Women’s History Month Recommendations from the Will Parry Library

Add some labor history to your Women’s History Month reading list! Here are some women’s labor history highlights from the Will Parry Library. Descriptions are pulled from our catalog and/or book jacket:

1. Women, work and protest : a century of U.S. women's labor history by Ruth Milkman

This volume represents the best of the new feminist scholarship in twentieth-century U.S. women's labor history. Fourteen original essays illuminate the complex relationship between gender, consciousness and working-class activism, and deepen historical understanding of the contradictory legacy of trade unionism for women workers.

2. Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History by Alice Kessler-Harris

A classic since its original publication, Women Have Always Worked brought much-needed insight into the ways work has shaped female lives and sensibilities. Beginning in the colonial era, Alice Kessler-Harris looks at the public and private work spheres of diverse groups of women--housewives and trade unionists, immigrants and African Americans, professionals and menial laborers, and women from across the class spectrum.

3. Sex workers unite : a history of the movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk by Melinda Chateauvert

Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America's major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers - not as helpless victims in need of rescue.

4. Rocking the Boat: Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975 by Brigid O’Farrell

Rocking the Boat is a celebration of strong, committed women who helped to build the American labor movement. Through the stories of eleven women from a wide range of backgrounds, we experience the turmoil, hardships, and accomplishments of thousands of other union women activists through the period spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement.

5. We just keep running the line : black Southern women and the poultry processing industry by LaGuana Gray

Using collected oral histories to allow these workers to tell their own stories and to contest and reshape narratives commonly used against them, We Just Keep Running the Line explores the physical and psychological toll this work took on black women, analyzing their survival strategies and their fight to retain their humanity in an exploitative industry.

6. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson

Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York's power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city's laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelmond and Robinson to join the vanguard of a successful unionization effort.

7. "Rights, Not Roses": Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80 by Dennis A. Deslippe

Although the most visible banners of feminism were carried by educated, white-collar, professional women, working-class women were themselves a powerful force in the campaign for gender equality. "Rights, Not Roses" explores how unionized wage-earning women led the struggle to place women's employment rights on the national agenda, decisively influencing the contemporary labor movement and second-wave feminism.

8. We Were There: Working Women by Barbara Wertheimer

Monograph recounting the historical role of the woman worker in the evolution of the working class and in the trade union movement in the USA - covers the working conditions and experiences of working women, including Black women in forced labor, wartime industrial workers, and married women settlers.

9. Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie by Ellen Cassedy

9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film-it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy and her friends. Ten office workers in Boston started out sitting in a circle and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years, they had built a nationwide movement that united people of diverse races, classes, and ages. Working 9 to 5 is a lively, informative, firsthand account packed with practical organizing lore that will embolden anyone striving for fair treatment.

10. We can't eat prestige : the women who organized Harvard by John Hoerr

Women workers at Harvard University created a powerful and unique union--one that emphasized their own values and priorities as working women and rejects unwanted aspects of traditional unionism. The workers involved comprise Harvard's 3,600-member "support staff," which includes secretaries, library and laboratory assistants, dental hygienists, accounting clerks, and a myriad of other office workers who keep an elite university functioning. Even at prestigious private universities like Harvard and Yale, these workers--mostly women--have had to put up with exploitive management policies that denied them respect and decent wages because they were women. With unusual access to its meetings, leaders, and files, he examines the unique culture of a female-led union from the inside.

11. We'll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction by Susan Eisenberg

Susan Eisenberg began her apprenticeship with Local 103 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 1978, the year president Jimmy Carter set goals and timetables for the hiring of women on federally assisted construction projects and for the inclusion of women in apprenticeship programs. Eisenberg introduces this new edition with a preface that shows how things have changed and how they have stayed the same since the book's original publication. She ends with a discussion of the practices and policies that would be required to uproot gender barriers where they are deeply embedded in the organization and culture of the workplace.

12. Women in Pacific Northwest history by Karen J. Blair

This 2nd edition of Karen Blair's popular anthology originally published in 1989 includes thirteen essays, eight of which are new. Together they suggest the wide spectrum of women's experiences at work that make up a vital part of Northwest history.