On Gender, Labor and Inequality by Ruth Milkman (review)

A leading scholar of labour studies in the US, Ruth Milkman has helped to shape multiple fields of study that cross disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries; her important work has challenged and re-shaped our historical and contemporary understanding of gender, class, and labour. This collection draws together some of her most important essays, published over four decades between 1976 and 2016, complimented by an introduction situating them in academic context and short introductory paragraphs doing likewise for each chapter.

Milkman’s book is a must read, not only to remind those of us influenced by her excellent work how significant her scholarship was and is, but also for new scholars who can trace the intellectual evolution of a labour studies author whose writing has always been grounded in painstaking empirical research, and simultaneously dedicated to analyzing the origins and operation of social inequality, even as specific topics, theories, and approaches have shifted over time.

The essays can be divided into four groupings. The first few pieces, likely better known to historians, deal with case studies of women workers in the Depression, World War II, and the post-war decades, especially those women toiling in mass production industries like auto manufacturing. These pieces are thoroughly grounded in archival and other historical sources, and were often shaped, as she points out, by debates in Marxist-feminist and socialist-feminist theories of the time. Milkman’s ability to create a useful, dialectical dialogue between theory and evidence is especially noteworthy: using the situation of working women during the Depression, to take only one example, she challenged older “reserve army of labour” theories by showing that the gender segmentation of the labour force offered women some protection against unemployment, if only because they were clustered in low-wage, highly gender-specific job ghettos.

These essays also allow us to see how different sets of historical sources offer cumulative insights into women’s occupational choices (or lack of them) and the resilience of race and gender divisions in the labour force – these being, for Milkman, a key element of women’s ongoing oppression. While “Redefining Women’s Work” explores the role of trade unions in sustaining gendered and raced job categorization during the war years, a subsequent essay builds on these findings, arguing that the critical element in the re-imposition of the pre-war gender order was management prerogative in defining the contours of its workforce. In all of this historical work, Milkman tries to situate the union movement, the central focus of her work, within the broader context of changing class and gender relations, though I sometimes wish she had written more about the political context. In an essay dealing with post-World War II retrenchment, for instance, it seems to me that the Cold War and decline of the Left (orchestrated by state repression and replayed through the unions) was absolutely critical in shutting down more radical alternatives to retrenchment.

The second grouping of chapters moves into the contemporary period, though often still using history as a key resource. Her cogent essay exploring the famous “Sears” court case of 1984, in which two historians of women testified on different sides of an important Equal Employment Opportunity Commission workplace gender discrimination case, is reprinted, along with pieces that examine how unions have responded to women, the feminization of work, and the gendered division of labour over long periods of time. Many of these essays offer broad, retrospective analyses that sketch out how and why social change does and does not transpire. For example, “Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective” suggests that the basic character of a union at the time of its creation tends to persist in its gender dynamics over time: a sort of “path dependency” theory for unions. While perhaps schematic for historians, it is provocative and suggestive in interesting ways. Reflecting shifts in the academic context, this venturesome piece is grounded more in sociological organizational theory rather than in debates in Marxist-feminism, as some earlier pieces were. Another essay, similarly...