In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America

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Oxford University Press, 2003 - 374 páginas
In this volume, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the transformation of some of the United States' most significant social policies. Tracing changing ideals of fairness from the 1920s to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs, or "gendered imagination" shaped seemingly neutral social legislation to limit the freedom and equality of women. Law and custom generally sought to protect women from exploitation, and sometimes from employment itself; but at the same time, they assigned the most important benefits to wage work. Most policy makers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women would not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris shows how ideas about what was fair for men as well as women influenced old age and unemployment insurance, fair labor standards, Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did the gendered imagination begin to alter--yet the process is far from complete.

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Contenido

The Responsibilities of Life
19
The Mere Fact of Sex
22
A Practical Independence
34
A ManRun Company
45
A Defining Condition
56
Maintaining SelfRespect
64
SelfHelp Is the Best Help
66
Have We Lost Courage?
74
More Than Money Is Involved
178
To Confer a Special Benefit on the Marital Relationship
193
What Discriminates?
203
Howre You Going to Feel?
206
The Presidents Commission on the Status of Women
213
Calling into Question the Entire Doctrine of Sex
226
Equal Pay for Equal Work
234
Whats Fair?
239

A Sieve with Holes
88
A Foundling Dumped upon the Doorstep
101
Questions of Equity
117
Matters of Right
121
The Hardest Problem of the Whole Thing
130
They Feel That They Have Lost Citizenship
142
It Would Be a Great Comfort to Him
156
A Principle of Law but Not of Justice
170
Apportioning the Income Tax
172
Constructing an Equal Opportunity Framework
241
Standing with Lots Wife
246
Divided Women
267
At First Glance the Idea May Seem Silly
275
History Is Moving in This Direction
280
Epilogue
290
Notes
297
Index
365
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Página 11 - It requires no argument to show that the right to work for a living in the common occupations of the community is of the very essence of the personal freedom and opportunity that it was the purpose of the Amendment to secure.
Página 12 - Here in America, we have raised the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full equality in economic opportunity? No man is wholly free until he is both politically and economically free.

Acerca del autor (2003)

Alice Kessler-Harris is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University, where she also teaches in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. A leading advocate of women's rights in the United States, she has been a featured speaker at a special White House symposium and an expert guest on the PBS documentary "The Measured Century." She is the author of Out to Work, A Woman's Wage, and Women Have Always Worked.

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