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摘要
摘要
Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy.
In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a "gendered imagination" that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable. In this brilliant account that traces social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs has distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit the freedom and equality of women. Government rules generally sought to protect women from exploitation, even from employment itself; but at the same time, they attached the most important benefits to wage work. To be a real citizen, one must earn--and most policymakers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women were not, and should not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris traces the impact of this gender bias in the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair labor standards, in Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. "For generations," she writes, "American women lacked not merely the practice, but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom." Only in the 1960s and '70s did old assumptions begin to break down--yet the process is far from complete.
Even today, with women closer to full economic citizenship than ever before, Kessler-Harris's insights offer a keen new understanding of the issues that dominate the headlines, from the marriage penalty in the tax code to the glass ceiling in corporate America.
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
A leading scholar on women's history and public policy, Kessler-Harris expands the work she began in her previous book, Out to Work: The History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, to examine not just women's employment history, but also the forces that have shaped economic policy for the past 100 years. In the introduction, she says, "For generations, American women lacked not merely the practice but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom." For anyone even remotely familiar with employment trends, this doesn't seem like a revelatory comment, but Kessler-Harris proceeds to make it one. By looking at crucial pieces of legislation and important court cases, she reveals the subtle shifts in language that marked progress for women and changed the work landscape. She points out that some employment areas, like Social Security legislation and tax laws, proved to be particularly resistant to equality for women, and changed very slowly over decades. Others, like the corporate glass ceiling, have yet to budge in some industries. Although focused on the larger issues of gender and economic policy, the book is also a refreshingly compact and useful primer on 50 years of employment legislation, detailing the crucial arguments and heated congressional debates that brought both men and women from the depths of the depression to the brink of equal economic citizenship. Historical perspective is especially important in later chapters, as she describes the effects of legislation that gave many middle-class women economic freedom, but had unforeseen negative consequences for poor women and women of color. But Kessler-Harris's cautious optimism about our shared economic future is hard to resist. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Kessler-Harris teaches history at Columbia University and at its Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is also the author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982). She proclaims that women cannot achieve full political participation without first achieving complete economic independence. Tracing the history of social and tax policies from the 1930s, Kessler-Harris shows that regulations and legislation that were originally designed to protect women and families ultimately limited their ability to make economic gains. She identifies existing attitudes that "affirmed the sexually segmented structure of the workforce" and looks at how changing conceptions of fairness were reflected in the social policies of the New Deal and the development of our systems of national welfare. She further examines early federal income tax policy and equal employment policy in the 1950s and 1960s. It was finally in the 1970s, asserts Kessler-Harris, that an "outdated gender system" was exposed and women were put at "the threshold of economic citizenship." --David Rouse
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
One of America's leading scholars on the economic impact of gender bias on women, Kessler-Harris (history, Columbia Univ., Columbia Inst. for Research on Women and Gender; A Woman's Wage) offers a vigorous historical analysis of the 20th-century U.S. social policies that produced differential access to resources for men and women. Beginning in early 20th-century America, she explains how the gendered conception of the right to work emerged differently among men and women and then follows the unfolding of this conception during the New Deal era. She concludes this solid, erudite, heavily noted history by exploring notions of fairness in early federal income-tax policy, issues of equal employment policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and the newly witnessed women's rights movement after World War II. Kessler-Harris succeeds in showing how gender has shaped the rules by which we live, how gendered habits of mind have been inscribed in social policies that continue to frame our lives, and how, once these habits are embedded in the legislative, judicial, and policymaking mechanisms of society, only such a critical, penetrating analysis as this can challenge them and begin to advance the cause of modern feminism. Highly recommended for all academic libraries supporting labor law, economics, and women's studies. Dale Farris, Groves, TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
Acknowledgments | p. ix |
Introduction | p. 3 |
Chapter 1 The Responsibilities of Life | p. 19 |
The Mere Fact of Sex | p. 22 |
A Practical Independence | p. 34 |
A Man-Run Company | p. 45 |
Marriage: A Defining Condition | p. 56 |
Chapter 2 Maintaining Self-Respect | p. 64 |
Self-Help Is the Best Help | p. 66 |
Have We Lost Courage? | p. 74 |
A Sieve with Holes | p. 88 |
A Foundling Dumped upon the Doorstep | p. 101 |
Chapter 3 Questions of Equity | p. 117 |
Matters of Right | p. 121 |
The Hardest Problem of the Whole Thing | p. 130 |
They Feel That They Have Lost Citizenship | p. 142 |
It Would Be a Great Comfort to Him | p. 156 |
Chapter 4 A Principle of Law but Not of Justice | p. 170 |
Apportioning the Income Tax | p. 172 |
More Than Money Is Involved | p. 178 |
To Confer a Special Benefit on the Marital Relationship | p. 193 |
Chapter 5 What Discriminates? | p. 203 |
How're You Going to Feel? | p. 206 |
The President's Commission on the Status of Women | p. 213 |
Calling into Question the Entire Doctrine of Sex | p. 226 |
Equal Pay for Equal Work | p. 234 |
Chapter 6 What's Fair? | p. 239 |
Constructing an Equal Opportunity Framework | p. 241 |
Standing with Lot's Wife | p. 246 |
Divided Women | p. 267 |
At First Glance, the Idea May Seem Silly | p. 275 |
History Is Moving in This Direction | p. 280 |
Epilogue | p. 290 |
Notes | p. 297 |
Index | p. 365 |