| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea. By Laura Hapke. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. xii, 202 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8135-3466-6. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8135-3467-4.)
Laura Hapke's Sweatshop is an important and interesting survey of garment sweatshop discourses from the 1840s to the 1990s. For Hapke, "language itself undermines, refashions, challenges, and sometimes contradicts the official goals of policy makers, advocates, and workers themselves" (p. 1). She argues, "Those who have represented the sweatshop in narratives have done so as part of a larger American ideological battle between labor and managerial-corporate elements" (p. 6). Through detailed analysis of visual and written texts, she unpacks this "battle to wrest representational control of the sweatshop narrative" (p. 5). The variety of sources and perspectives is a major strength, as she includes sweatshop supporters, apologists, and critics.	1
Attentive to nativism and gender, Hapke notes that 1840s public health agents equated sweatshops with tenements and immigrants, as they "stigmatized not only the sweated space, which often doubled as a worker's home or as a boarding house, but also the workers themselves" (p. 27). By the 1890s, an ethnic counternarrative depicted "the transformative power of workers in even the most oppressive conditions" (p. 36). The Progressive Era's survey movement deemed sweatshops relics of the past and pondered their persistence. During the Great Depression, Works Progress Administration (WPA) artists portrayed workers' dignity, with sweatshops still relegated to the past.	. . .

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