United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism

by Ileen A. DeVault

Overview

In the late nineteenth century, most jobs were strictly segregated by sex. And yet, despite their separation at work, male and female employees regularly banded together when they or their unions considered striking. In her groundbreaking book, Ileen A. DeVault explores how gender helped to shape the outcome of job actions—and how gender bias became central to unionism in America.

Covering the period from the formation of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 to the establishment of the Women's Trade Union League in 1903, DeVault analyzes forty strikes from across the nation in the tobacco, textile, clothing, and boot and shoe industries. She draws extensively on her research in local newspapers as she traces the daily encounters among male and female coworkers in workplaces, homes, and union halls. Jobs considered appropriate for men and those for women were, she finds, sufficiently interdependent that the success of the action depended on both sexes cooperating. At the same time, with their livelihoods at stake, tensions between women and men often appeared.

The AFL entered the twentieth century as the country's primary vehicle for unionized workers, and its attitude toward women formed the basis for virtually all later attempts at their organization. United Apart transforms conventional wisdom on the rise of the AFL by showing how its member unions developed their central beliefs about female workers and how those beliefs affected male workers as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801427688
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2004
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ileen A. DeVault is Associate Professor of Labor History in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is the author of Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh, also from Cornell.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	vii
	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
1.	Strike	11
2.	The Knights of Labor	53
3.	The American Federation of Labor	75
4.	Ethnicity, Race, and Strikes	105
5.	Strikes in the Industrial Periphery	131
6.	Family Ties	153
7.	Industrial Unions in the AFL?	179
8.	Conclusion	215
Appendix 1.	Strike Case Studies and Selected Bibliography	223
Appendix 2.	1900 Census Projects	231
	Index	237

What People are Saying About This

Mark G. Harmon

In United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism Ileen A. DeVault makes a significant advance in the study of labor relations in the United States during the turn of the last century. DeVault began with an exhaustive study of 40 strikes of the late 19th and early 20th century in a sound cross section of industries and regions. With a particular care to detail, four important strikes are singled out as prime examples of typical labor strife of the period and analyzed with extreme thoroughness. These narratives are the highlight of this book and add considerable weight to her findings. DeVault pays particular attention to the large national craft unions that dominated the industries and expands on the roles that race, ethnicity, gender, region, and family played.

Eileen Boris

In United Apart strikes become the means to interrogate larger questions. Ileen A. DeVault has written a tour de force that innovates in its form as well as its analysis. She closely reconstructs strikes in both the industrial center and periphery during this key period of economic transformation and illuminates the connections among forms of collective action and identities based on skill, gender, race/ethnicity, and family.

Patricia Cooper

United Apart takes an unconventional approach to what appears to be a familiar topic. By looking at cross-gender strikes nationally with an eye for region, gender, race, ethnicity, and family, Ileen A. DeVault not only revises earlier studies but also adds rich new material. She has sifted through a mountain of detail and created a complex yet crystal clear picture that every labor historian must now engage. Superb!

Editorial Reviews

Providing much interesting detail regarding the thousands of labor strikes that pulsated across America at the end of the nineteenth century, DeVault claims that the evolution of the very gender-specific craft unionism that permeated the American Federation of Labor from its inception in 1886 and well into the twentieth century can be traced to the ways in which men and women strikers related to each other under such pressure.

Choice

Providing much interesting detail regarding the thousands of labor strikes that pulsated across America at the end of the nineteenth century, DeVault claims that the evolution of the very gender-specific craft unionism that permeated the American Federation of Labor from its inception in 1886 and well into the twentieth century can be traced to the ways in which men and women strikers related to each other under such pressure.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher

"United Apart takes an unconventional approach to what appears to be a familiar topic. By looking at cross-gender strikes nationally with an eye for region, gender, race, ethnicity, and family, Ileen A. DeVault not only revises earlier studies but also adds rich new material. She has sifted through a mountain of detail and created a complex yet crystal clear picture that every labor historian must now engage. Superb!"

Patricia Cooper

"In United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism Ileen A. DeVault makes a significant advance in the study of labor relations in the United States during the turn of the last century. DeVault began with an exhaustive study of 40 strikes of the late 19th and early 20th century in a sound cross section of industries and regions. With a particular care to detail, four important strikes are singled out as prime examples of typical labor strife of the period and analyzed with extreme thoroughness. These narratives are the highlight of this book and add considerable weight to her findings. DeVault pays particular attention to the large national craft unions that dominated the industries and expands on the roles that race, ethnicity, gender, region, and family played."

Mark G. Harmon

"In United Apart strikes become the means to interrogate larger questions. Ileen A. DeVault has written a tour de force that innovates in its form as well as its analysis. She closely reconstructs strikes in both the industrial center and periphery during this key period of economic transformation and illuminates the connections among forms of collective action and identities based on skill, gender, race/ethnicity, and family."

Eileen Boris