The Feminist Majority—a US organization dedicated to women’s advancement—recently announced that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is “moving forward again!” This renewed interest in constitutional guarantees of women’s equality renders Nancy Woloch’s award-winning book especially timely. A Class by Herself is the only history to analyze single-sex protective labor legislation from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth, and it stands as both a warning to the reviving ERA movement and a spur to it.
Because women-only labor laws were for many decades the primary obstacle to the ERA, the history of the amendment has been closely bound to that of labor law. In fact, the early opposition between ERA and single-sex labor protections expressed class divisions that, in some cases, continue to bedevil feminists. Since the ERA was originally promoted by a small band of elites closely tied to employers and would, in that period, have hurt many...