Feminism and Organized Labor

Abstract Organized women workers in the United States have long expressed a broad vision of fairness and justice and have raised profound questions about citizenship, rights, equality, gender, and class in American society. This article takes a long view of feminism’s place within organized labor from the 1830s to the early 21st century, noting important themes in US labor, working-class, and feminist history. It shows how organized women workers have consistently forged a feminist class analysis of American society and the conditions of labor, and how their arguments have influenced the shape and direction of the labor and women’s movements in the United States. The article also describes how scholarship on the history of organized women workers has changed since social history, labor history, and women’s history first emerged as fields in the 1960s. Whereas early histories of wage-earning women’s participation in labor and feminist movements focused on tension and conflict—between wage-earning women and men in trade unions, and between working-class women and middle-class activists—more recent scholarship considers how labor feminists contributed to both the modern labor and women’s movements, shaping some of the most significant policies that transformed gender relations in the 20th century.