Women and Work in America (HIST 250-01): PRINT BOOKS SXU LIBRARY

Feminist Frontiers offers analyses of the causes and consequences of gender inequality in a global context and introduces students to feminist theory and methodology. A sociological analysis opens each of the four parts and eleven sections of the book. Boxed inserts featuring personal stories, news articles, and other items from popular culture complement the readings.

"A foreign method of working": racial degeneration, gender disorder, and the sweatshop danger in America; Fashion, flexible specialization, and the sweatshop: a historical problem, and more essays.

In the popular stereotype of post-World War II America, women abandoned their wartime jobs and contentedly retreated to the home. These mythical women were like the 1950s TV character June Cleaver, white, middle-class, suburban housewives. Not June Cleaver unveils the diversity of postwar women, showing how far women departed form this one-dimensional image.

"We seek to inform as well as to celebrate. The best posters about American workers and the jobs at which they labor make up a visually fascinating body of work that rewards our attention. A brief history of activist graphic media -- Dignity and exploitation -- Health and safety -- Women -- Race and civil rights -- War, peace, and internationalism -- Solidarity and organizing -- Strikes and boycotts -- Democracy, voting, and patriotism -- History, heroes, and martyrs -- Culture.

Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor: Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the "counter girls" at the Detroit Woolworth's during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelley's story of a movie theater musicians' strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology.

Her rallying cry was famous: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." A century ago, Mother Jones was a celebrated organizer and agitator, the very soul of the modern American labor movement. At coal strikes, steel strikes, railroad, textile, and brewery strikes, Mother Jones was always there, stirring the workers to action and enraging the powerful. In this first biography of "the most dangerous woman in America, " Elliott J. Gorn proves why, in the words of Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones "has won her way into the hearts of the nation's toilers, and . . . will be lovingly remembered by their children and their children's children forever."