Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Mayeri reviews Turk on "Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace"

Writing for JOTWELL's Legal History Section, former LHB guest blogger Serena Mayeri (University of Pennsylvania) has posted an admiring review of Katherine Turk's Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Here's the first paragraph:
Katherine Turk’s elegantly written, deftly argued study of Title VII’s first half-century spotlights working-class women’s distinctive legal activism, deepening our understanding of the promise and limitations of American antidiscrimination law in an era of increasing income and wealth inequality. Using fine-grained case studies as emblematic of larger themes, Turk takes us deep into ground-level campaigns and controversies in a diverse array of workplaces, organizations, and government agencies, from the New York Times and the National Organization for Women (NOW) to municipal employees’ unions to hospitals and hotels where women and men struggled for better and fairer conditions for all workers. Working women built cross-class and interracial coalitions with labor and feminist organizations to fight for pay equity, comparable worth, higher safety standards and workplace protections, paid family and medical leave, occupational mobility, and accommodation of family responsibilities.
Read on here.