New from the University of Pennsylvania Press:
Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, by
Katherine Turk (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). A description from the Press:
In 1964, as part of its landmark Civil Rights Act, Congress outlawed
workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as
sex, race, and religion. This provision, known as Title VII, laid a new
legal foundation for women's rights at work. Though President Kennedy
and other lawmakers expressed high hopes for Title VII, early attempts
to enforce it were inconsistent. In the absence of a consensus
definition of sex equality in the law or society, Title VII's practical
meaning was far from certain.
The first history to foreground Title VII's sex provision, Equality on Trial
examines how the law's initial promise inspired a generation of
Americans to dispatch expansive notions of sex equality. Imagining new
solidarities and building a broad class politics, these workers and
activists engaged Title VII to generate a pivotal battle over the terms
of democracy and the role of the state in all labor relationships. But
the law's ambiguity also allowed for narrow conceptions of sex equality
to take hold. Conservatives found ways to bend Title VII's possible
meanings to their benefit, discovering that a narrow definition of sex
equality allowed businesses to comply with the law without transforming
basic workplace structures or ceding power to workers. These contests to
fix the meaning of sex equality ultimately laid the legal and cultural
foundation for the neoliberal work regimes that enabled some women to
break the glass ceiling as employers lowered the floor for everyone
else.
Synthesizing the histories of work, social movements, and civil rights in the postwar United States, Equality on Trial recovers the range of protagonists whose struggles forged the contemporary meanings of feminism, fairness, and labor rights.
A few blurbs:
"Exhaustively researched and cogently argued, Equality on Trial transforms how we think of the 1964 Civil Rights Act's inclusion of sex."—Eileen Boris
"An extraordinary and extraordinarily important piece of scholarly work. Katherine Turk's Equality on Trial is a stunning achievement: deeply researched, powerfully argued,
brilliantly elaborated, attentive to detail, nuance, complexity and
contradiction, and never losing sight of the individual lives and
livelihood at stake."—Barbara Welke
More information is available
here.
