A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

by Alice Kessler-Harris

Overview

Hidden inside everyone's paycheck is a set of social constructs that conveys messages about our lives and social roles. In this path breaking book, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women's wages in the United States in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813145396
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	05/27/2014
Series:	Blazer Lectures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	196
File size:	721 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alice Kessler-Harris is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History and professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. She is the author of numerous books, including In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America; Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States; and A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman.

Table of Contents

Introduction
A Wage Conceived: Value and Need as Measures of a Woman's Worth
Law and a Living: The Gendered Content of "Free Labor" in the Progressive Period
Providers: An Exploration of Gender Ideology in the 1930s
The Double Meaning of Equal Pay
The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women
A Woman's Wage, Redux

Editorial Reviews

A wage is more than dollars and cents. It embodies specific, powerful ideas about gender roles, economic goals, and social justice. In this series of essays historian Kessler-Harris ( Out to Work , LJ 3/15/82) explores five struggles over how and why women should be paid for their labor: the early 20th-century debate over the ``living wage''; the legal battle for a minimum wage; public perceptions of working women during the Depression; the political struggle for the Equal Pay Bill; and today's comparable worth controversy. Kessler-Harris's text is dense with ideas and musings about the relationships among wages, women, the labor market, and how these relationships define our social concepts of ``women's role,'' ``fairness,'' and ``equality.'' She argues persuasively for a feminist viewpoint grounded in intense historical analysis. A challenging, thought-provoking book, highly recommended for graduate-level social science collections.-- Donna L. Schulman, Cornell Univ. ILR Lib., New York

Library Journal

Poses hard, pressing questions about wage justice and provides the historical perspective that is needed to answer them.

New York Times Book Review

A rich collection of essays about the gendered construction of the wage in the twentieth-century United States.

Women's Review of Books

"A rich collection of essays about the gendered construction of the wage in the twentieth-century United States." -- Women's Review of Books

"Argues persuasively for a feminist viewpoint grounded in intense historical analysis. A challenging, thought-provoking book." -- Library Journal

"Poses hard, pressing questions about wage justice and provides the historical perspective that is needed to answer them." -- New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher