Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace by Katherine Turk (review)

Katherine Turk captures the workplace-activist movement of the 1970s at its most ambitious, when organizers used the watershed gains of the 1960s to demand workplace fairness in expansive terms. Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace traces how rank-and-file workers, feminist organizations, labor unions, gay rights leaders, and other cultural dissidents used Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the watershed law that outlawed workplace discrimination based on sex, race, and religion, among other attributes — to advance their political agendas. Turk argues that as it became a powerful new tool for organizing, Title VII intensified ideological tensions among 1970s activists. Drawing on long-standing labor feminist advocacy for bodily autonomy at work, shorter hours, and control over the labor-management relationship, some organizers focused on improving the quality of jobs on the margins of the economy for the women — and for the workers of color, working-class white men, and immigrant workers — who occupied them. Other leaders favored a narrower strategy centered on individual women’s access to the privileged jobs reserved for white men. As federal agencies and the judiciary moved to the right after 1980, activists were far more likely to file Title VII claims based on the second, limited strategy of individual equality. But rather than frame the shift away from workplace fairness and toward individual access as an inevitable consequence of the resurgence of conservatism and of the decline of the labor movement, Turk demonstrates that Title VII has provided a means for workers to build alliances across lines of gender, race, and class and to win safer jobs that pay a living wage.

Equality on Trial makes three original contributions to fields such as labor studies, legal history, history of women, gender, and sexuality, and sociology of work. First, it shows how feminist activists used Title VII to advocate for better jobs for everyone, explaining how frontline employees made alliances between unions, second wave feminist organizations, and the civil rights movement, a process of coalition building that remains highly relevant to the service economy of the twenty-first century. Second, the book challenges assumptions about the conservatism of the labor movement and of middle-class feminism in the 1970s, providing a wealth of concrete examples to contest overly simplistic narratives about union leaders who favored their white male members in manufacturing over diverse workforces in the service sector or about bourgeois feminist organizations that focused on legal equality for professional white women at the expense of poor women, queer women, and women of color. Finally, by placing Title VII in the context of a wide range of political practices, from collective bargaining to rank-and-file agitation to feminist institution building, the book shows that the law can be a tool for social movements without wholly determining the agenda of those movements. Overall, Equality on Trial rests on an impressive body of evidence and deploys that evidence in clear prose. A text with this level of historical detail needs strong architecture: assertive topic sentences, sensible section breaks, and reasonably short chapters so the reader understands what to do with the data. This book has all of these components and is thus readable to an undergraduate audience and to feminist and labor activists.

The book is composed of seven chapters that approach Title VII from a broad array of workplaces. Chapters 3 and 4 are particularly useful to contemporary organizers. They draw on Dorothy Sue Cobble’s cogent insights about mid-twentieth-century labor feminism from The Other Women’s Movement but make a more precise argument about the opportunities and the challenges for building coalitions across lines of class, race, and immigration status after 1970. Chapter 3 documents a Title VII campaign by the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) against Sears department stores in the early 1970s. Rank-and-file workers and NOW activists...