Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920 (review)

In Breadwinners, Lara Vapnek examines the efforts of women in three industrialized northern cities to organize around their rights as economic citizens in late 19th and early 20th century America; in doing so, she strikes a nice balance between exploring the political and ideological barriers to women's organizing and women's concerted efforts to challenge those barriers. She begins with an unprepossessing historiographical statement that does not make grandiose methodological claims, yet carefully positions her work in the gaps and silences of women's labour history. And she delivers well, altering our picture of labour feminism by rescuing and reassessing a group of women activists who focused their organizing efforts on working women, arguing that these women deserved the same rights and entitlements as wage-earning men. Her emphasis on this particular group of activists provides a counterweight to studies that have examined how successfully trade unions, particularly the skilled ones, promoted the ideal of the male breadwinner at this time. Not all female labour reformers, she argues, accepted this ideal, including women who saw first-hand that it was unachievable, and also more politicized activists who understood that making women second-class economic citizens made them vulnerable 'dependents,' not only in the workforce but also within the family.

Vapnek begins her story with lesser known post-Civil War era women from Boston such as Jennnie Collins and Aurora Phelps, whose short-lived Working Women's League advocated for all women's right to be self-supporting. Democratic ideals of "leveling out all distinctions" among citizens, and removing the "artificial barriers against individuals exercising their full range of talents" (28) often framed their political imaginary, rather than socialist ideology. One of Phelps's projects was the provision of land, or 'Garden Homesteads' for women outside Boston; while the scheme did not successfully survive, its premise was quite radical, "upending" (21)existing Republican ideology that stressed the provision of land only to male heads of household.

Vapnek then explores the writing of four social investigators who examined aspects of women's work in Boston, New York, and Chicago. Although other historians have delved into the writing of experts, particularly for the early 20th century, Vapnek adds a new dimension by reaching back to the 1880s, and by comparing and contrasting four different kinds of investigations, including the government-sponsored survey of Boston's Carroll D. Wright, the writing of Knights of Labor organizer Leonora Barry, middle-class reformer Helen Campbell's book, Prisoners of Poverty, and the more sensational Chicago Times exposé of working women by journalist Nell Cusak. While claiming to use scientific categories, many surveyors were in fact creating those categories, which were inevitably shaped by their own ideological assumptions, and these four examples, sometimes overlapping, but also distinctive, are interesting precisely for that reason. Also, rather than presenting women only as objects of surveillance, Vapnek uses these sources to make the case that these investigations could lead to the emergence of "counter narratives" (60) from women workers themselves. By dissecting the rhetoric of these investigators, she is also able to analyze their repeated use of the 'wage slavery' metaphor to describe white women's work. Although African-American women were a small minority in many of these cities in the late 19 th century, race was nonetheless ever present in social thought and commentary. By referring to white women's labour as wage slavery, she argues, writers not only "erased the differences in ethnicity that divided" working women, but also "subtly combined sympathy for the enslaved with the racist insistence that whiteness should ensure entitlement to better treatment." (57)

Vapnek's chapter on Gender, Class and Consumption introduces us to Leonora O'Reilly, whose presence is an important theme throughout the book, as well as the New York Working Women's Society, founded in 1886, and dedicated to improving the working conditions of women. Many of these early organizations, it is clear, drew on ideas and personnel from the Knights of Labor after its demise...