In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century AmericaIn 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. |
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Contents
3 | |
19 | |
CHAPTER 2 Maintaining SelfRespect | 64 |
CHAPTER 3 Questions of Equity | 117 |
CHAPTER 4 A Principle of Law but Not of Justice | 170 |
CHAPTER 5 What Discriminates? | 203 |
CHAPTER 6 Whats Fair? | 239 |
Epilogue | 290 |
Notes | 297 |
Index | 365 |
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Advisory Council advocates African-American Altmeyer American argued benefits bill black women civil rights commission Committee community property Congressional contributions Court debate Dewson domestic workers earned economic citizenship Edith Green EEOC employers employment equal pay equal rights amendment equity Esther Peterson excluded fairness federal female feminists File Fourteenth Amendment gender groups Hearings on Social House husbands Ibid idea individual industry issue labor force labor market male mandatory joint marriage married couples married women maternalist ment mothers Murray National numbers old age insurance opportunity Pauli Murray PCSW Collection pension percent political protective labor legislation race racial roles Security Act Amendments Senate sex discrimination social insurance Social Security Act Status of Women Theda Skocpol tion Title VII U.S. Congress unemployment insurance unions University Press wage wage-earning women Welfare widows wife Witte wives woman women workers Women's Bureau women's rights York