Book Review

Recently I taught a course on the history of American women and work. Each week, a few of the students marveled that women did not "work" until the 1980s. Puzzled, I reminded them of the material we had previously covered, which demonstrated irrefutably (I thought) that women had indeed worked, performing both paid and unpaid labor, inside and outside the home. After reading Alice Kessler-Harris's important new book, I realize that my students' pronouncements reflect more than inattention or historical amnesia. The problem was not that they refused to believe that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women worked. Rather, it was that they had difficulty conceiving of past women as "real" workers.

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In Pursuit of Equity explores the far-reaching consequences of this belief. With breathtaking clarity, Kessler-Harris analyzes the myriad ways in which what she calls the "gendered imagination" shaped twentieth-century social policy. Most Americans, men and women alike, envisioned a nation populated by idealized families headed by (white) male breadwinners, ignoring evidence to the contrary. They constructed women primarily in relation to families, as wives and mothers who deserved protection but not individual economic rights. The gendered imagination justified a sex-segregated labor market and the attendant miseries it visited on female wage earners: low pay, limited opportunities, and exclusion from skilled trades and prestigious professions. More important, positioning women within imaginary families categorically denied them "economic citizenship." Conferring the right to work in one's chosen pursuit, economic citizenship (a revivified version of the nineteenth-century "family wage") also offered "customary and legal acknowledgment of personhood" and key political rights. Kessler-Harris's signal contribution is to show not merely, as have several scholars, that social policies were gendered. But by granting economic citizenship to white male breadwinners, such policies implicitly and sometimes explicitly rendered others less than "persons" under the law. This definition of citizenship fixed a pattern that discouraged alternative visions of justice and fairness, for it encouraged the dispossessed to voice their claims in the language of individual economic rights. Indeed, Kessler-Harris argues, the importance placed on economic citizenship does much to explain the distinctive character of the American welfare state, a polity in which the status of "worker" entitles one to a generous array of social benefits.

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