Stories From The Stacks

Americans value equality, but have competing visions of what it should look like. The twentieth-century women’s movement was riven by class divisions. Elite women within the movement favored the uncompromising Equal Rights Amendment; while working women feared that it would undermine gains they had made in gendered workplace protections, and so favored the Women’s Status Bill, which would preserve regulation against exploitation of women workers. This division opened the possibility of business interests appealing to and splitting off a segment of organized American women. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, labor historian Emily Twarog, associate professor in the School of Labor & Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses how business interests appealed to the women’s movement with explicit validation of women’s socio-economic importance, and calls to rally women to the cause of free enterprise and the defense of the American way of life. Using Hagley Libra