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Book Review
| Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 374. $35 cloth (ISBN 0-19-503835-5); $18.95 paper (ISBN 0-19-515802-4).
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| Kessler-Harris opens her prize-winning book, In Pursuit of Equity, by explaining a mindset—what she creatively calls "the gendered imaginary"—that she argues most white American men and women shared for much of the twentieth century relating to gender, work, family, and rights. In this mindset, men were rights-bearing individuals and one of the rights that marked them as men was the right to work. Women, on the other hand, were defined not as persons, but as family members. Their wage work—even in the early twentieth century, millions of American women were engaged in wage work for some part of their lives—was seen as a matter of family necessity, not individual right. This part of the argument will sound familiar to readers; Kessler-Harris relies here on both her own previous work and that of many other scholars. And, indeed, as she acknowledges, the gendered imaginary was not that far from the reality of most white men's and women's lives in early twentieth-century America. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, the gendered imaginary was inscribed in state protective labor legislation and effectively locked into place by the Supreme Court through 14th Amendment Privileges and Immunities and Equal Protection jurisprudence, in cases like Bradwell and Muller. |
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The argument is still on familiar ground at this point. It's what comes next that makes the gendered imaginary and its persistence so troubling. As Kessler-Harris explains, the programs of the New Deal in the 1930s—including protections for labor organization, expanded maximum hours legislation with provisions for overtime pay, unemployment and old-age insurance—effectively expanded the "rights" of American citizenship. In contrast to European welfare provision, in the American model these new rights, what Kessler-Harris aptly labels "economic citizenship," were tied not to families, or individuals, but to a particular definition of work. White men effectively became the beneficiaries of expanded rights of citizenship; white women and the vast majority of minorities (men and women alike) were not "workers," or not the right kind of workers, and so were effectively denied these same rights. Moreover, law sanctioned cultural and social norms and business practices that continued to exclude women and racial minorities from the privileged, rightsyielding domains of "work" even as more and more women, including married women and married women with small children, entered the labor force in the 1940s and 1950s. |
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The heart of the book lies in Kessler-Harris's skillful uncovering of the power of this racialized, gendered imaginary (man = worker/individual; women = wife and mother/family member) in the crafting and administration of social policy over the full sweep of the twentieth century in everything from labor policy, to social security, to tax law. For example, the reader listens in as members of Congress rationalized why married men should receive higher old-age benefits under Social Security than single men; why the widow should receive less than the single man ("she is used to doing her own housework whereas the single man has to go out to a restaurant") (137); and, why she shouldn't continue to receive benefits if she remarried (lest widows become a "prize" for enterprising men) (136). The book contains one quotable quote after another as labor leaders, social reformers, judges, and legislators unself-consciously debate and opine on the fairness of allocating benefits based on a gendered and racialized imagining of the right to work. In many instances, the reasoning seems laughable until one remembers that these gendered assumptions provided the foundation for laws that conferred and denied rights to tangible economic benefits. The second half of the book—chapters 3 through 6 and the Epilogue—holds the greatest riches. Here Kessler-Harris takes the reader through the crafting and implementation of Social Security (chap. 3); the intense debates over the implementation of the joint income tax return for married couples (chap. 4) (my own personal favorite); the first, halting efforts during the Kennedy Administration to imagine that women's status was the product of discrimination akin to racial discrimination in the President's Commission on the Status of Women (chap. 5); and, the inclusion of sex as a category of prohibited discrimination in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the struggle to make the EEOC take sex discrimination seriously (chap. 6). |
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Kessler-Harris brings a keen eye to these episodes from the past, sensitive to tone and historical context. One of the most significant contributions of the book is the skill it reflects in bringing questions of gender to policy and political history. And this is, truly, a work about gender. Kessler-Harris is as focused on capturing the moments and nuances of how men's right to work was articulated and protected by labor leaders, reformers, and legislators, as she is on the female side of the gendered imaginary. Indeed, as she convincingly shows, organized labor's almost maniacal belief that unearned social welfare provision would destroy American manliness was critical to the link made between the right to work and enjoyment of the benefits of economic citizenship in the New Deal era. She is sensitive as well to, if clearly at times frustrated by, the extent to which women policy-makers shared and advanced assumptions that excluded women from the benefits of economic citizenship. Throughout the book, she carefully exposes and untangles the strands of race, class, and gender. So, for example, she reminds the reader that the gendered imaginary did not fit the life experience of most black families even at the beginning of the century; she captures how economic emancipation for well-educated white women provided policy-makers a rationale for forcing many poor black women with small children into the labor force. Finally, she is careful throughout in acknowledging that the gendered imaginary was not the only or even, in some cases, the most important factor driving policy decisions. |
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In Pursuit of Equity is a book about the stubborn, almost unyielding hold of an idea even in the face of dramatic demographic change. It is also a book about the transformation of that idea, because assumptions about what was fair did change. Privilege came to be seen as discrimination. Choice, in many instances, came to be seen as socially, culturally, and legally constructed constraint. Kessler-Harris gives far greater attention to the policy side of that transformation than she does to the judicial revolution. Largely absent also are the voices of individual working women in challenging the gendered imaginary and then in creating and securing its (limited) transformation. |
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This book deserves a wide readership not only among historians, but also policy-makers, social activists, and labor leaders. It captures the importance of ideas as forces in history. It offers, as well, a cautionary tale of the nefarious power of gendered and racialized assumptions to cast as "fair" the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others from the benefits of citizenship. |
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| Barbara Y. Welke
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| University of Minnesota |
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