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Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American
working-class history.” —The American Prospect Praised
for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who
Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing
American history through the prism of working people (Publishers
Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in
seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary
Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people,
places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the
evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from
the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco (Library Journal).
Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of
labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers,
disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice
movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in
the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the
crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to
unions. With two entirely new chapters—one on global developments
such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’
relationships to Trump—this is an “extraordinarily fine
addition to U.S. history [that] could become an
evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s
award-winning A People’s History of the United States”
(Publishers Weekly). “A marvelously informed, carefully
crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” —Noam Chomsky
Working girls' clubs were a flash-point for class antagonisms yet
also provided fertile ground for surprising cross-class alliances.
Priscilla Murolo's nuanced study charts the shifting points of
conflict and consensus between working women and their genteel club
sponsors; working women and their male counterparts; and among
working women of differing ethnic backgrounds. The working girls'
club movement lasted from the 1880s, when women poured into the
industrial labor force, to the 1920s. Upper-class women initially
governed the clubs, and activities converged around standards of
"respectability" and the defense and uplift of the character of
women who worked for wages. Later, the workers themselves presided
over the leadership and shifted the clubs' focus to issues of labor
reform, women's rights, and sisterhood across class lines. A
valuable and lucid study of the club movement, The Common Ground of
Womanhood throws new light on broader trends in the history of
women's alliances, social reform, gender conventions, and worker
organizing.
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