Abstract
Ruth Milkman was doing intersectional research before Crenshaw named the approach in 1989. This book is about gender and the workplace but it is always and essentially about class and gender. By covering nearly a century, the continuing salience of a class and gender analysis is both demonstrated and its dynamic and changing nature revealed. Any presumption that class is being eroded is dismissed through the compelling chapter on the decline and subsequent rise of the domestic workforce in the United States, the product of increasing inequalities among women and the lack of public services to substitute for domestic labour. What comes through in all the chapters is a remarkable ability to simultaneously analyse and promote the cause of both gender and class equality, each accorded equal importance. Milkman identifies the role of trade unions in maintaining gender segregation and gender inequality without at any point falling into the trap, identified by Nancy Fraser (2009), of feminists through such critiques giving inadvertent support to the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism. Thus, the punchline to the book refers not to the improved position for women since the 1930s but to the fact that ‘class inequality among women’ has never been greater than in the 21st century, and unlikely to be resolved without policies to address overall inequality in society.
The intersectional analysis of class and gender is pursued through four main themes in this book of collected articles, supplemented by one new article on the recent financial crisis. The first theme is about how recession and crisis affect both gender and class relations. The starting point is the 1930s but subsequent chapters cover employer and union strategies to return jobs to demobbed armed forces after the Second World War and compare experiences between the Great Depression and the recent Great Recession. This theme on the impact of the economic cycle is overlaid by a second concurrent theme on the role of gender segregation in the workplace in shaping class and gender outcomes. The third theme traces the role of trade unions in shaping gender and class relations and makes the case that it is the context and rationale for each union’s initial development that shapes its future actions with respect to the organizing and protection of women workers. While several chapters identify the failings of trade unions to organize and defend women’s right to work, the chapter on ‘Rosie the Riveter Revisited’ rebalances the argument by considering the even more important role of managers in, to use Milkman’s term, purging women from manufacturing jobs after the Second World War. The fourth theme explores gender and class relationships in the organization of unpaid work and care work, paying attention both to women’s role in the household economy and to the underdevelopment of state support for working parents in the United States.
Taken together, these four themes across 11 chapters provide a very rich diet of insights into the historical development of class and gender relations in the United States. That could also be considered its limitation. Undoubtedly the book is aimed at a primarily American audience, published as it is in a series on the history of the working class in America, but as a non-American I felt a need to understand a bit more about how the particularities of American history had shaped these gender and class outcomes. The chapters on growing class inequality and the poverty of welfare state provision for working parents do focus on the lack of state support and the overwhelming power of the business lobby but the United States is such an outlier on so many points that more is needed for an international audience on its specificities. Little is said, for example, on how the health insurance system and its availability mainly for full-time workers, shapes women’s work patterns. The real puzzle is how mothers in the United States maintain relatively high employment (even if recently stagnating) in full-time jobs despite some of the longest working hours and the least developed care and maternity leave systems. The chapter on the re-emergence of domestic labour provides some clues for higher earners but exactly how middle or low income households survive the squeeze between long and unsocial hours and a weak system of state or family support for care still remains a puzzle for Europeans. Another issue that is in part specific to the United States is gender segregation. The trends towards desegregation are clearly identified as only benefitting the higher educated but I was also curious to know to what extent this more rapid rise for women in higher level jobs is linked to specific contextual factors such as the availability of cheap female labour for domestic work. Likewise, in understanding the maintenance of gender segregation for lower level jobs, I felt the need to know more about the intersections of gender, race and citizenship in a country where it is not necessarily only women who are the main source of low wage labour. But these questions simply reflect how much the volume has whetted my appetite for more, as should indeed be the effect of a stimulating read.