Breadwinners
Subtitle: working women and economic independence, 1865-1920
By: Lara Vapnek.
Series: Women in American history
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780252034718; 9780252076619
Subjects: Women -- Employment -- United States -- History; Working class women -- United States -- History
Description: Lara Vapnek tells the story of American labor feminism from the end of the Civil War through the winning of woman suffrage. During this period, working women in the nation's industrializing cities launched a series of campaigns to gain economic equality and political power. This book shows how working women pursued equality by claiming new identities as citizens and as breadwinners. Analyzing disjunctions between middle-class and working-class women's ideas of independence, Vapnek highlights the agendas for change advanced by leaders such as Jennie Collins, Leonora O'Reilly, and Helen Campbell and organizations such as the National Consumers' League, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the Women's Trade Union League. Locating households as important sites of class conflict, Breadwinners recovers the class and gender politics behind the marginalization of domestic workers from labor reform while documenting the ways in which working-class women raised their voices on their own behalf. --Publisher description.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: The daily labor of our own hands; title: Working girls and white slaves; title: Gender, class, and consumption; title: Solving the servant problem; title: Democracy is only an aspiration.