Rethinking the American Labor Movement

Elizabeth Faue’s Rethinking the American Labor Movement reconsiders the twentieth-century labor movement through a gendered lens, building a powerful and approachable narrative that integrates working women’s experiences into this history. Faue argues that the modern American labor movement is really a loose coalition, rooted in local institutions, communities, and workplaces. It should be studied through a social-movement theory of “resource mobilization” (J. Craig Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology, no. 9 (1983): 527 – 53). To understand its watershed moments, missed opportunities, and common and contentious goals, Faue examines how activists and organizations deployed their energy and resources in ways that reflected gendered perceptions of the labor question. Understanding the many and sometimes conflicting goals among this loose coalition are three central issues: the presence of intraclass conflicts over gender, race, ethnic, and sexual inequalities; the dominance of masculinity and whiteness...