The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917

New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980. Trade Paperback. Like New. 8vo or 8° (Medium Octavo): 7¾" x 9¾" tall. 332 pp. Book in excellent condition, without any visible damage. From Preface:"Until the development of the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s, the most diligent searcher for women in the pages of U.S. labor history could find them only sporadically. They would suddenly appear, only to disappear again like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, leaving just a smile behind. In recent years more attention has been paid to the history of working-class women. At this stage much of the work is still in survey form (necessary when the ground is so unknown) or is focused on particular organizations such as the Women's Trade Union League. Not enough detailed research has yet been done to enable us to develop a solid theoretical understanding of the problems involved in connecting women's history and labor history. Still less do we have a body of elegant theory on the relationship of the workingclass struggle to women's liberation. This book is an initial attempt to study that relationship at one moment in our history. It is based on certain presumptions: the labor movement is not the same as the working-class movement as a whole, nor can the history of working-class women be restricted to the history of women in unions. Much work remains before we can develop an accurate sense of the intricate relations between workplace and home, union and community organization, socialist and feminist group, street and kitchen and school and bedroom, as these have occurred in history. The web of connections that bind all these together in the life of one woman can be like a spiderweb, preventing her from moving. Yet when a strong enough wind is blowing, the whole web and all the women in it can be seen to move together, and this is a new kind of movement, a new source of power and connectedness. For women, labor history comes attached to community history and family history and the history of reproduction. It involves not only class consciousness and the consciousness of national oppression, but also sex consciousness.