San Antonio College Library

In mines and mills and on railroads, work in America had become more dangerous than in any other advanced nation. Ninety years later, such numbers and events seem extraordinary. Although serious accidents do still occur, industrial jobs in the United States have become vastly and dramatically safer. In Safety First, Mark Aldrich offers the first full account of why the American workplace became so dangerous, and why it is now so much safer. Aldrich,...

Traces the involvement of poor, minority, and middle class American women in household work, wage labor, social reform, and Depression and wartime labor forces.

"In tobacco fields, auto and radio factories, cigarmakers' tenements, textile mills, print shops, insurance companies, restaurants, and bars, notions of masculinity and femininity have helped shape the development of work and the working class. The fourteen original essays brought together here shed new light on the importance of gender for economic and class analysis and for the study of men as well as women workers. After an introduction by Ava...

Overview: First published in 1982, this pioneering work traces the transformation of "women's work" into wage labor in the United States, identifying the social, economic, and ideological forces that have shaped our expectations of what women do. Basing her observations upon the personal experience of individual American women set against the backdrop of American society, Alice Kessler-Harris examines the effects of class, ethnic and racial patterns,...

"This lively and thought-provoking book takes a close look at women's work--paid and unpaid, domestic and public, agrarian and industrial--over the past two centuries in America. Covering a wide array of working situations, from a farm household in eighteenth-century New England to a contemporary office being picketed by striking clerical workers in Wisconsin, it offers important new perspectives on women's experience in the labor force. "To Toil...