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178 Michigan Historical Review assaults on this right. Kersten's detailed examination of the AFL's concern for proper postwar planning?a committee was formed as early as October 1941?also shows how the federation was determined to guarantee progressive postwar reforms hke full employment and national health insurance. There areminor quibbles?the AFL sought labor peace, but through its alliances with reactionary politicians hke Virginia's Howard Smith and its attempts to change theWagner Act it certainly did not stop battling the CIO during the war. But Labor's Home Front is largely a successful and worthy attempt to resituate the oft-criticized "conservative" American Federation of Labor in amore progressive hght. Greg Geddes St. John's Country Day School, Orange Park, FL Alice Kessler-Harris. Gendering Labor History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 392. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $25.00. Gendering Labor History is both the tide of Alice Kessler-Harris's collection of essays and an apt description of her career-long project to integrate gender into American labor history. She consistendy argues that gender ideology matters in configuring all paid or unpaid economic relationships, regardless of whether she is detailing how workers relate to each other, how workers relate to bosses, or how working citizens relate to the state. The seventeen chapters in this book are organized into four sections that show the progression of the author's work and demonstrate the importance of understanding the way gender affects economic activity: "Women and the Labor Movement," "Gender and Class," "Labor and Social Pohcy," and "New Directions." Like other 1960s leftists, Alice Kessler-Harris sought to bring activism to her scholarship. Her early work included in this volume asked "Where Are the Organized Women Workers?" (pp. 21-37) and exposed the tension between feminism and the labor movement early in the twentieth century as well as pointing to similar tensions seventy years later. The failure of scholars at a 1984 conference to follow her lead and integrate gender into a labor-history synthesis ledKessler-Harris to call for a new agenda where gender was not stuck on the periphery or merely added at the end, but central to the project (pp. 145-59). When she turns to social pohcy, as in the case of legislation regarding maternity leave or Book Reviews 179 restrictions on women's night work, the effects of the gendered nature of citizenship on social welfare are especially compelling (pp. 222-36). The scope of the essays reflects Kessler-Harris's increasingly wider analytical framework, from a mid-1970s study of three mihtant Jewish female garment workers in the early twentieth century (pp. 38-51) to a 2004 attempt at constructing a global perspective on how gender ideologies help shape world economies (pp. 270-85). Overall these articles are about national trends and legislation, rather than about the microlevel activities of one state or region. Taken as a whole, these essays read more hke an intellectual autobiography than a collection of disengaged academic arguments and that seems to be Alice Kessler-Harris's intent. One drawback to Gendering Labor History is that with the exception of the introduction, all of the articles have been previously published in other anthologies or journals hke Labor History or Journal of Women's History. Therefore, seasoned scholars of labor and gender history may not find much new content here, but they will find a book that offers students and interested observers a wonderfully wide lens for viewing the development of two intersecting fields of American history during the past four decades. Joshua R. Greenberg Bridgewater State College Steve Lehto. Death's Door: The Truth behind Michigan's Largest Mass Murder. Troy, Mich.: Momentum Books, 2006. Pp. 231. Bibliography. Notes. Paper, $19.95. During a Christmas celebration in 1913, aman walked into the Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan, and shouted "fire." In the ensuing panic, revelers rushed down the stairs toward the exit, only to be trapped in the doorway, which resulted in seventy-four deaths from suffocation. At the time local newspapers characterized the incident as a tragic accident. However by presenting recendy uncovered court records and archival material, Steve Lehto's Death...

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