a factory down for varying lengths of time.

A poem by Thomas Hood and a 1909 film of the same name by D.W. Griffith are two of the antecedents of "The Song of the Shirt," a complex film concerning the lives and toil of women working in the British garment industry in the 1830s and 1840s. Using dramatic recreation of general conditions and specific events, intercut with evocations of the literature and journalism of the time, its authors present a variety of information and entertainment to illuminate a period which they describe as crucial to the positioning of women in British society. At the same time, the film questions the use and acceptance of traditional forms of historical documents and their inherent bias. It demands a good deal of time and concentration from any viewer to follow its ambitious goals-one being to break out completely from the conventional techniques of documentary films. In some ways the film succeeds, creating moods and emotional scenes which enrich the grim facts and documents of exploitation, the economic arguments, the attempts to legislate and reform abuses.

"There are good people in all our large cities who live just above the starving point," wrote William T. Elsing, a New York minister, in 1895. Elsing's claim would have startled few of the men and women involved in urban charitable work, tenement house reform, and public health movements. Middle class Americans active in social reform between 1890 and 1920 saw poverty as one of the nation's most difficult and pressing problems. As observers of a changing nation, they knew that many working class families lived from hand to mouth, scrimping by on wages insufficient to meet family needs. What they did not know was how many Americans suffered from poverty. To determine the extent of this suffering Progressive Era reformers began to detail the quality and standard of living for American workers in family budget studies and social surveys. Initially centered on the informal examinations of "friendly visitors" and settlement house workers, the budget studies became an important tool for Progressive reform.

The women's rights movement became one of that host of reform efforts falling under the rubric of Progressivism in the early twentieth century. The majority of women involved were "social feminists" who put social reform ahead of purely feminine issues. The inequities facing women made many of them sympathetic to demands for social reform generally; indeed, some of the most prominent leaders of the social justice wing of progressivism were women, such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald. For the most part, however, women's reform efforts were in the traditional sphere reserved for women, namely, Home and Motherhood, which included the morals, health, education and welfare of children. Hence, they strongly supported prohibition, pure food and drugs, control and prevention of venereal disease, elimination of prostitution and the double standard, creation of juvenile courts and reformatories for children, child labor laws, and compulsory school attendance. The general protection of women and children had to wait upon the New Deal.

When the American Federation of Labor was founded at the end of the nineteenth century it was immediately aware of the necessity of organizing females in order to protect and improve the conditions of male workers. Although the new organization inherited an increasingly pragmatic sense of working class-consciousness from earlier unions, it was also bequeathed by them a Victorian concept of woman's place in society. Not only had the Nineteenth Amendment been ratified and the Women's Bureau instituted, but trade union women themselves were assuming positions of leadership in union activities; so much so that in 1922 Margaret Robins would resign as League President to be succeeded by Maud O'Farrell Swartz of the Typographical Union. Furthermore, 8 percent of trade union membership was now female, with 6.6 percent of working women organized the Women's Trade Union League (W.T.U.L.). Only time would tell if these new begin-flings were again to be frustrated by the trade unions' quandary; namely, the mutually exclusive convictions that working women must be organized and, impeding this view, that women at the same time belonged at home.

The minimum-wage movement on the state level followed a meteoric course in the early twentieth century. In 1911 Wisconsin lawmakers introduced the first bill. The next year Massachusetts became the first state to enact a minimum-wage law for women and children. With some variation eight states had copied Massachusetts by 1913. While New York did not pass such a law, the New York State Factory Investigating Commission (1911-1915) wrote an important chapter in the broader story of the minimum-wage drive during the Progressive Era. Its investigation into wages continued to influence the minimum-wage movement at both the state and national levels, through the 1930s. In the United States progressives restricted their proposals to women and minors because of the tenuous constitutionality of minimum-wage statutes. Opponents of minimum-wage laws would certainly challenge them in the courts as a denial of property rights and, hence, interference with individual liberty. The initial impetus for the minimum-wage movement came from the Consumers' League. Its leaders had urged merchants voluntarily to apply minimum rates to female employees during the 1890's. By 1913 the reformers' drive led to investigations that had successfully persuaded the legislators in nine states to establish minimum-wage acts. The statutes varied. Reformers had not neglected New York. In their early campaigns for voluntary action, Consumers' League leaders had pressured New York. Nationally, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (F.L.S.A.) crowned the minimum-wage movement. Congress passed this law as a result of the 1935 Supreme Court decision against the N.I.R.A. It provided for flat minimum-wage rates, originally 25 cents an hour, but to go up to 40 cents in seven years.