In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

by Alice Kessler-Harris
In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

by Alice Kessler-Harris

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Overview

Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy.

In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a "gendered imagination" that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable. In this brilliant account that traces social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs has distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit the freedom and equality of women. Government rules generally sought to protect women from exploitation, even from employment itself; but at the same time, they attached the most important benefits to wage work. To be a real citizen, one must earn--and most policymakers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women were not, and should not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris traces the impact of this gender bias in the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair labor standards, in Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. "For generations," she writes, "American women lacked not merely the practice, but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom." Only in the 1960s and '70s did old assumptions begin to break down--yet the process is far from complete.

Even today, with women closer to full economic citizenship than ever before, Kessler-Harris's insights offer a keen new understanding of the issues that dominate the headlines, from the marriage penalty in the tax code to the glass ceiling in corporate America.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780198020899
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 09/20/2001
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Alice Kessler-Harris is the author of Out to Work, A Woman's Wage and Women Have Always Worked. From featured speaker at a special White House symposium, to expert guest on the PBS documentary "The Measured Century," she has been a leading advocate of women's rights in the United States. She teaches in the Department of History and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsix
Introduction3
Chapter 1The Responsibilities of Life19
The Mere Fact of Sex22
A Practical Independence34
A Man-Run Company45
Marriage: A Defining Condition56
Chapter 2Maintaining Self-Respect64
Self-Help Is the Best Help66
Have We Lost Courage?74
A Sieve with Holes88
A Foundling Dumped upon the Doorstep101
Chapter 3Questions of Equity117
Matters of Right121
The Hardest Problem of the Whole Thing130
They Feel That They Have Lost Citizenship142
It Would Be a Great Comfort to Him156
Chapter 4A Principle of Law but Not of Justice170
Apportioning the Income Tax172
More Than Money Is Involved178
To Confer a Special Benefit on the Marital Relationship193
Chapter 5What Discriminates?203
How're You Going to Feel?206
The President's Commission on the Status of Women213
Calling into Question the Entire Doctrine of Sex226
Equal Pay for Equal Work234
Chapter 6What's Fair?239
Constructing an Equal Opportunity Framework241
Standing with Lot's Wife246
Divided Women267
At First Glance, the Idea May Seem Silly275
History Is Moving in This Direction280
Epilogue290
Notes297
Index365
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