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Over twenty years after its initial publication, Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire continues to resonate with its harrowing story of activism, labor, and women's history. Orleck traces the personal and public lives of four immigrant women activists who left a lasting imprint on American politics. Though they have rarely made more than cameo appearances in previous histories, Rose Schneiderman, Fannia Cohn, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, and Pauline Newman played important roles in the emergence of organized labor, the New Deal welfare state, adult education, and the modern women's movement. Orleck takes her four subjects from turbulent, turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe to the radi...
The inspiration for the PBS documentary premiering March 2023 The story of the revolutionary Black women welfare organizers of Las Vegas who spearheaded an evergreen, radical revisioning of American economic justice This timely reissue tells the little-known story of a pioneering group of Black mothers who built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs. In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck brings into focus the hidden figures of a trailblazing movement who proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty, providing job training, libraries, medical access, daycare centers and housing to the poor in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s. Orleck introduces Ruby Duncan,...
The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage. Tracing a new labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from across the globe, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now” is an urgent, illuminating look at globalization as seen through the eyes of workers-activists: small farmers, fast-food servers, retail workers, hotel housekeepers, home-healthcare aides, airport workers, and adjunct professors who are fighting for respect, safety, and a living wage. With original photographs by Liz Cooke and drawing on interviews with activists in many US cities and countries around the world, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, it features stories of resistance and rebellion, as well as reflections on hope and change as it rises from the bottom up.
Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of "poverty pimps," and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal. The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural w...
Essays and interviews explode the myth of apolitical motherhood by showing how 20th century women have politicized their role as mothers in a wide range of social contexts.
Rethinking American Women's Activism traces intersecting streams of feminist activism from the nineteenth century to the present. This enthralling narrative brings to life an array of women activists from the abolition, suffrage, labor, consumer, civil rights, welfare rights, farm workers’, and low-wage workers’ movements, and from campus fights against sexual violence, #MeToo, the Red for Ed teacher’s strikes, and Black Lives Matter. Multi-cultural, multi-racial and cross-class in its framing, the text enables readers to understand the impact of women's activism. It highlights how feminism has flourished through much of the past century within social movements that have too often been treated as completely separate.Weaving the personal with the political, Annelise Orleck vividly evokes the events and people who participated in our era's most far-reaching social revolutions. This new edition has been updated to include recent scholarship and developments in women’s activism from 2011 into the 2020s. This book is a perfect introduction to the subject for anyone interested in women’s history and social movements.
This collection of twenty-four original essays by leading scholars in American women's history highlights the most recent important scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field. Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including the colonial family, marriage, health, sexuality, education, immigration, work, consumer culture, and feminism. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes expanded bibliography of titles to guide further research.
A highly readable introduction to an an important new American population.
"Candid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as "waists." The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. This book is a collection of stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors offer a collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims"--
"In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julily Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period."--Page 4 of cover