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This chapter focuses on the community of lay Catholic women who wrote for the magazine Marriage, a magazine for Catholic couples. Transitioning gender roles were a major preoccupation in the magazine in the years during and following Vatican II. Catholics debated issues of vital importance to the identity of Catholic laywomen, including complementarity, gender essentialism, working women, male headship in the family and feminism. The chapter also examines Catholic attitudes toward marital sexuality after the Rhythm Method was largely abandoned by American Catholics as a means of contraception. Although the magazine remained moderate in its responses to the women’s movement, analysis suggests that attitudes about Catholic women’s role in the church, home, and the workplace shifted significantly. Acceptance of complementarity was waning by the mid-1970s as increasing numbers of Catholic laywomen challenged cultural beliefs about Catholic womanhood.

This chapter focuses on the lessons and insights gained from the first phase of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project, showing how participants from both sides laid the intellectual groundwork necessary for engaging in meaningful problem solving. It recounts the first face-to-face international meeting in Detroit on September 24–25, 2004, when each of the participating women's groups introduced themselves at a fairly broad level: who they are, how their organizations came about, what they hope to accomplish and by what means. It explains the purpose and format of the meeting and presents the views of scholars from both Japan and the United States about the social, economic, and legal contexts in which the participating women's unions and organizations operate. In particular, it looks at Dorothy Sue Cobble's talk on the history of U.S. labor feminism. There are also discussions by representatives from women's organizations such as the Coalition of Labor Union Women, Kansai Women's Union, and Working Women's Voices.

This book examines the rise of feminist labor unions in Japan and their efforts to transform their workplaces, their lives, and the national labor movement as a whole. Focusing on the story of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project, it highlights the complex and often conflicting nature of women's unions' mission and organizational structures and practices. It documents the evolution of Japanese women's unions by using the case of Women's Union Tokyo; their origins, goals, philosophies, and daily practices; and the internal and external obstacles they face in practice. It also discusses the insights and innovations that grew out of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project, along with the lessons learned about the necessity and the difficulties of crossborder collaborations. This introduction provides an overview of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace, enterprise unions and community unions, and women's unions in Japan in theory and practice.

Chapter three analyzes how various thinkers applied evolutionary theory to turn-of-the-twentieth century debates about motherhood. Opponents of women’s advancement typically claimed that women’s foremost function was to bear and raise children; any intellectual or professional endeavors detracted from this sacred duty and imperiled the human race. These arguments were often couched in evolutionary discourse, as exemplified by the much-studied “Race Suicide” panic of the early 1900s. Because of the flexibility of Darwinian discourse, however, evolutionary theory also buttressed a feminist redefinition of motherhood– promoted by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others—which claimed, in part, that it was unnatural for women to be confined to domestic tasks because female domesticity had no precedent in the animal kingdom. Focusing on feminist applications of animal-human kinship, this chapter examines the turn-of-the-century vogue for fit pregnancy and demands for the reapportionment of domestic duties to enable mothers to work outside the home.

From the early 20^th century through World War II, labor activism and women’s subsistence activism around tenants’ rights, food prices and education was central to industrial feminism and working-class women’s activism. This chapter traces the career of Clara Lemlich Shavelson after the 1909 uprising as she became a Communist Party activist and a leader in decades of rent strikes, kosher meat boycotts and the creation of working-class women’s neighbourhood councils. By 1935 her work had helped to spark a nation-wide meat boycott to protest price gouging.

Chapter four examines how women’s bodies were used to represent the overall danger London’s fairs presented the city and even the nation. Literary and artistic representations of the danger of London fairs featured prominently unruly or immoral women. This chapter provides an overview of the unflattering literary and artistic depictions of women providing services or enjoying the spectacle of fairs and analyzes their significance in terms of early modern notions that gender order was the foundation for a stable society. Fears about the unpredictability of urban amusement were embodied in representations of women who tempted men or flouted gender hierarchy at fairs. Court records, periodicals, pamphlets, sermons, and newspapers relating to London’s fairs reveal that social critics shared assumptions that upsetting gender order threatened metropolitan social order. Representations of women at fairs reveal, also, how views of women common in early modern Europe were adapted to and continued to be invoked in an increasingly modern environment.

In this chapter, the author considers the lasting impacts of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project some ten years after its completion, with particular emphasis on how it has transformed the Japanese women's movement as a whole. She shows how the US–Japan Project has enabled Japanese women's organizations such as the Working Women's Educational Network and the Action Center for Working Women to take on a new vitality and develop a new unity. She also examines how the US–Japan Project has helped promote democracy within unions, as well as across social movements and organizations, through participatory membership education programs. Finally, she discusses the remaining challenges that Japanese women's unions (JWUs) have to deal with and reflects on JWUs' viability over time; their ability to fulfill the essential role of a labor union, which is to confront capital; and what role they might ultimately play in reshaping the Japanese labor movement even if they are unable to develop to the level initially envisioned by the founders.

This chapter explores the legacy of the interwar period by focusing on the contested meaning of protection. It contrasts labor standards as protections for workers with cultures of protection that address Western notions of morality, sexuality, gender ideals, and “civilized” behavior. It probes standards for workers who deviated from the adult male industrial norm by their gender, age, occupation, or geographical location. After discussing the promise of the International Conference of Working Women, it analyzes the ILO’s originary embrace of protection in 1919. It then compares two ILO proposals that elicited pushback from both social purity advocates and legal equality feminists: migrant women traveling alone on ships and the social welfare of seafaring men in ports. It finally turns to interwar conventions for areas under colonial rule. Amid regulation of forced and contract labor, Western women justified their own quest for equal rights by intervening to save “native” women from multiple kinds of violations through “native” labor conventions. The operation of such special protections highlights the centrality of reproductive labor for the sexual division of labor, but also for the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of the colonial powers.

This chapter discusses the struggles of Filipino when it comes to their status as an ethnic minority group. Case studies reveal how Filipino migrant advocates understood intersectionality and were able to transcend their own class positions to address the issues faced by youth and women of Filipino ethnicities. The chapter references Operation Manong in Hawaii and the Filipino Women’s Working Party in Australia as examples. It includes how Filipina activism impacted domestic violence cases in Australia. Data from the migrant archives illustrate the diversity, scope, and serious nature of the trials faced by Filipino migrants.

This chapter examines the debate over U.S. membership in the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO) as the ILO founding conference took place in Washington, D.C., in November 1919. It considers the importance of the International Congress of Working Women and African Americans from Leftist groups in shaping the debate over the ILO in the United States. In particular, it explores how a unique confluence of class, diaspora, race, and isolationist politics in the United States drove many centrist labor and moderate Left groups to adopt “irreconcilable” or harshly reservationist positions on the question of U.S. participation in the League and ILO. It also discusses Republican Senator Robert LaFollette's attack on the ILO in Congress and suggests that the debate over the ILO is illustrative of the role of economic considerations and ideas about the racialized division of labor in shaping Congressional responses to Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy programs in 1919.

The National Association of Working Women (“9to5”), a labor organization for working women, fought for enforcement of affirmative action regulations. The success of the organization’s efforts depended largely on support—or lack of support—from the Oval Office. American presidents from both political parties declined to support 9to5, leaving corporate officials free to ignore federal strictures.

Chapter five considers whether or not gendered understandings of women’s behaviour at fairs developed by elite male writers and artists had any real impact on the lived experience of women who worked at fairs. Though representations of women at London’s fairs did contribute to negative stereotypes of working women, opportunities for women to profit at fairs remained into the middle of the eighteenth century. Their ability to partake in fair commerce is revealed in court documents (and in one case, in a little-used Pie Powder court record for Bartholomew Fair), lease documents, and even Parliamentary records. As this chapter reveals, though social critics believed women were a dangerous presence at fairs, this discourse had little effect on women’s abilities to find work at them. Eighteenth-century representations of the ‘fair sex’ at work tell us more about gender expectations and social order than they do about women’s actual experience at fair grounds.

This chapter places the leisure pursuits of female characters in Harkness’s fiction in a broader context of gendered cultural anxieties about working-class leisure activities in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on two of Harkness’s novels, A City Girl and In Darkest London, it argues that, for working women in Harkness’s fiction, leisure may be difficult to access and often becomes another form of work. Comparing Harkness’s characters to women in other contemporary texts such as Liza of Lambeth, it shows how leisure pursuits often reflect and reproduce social dangers and structures of oppression for unmarried working-class women.

This shows how Hollywood was more effective than any other institution in America in challenging gender roles and portraying a positive image of working women both on and off screen. It reviews the importance of women within the studio system not only as actors and stars but also as screenwriters, film editors, costume and make-up design, research, and production (but significantly not as directors). It then analyses a set of highly successful films that were significant for promoting a positive image of working women. These are: A Woman Rebels (RKO, 1936); A Star is Born (Selznick International, 1937); Gone With the Wind (Selznick International-MGM, 1939); and Kitty Foyle (RKO, 1940). What these films have in common is an awareness of generations of women working in front of and behind the scenes that is rendered through their working-women heroines.

This chapter reports on the second meeting of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project, when U.S. educators came to Tokyo to model participatory education techniques as a first step toward enabling Japanese women's groups to create their own educational programs. Representatives from the expanding pool of participating women's organizations met at Waseda University for a national two-day seminar to begin choosing the topics for their first three educational modules. The Waseda meeting was run entirely by the Japanese activists. This chapter first explains the purpose and organization of Workshop II before discussing the tensions that arose among some of the participants. It also considers the important lessons learned from the conflict about differences in how U.S. and Japanese labor-feminists think about organizing, empowerment, and individualism. It shows how participants, in trying to work through the tensions, gained valuable knowledge about what it takes to create and maintain successful crossborder collaboration.

This chapter discusses the first concrete fruits of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project as the Japanese participants pilot their own newly created educational programs. On December 24, 2005, the Japanese women held a national meeting in Osaka in preparation for Workshop III. Each of the work groups hosted workshops based on the latest versions of their evolving modules. They also reported on the questions, concerns, and insights that had come up through their process of creation, and on what they needed to get out of Workshop III to move forward. This chapter showcases some of the most innovative ideas introduced by the Japanese women, particularly those relating to knowledge building, empowerment, and organizing. It also describes the various processes of creation established by the women to enable the groups to work together across time and space to develop their new educational programs.

Introduces Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Clara Lemlich Shavelson and Fannia Cohn. Argues that they represented a vision of “industrial feminism.” Taken collectively, their biographies revise historical understanding of U.S. labor, political, immigrant and women’s history.

This chapter reports on the systematic organizational self-analysis presented by Women's Union Tokyo (WUT) at the first international meeting of the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project. During the meeting, the WUT laid out in detail all of its organizational problems and challenges, as well as the problem-solving discussions that followed. In particular, the union outlines the barriers to its growth, namely: low membership retention rate; lack of resources and strategies for communications and information sharing; shortage of funding sources; difficulty in stimulating a larger social movement; limited impact on public policy; lack of effective advertising; and inadvertent re-creation of the same kind of hierarchical power structures found in male-oriented labor unions. The chapter also summarizes the presentations of activists and educators on how participatory labor education has been used to foster greater union democracy and membership participation in the United States. Finally, it discusses the positive outcomes of the meeting, some of the lessons learned the hard way, and future prospects.

Louisville had been a perpetual disappointment to suffrage leaders, experiencing very little growth until 1909. Following the National convention, held there in 1911, it became a stronghold for KERA. This chapter describes the factors that allowed Louisville women to become key players and emphasizes how this new urban, Progressive contingent pushed KERA to broaden its goals and embrace new tactics such as militancy and new constituencies, including Jewish women and working women.

This chapter looks at Women's Union Tokyo (WUT) in practice based on the author's observations during period from December 2000 to May 2001. It discusses significant internal pressures the WUT was experiencing at that time and provides an account of the running dialogue among union leaders, members, and the author, culminating in the US–Japan Working Women's Networks Project. After explaining the origin of this project, the chapter considers the problems with service unions, on which the WUT had inadvertently structured itself. It also examines the WUT's individual unionism in practice, with particular emphasis on the disadvantages of individual affiliation, and shows that this model of membership hinders the union from retaining members, which in turn exacerbates the workload crisis that the WUT and other Japanese women's unions face.