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

by Kessler-Harris, Alice

• ISBN13: 9780195158021
• ISBN10: 0195158024
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 neutralsocial 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 fromthe 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.

Author Biography

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	p. ix
Introduction	p. 3
The Responsibilities of Life	p. 19
The Mere Fact of Sex	p. 22
A Practical Independence	p. 34
A Man-Run Company	p. 45
Marriage: A Defining Condition	p. 56
Maintaining Self-Respect	p. 64
Self-Help Is the Best Help	p. 66
Have We Lost Courage?	p. 74
A Sieve with Holes	p. 88
A Foundling Dumped upon the Doorstep	p. 101
Questions of Equity	p. 117
Matters of Right	p. 121
The Hardest Problem of the Whole Thing	p. 130
They Feel That They Have Lost Citizenship	p. 142
It Would Be a Great Comfort to Him	p. 156
A Principle of Law but Not of Justice	p. 170
Apportioning the Income Tax	p. 172
More Than Money Is Involved	p. 178
To Confer a Special Benefit on the Marital Relationship	p. 193
What Discriminates?	p. 203
How're You Going to Feel?	p. 206
The President's Commission on the Status of Women	p. 213
Calling into Question the Entire Doctrine of Sex	p. 226
Equal Pay for Equal Work	p. 234
What's Fair?	p. 239
Constructing an Equal Opportunity Framework	p. 241
Standing with Lot's Wife	p. 246
Divided Women	p. 267
At First Glance, the Idea May Seem Silly	p. 275
History Is Moving in This Direction	p. 280
Epilogue	p. 290
Notes	p. 297
Index	p. 365
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