Alice Kessler-Harris

I Fronesis nr 1 lyfts grundläggande maktfrågor. Fokus sätts på ekonomins ständiga konfliktdimension. I stället för att se ekonomins demokratisering som en historisk nödvändighet, diskuterar vi den som en möjlighet att utmana maktförhållanden som alltför ofta tas för givna. Men det handlar inte bara om maktförhållanden inom den ekonomiska sfären, utan även om vad som konstituerar ekonomin som avskild sfär med egen logik. Det politiska handlar lika mycket om maktkamp inom en viss sfär som en kamp om denna sfärs gränser mot samhällets övriga liv. Innehåll i Fronesis nr 1 (202 sidor): Olle Sahlström: Praktiskt förnuft Svante Skoglund: I stället för cynism och uppgivenhet Magnus Wennerhag: Varför demokratisk ekonomi? Jan Lindhagen: Vid källan smakar vattnet bäst eller Varför går vi medströms? Anders Kalat: Tänkande utan grund Ernesto Laclau och Chantal Mouffe: Socialdemokratin: Från stagnation till ”plantänkande” Gunnar Hansson: Gillesocialismen och Cole G. D. H. Cole: Gilletankens uppkomst Gunnar Hansson: SAP och Wigforss Utdrag ur protokoll från SAP:s kongress 1920: Industriell demokrati Gunnar Hansson: Wigforss och industriell demokrati Klas Gustavsson: Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci: Amerikanism och Fordism Rudolf Meidner: Några kommentarer till ”Det sociala ägandet av kapital” Richard Minns: Det sociala ägandet av kapital Cecilia von Otter: Inte bara en fråga om klass Aleksandra Ålund: Etniska ungdomar och den sociala krisen - Om utbildning, arbete och identitet Alice Kessler-Harris: Genusidentitet: Rätten till arbete och idén om ett ekonomiskt medborgarskap

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. She delves into issues ranging from the gendered nature of the success ethic to the social activism and the meaning of citizenship for female wage workers. This second edition adds artwork and features significant updates. A new chapter by Kessler-Harris follows women into the early twenty-first century as they confront barriers of race, sex, and class to earn positions in the new information society.

In this updated edition of a groundbreaking classic, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women's wages in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on three issues that capture the transformation of women's roles: the battle over minimum wage for women, which exposes the relationship between family ideology and workplace demands; the argument concerning equal pay for equal work, which challenges gendered patterns of self-esteem and social organization; and the debate over comparable worth, which seeks to incorporate traditionally female values into new work and family trajectories. Together, these topics illuminate the many ways in which gendered social meaning has been produced, transmitted, and challenged.

This collection represents the thirty-year intellectual trajectory of one of today’s leading historians of gender and labor in the United States. The seventeen essays are divided into four sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of Alice Kessler-Harris's central project: showing gender’s fundamental importance in the shaping of United States history and working class culture. The first section considers women and organized labor while the second pushes this analysis toward a gendered labor history as the essays consider the gendering of male as well as female workers and how gender operates with and within the social category of class. Subsequent sections broaden this framework to examine U. S. social policy as a whole, the question of economic citizenship, and wage labor from a global perspective. While each essay represents an important intervention in American historiography in itself, the collection taken as a whole shows Kessler-Harris continuing to push the field of American history to greater levels of inclusion and analysis.

This masterwork of American immigrant literature is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father's rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. Sarah's struggle towards independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Beautifully redesigned page for page with the previous editions, Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance.

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, changing perceptions of wage work for women, and the relationship between wage-earning and family roles. In the 20th Anniversary Edition of this landmark book, the author has updated the original and written a new Afterword.