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...
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