Abstract
Historians of the United States who turned to women’s history in the early 1970s found themselves mired in a debate about the centrality of class. Absent a governing theoretical apparatus in the discipline, many feminist historians turned to Marxian ideas to explain the kinds of changes taking place in family lives, female labor market participation, and women’s consciousness. This essay traces the emergence of these ideas in the life of a single historian; it follows the subsequent turn to shifting, and racialized, gender relations to explain social and political change. Reconciling gender and class provided the impetus for historians of late twentieth-century womanhood to develop new understandings of family and work.
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Notes
- 1.
Sweden’s Gunnar Myrdal, an economist by training, is the outstanding exception. His American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Myrdal, 1944 focused on culture and values. At the insistence of his wife, Alva Myrdal, the book included a final chapter on women.
- 2.
Some of what follows is drawn from my memories of this conference, as recorded in Kessler-Harris 1990.
- 3.
13 of the 70 participants were female. They included such sterling figures as Mari Jo Buhle, Barbara Fields, Jacquelyn Hall, Sue Levine, Ruth Milkman, Vicki Ruiz, Judith E. Smith, and Christine Stansell.
- 4.
- 5.
The case was widely discussed and, in its aftermath, excited public and scholarly scrutiny.
- 6.
Arguably, Charles Sabel offered a precursor to intersectionality with his conception of every individual having a complex worldview, a part of which motivated action at any point in time. See Sabel 1982.
- 7.
The best source for data about wage-earning women comes from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC.
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Kessler-Harris, A. (2020). The Power of Class; the Gender of Power. In: Fenstermaker, S., Stewart, A.J. (eds) Gender, Considered. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48501-6_6
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