Wage Work for Women Citizens: 1870-1920
Develop a deeper understanding of women's work and independence in the late 19th century, and how it was influenced by gender and politics in this second part of the "Women Have Always Worked" series.
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Course Description
- Understand the complexities of women's work outside the home during the late 19th century, analyzing the balance between domesticity and the pursuit of independence.
- Assess the impact of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments on women's political organizing and participation.
- Explore the garment industry as a key case study to comprehend women's efforts in championing the rights of industrial workers through unions and various advocacy groups.
- Employ an intersectional lens to discern how women of diverse backgrounds formed alliances around critical social and legal issues, culminating in the suffrage movement of the early 20th century.
This is the second of four courses in the Women Have Always Worked series:
- Seeking Women’s Rights: Colonial Period to the Civil War
- Wage Work for Women Citizens: 1870–1920
- Negotiating a Changing World: 1920-1950
- Fighting for Equality: 1950-2018
Course Prerequisites
Recommended for those with an undergraduate level interest in history, labor, and gender.
What You Will Learn
By the end of this course, learners will be able to:
Analyze the rise of independent womanhood during the industrialization era and its influence on women's roles in society.
Examine the implications of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments on women's political engagement and their pursuit of legal independence.
Understand the depth of women's contributions to labor reforms, their influence on trade unions, and their advocacy for protective labor legislation.
Navigate the complexities of women's public roles, uncovering generational and racial dynamics of the suffrage movement and the foundational stages of feminism.
Course Outline
Module 6: Paid work and moral virtue in the age of industrialization
Module 7: Work and women's identity in the age of industrialization
Module 8: New meanings for women's citizenship: Women, work, and the changing law
Module 9: Searching for democracy: Intersectionality and politics
Module 10: Women's politics, women's suffrage
Instructors
Alice Kessler-Harris is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History Emerita at Columbia University where she was also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Professor Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and 20th-century social policy. Her books include In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001), which won the Bancroft, Taft, Joan Kelly, and Herbert Hoover prizes; Gendering Labor History (2007), which contains her essays on women, work and social policy, the recently re-issued A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990), and A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012). She is perhaps best known for the classic Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982, 2001). This course is based in part on the second edition of Kessler-Harris’ 1981 book, Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History, published in 2018. Professor Kessler-Harris is past president of the Organization of American Historians, the Labor and Working Class History Association, and the American Studies Association. Currently, she serves as Vice President of the Society of American Historians. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Nick Juravich earned his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2017 and currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at New-York Historical Society. Beginning in September 2019, he will be an assistant professor of public and labor history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Nick's first book, The Work of Education: Community-Based Educators in Schools, Communities, and the Labor Movement is under advance contract with University of Illinois Press in the Working Class in American History series. Nick is a trained oral history researcher and first interviewed Professor Kessler-Harris for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia's 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
Please note that there are no instructors or course assistants actively monitoring this course.