In this volume, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the transformation of some of the United States' most significant social policies. Tracing changing ideals of fairness from the 1920s to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs, or "gendered imagination" shaped seemingly neutral social legislation to limit the freedom and equality of women. Law and custom generally sought to protect women from exploitation, and sometimes from employment itself; but at the same time, they assigned the most important benefits to wage work. Most policy makers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women would not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris shows how ideas about what was fair for men as well as women influenced old age and unemployment insurance, fair labor standards, Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did the gendered imagination begin to alter—yet the process is far from complete.
ISBN-13: 9780195158021
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 02-06-2003
Pages: 384
Product Dimensions: 9.44(w) x 6.28(h) x 1.00(d)
Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University, where she also teaches in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. A leading advocate of women's rights in the United States, she has been a featured speaker at a special White House symposium and an expert guest on the PBS documentary "The Measured Century." She is the author of Out to Work, A Woman's Wage, and Women Have Always Worked.
Table of Contents
|
Acknowledgments |
ix |
|
Introduction |
3 |
| Chapter 1 |
The Responsibilities of Life |
19 |
|
The Mere Fact of Sex |
22 |
|
A Practical Independence |
34 |
|
A Man-Run Company |
45 |
|
Marriage: A Defining Condition |
56 |
| Chapter 2 |
Maintaining Self-Respect |
64 |
|
Self-Help Is the Best Help |
66 |
|
Have We Lost Courage? |
74 |
|
A Sieve with Holes |
88 |
|
A Foundling Dumped upon the Doorstep |
101 |
| Chapter 3 |
Questions of Equity |
117 |
|
Matters of Right |
121 |
|
The Hardest Problem of the Whole Thing |
130 |
|
They Feel That They Have Lost Citizenship |
142 |
|
It Would Be a Great Comfort to Him |
156 |
| Chapter 4 |
A Principle of Law but Not of Justice |
170 |
|
Apportioning the Income Tax |
172 |
|
More Than Money Is Involved |
178 |
|
To Confer a Special Benefit on the Marital Relationship |
193 |
| Chapter 5 |
What Discriminates? |
203 |
|
How're You Going to Feel? |
206 |
|
The President's Commission on the Status of Women |
213 |
|
Calling into Question the Entire Doctrine of Sex |
226 |
|
Equal Pay for Equal Work |
234 |
| Chapter 6 |
What's Fair? |
239 |
|
Constructing an Equal Opportunity Framework |
241 |
|
Standing with Lot's Wife |
246 |
|
Divided Women |
267 |
|
At First Glance, the Idea May Seem Silly |
275 |
|
History Is Moving in This Direction |
280 |
|
Epilogue |
290 |
|
Notes |
297 |
|
Index |
365 |
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