Lara Vapnek tells the story of American labor feminism from the end of the Civil War through the winning of woman suffrage. During this period, working women in the nation's industrializing cities launched a series of campaigns to gain economic equality and political power. This book shows how working women pursued equality by claiming new identities as citizens and as breadwinners.

Analyzing disjunctions between middle-class and working-class women's ideas of independence, Vapnek highlights the agendas for change advanced by leaders such as Jennie Collins, Leonora O'Reilly, and Helen Campbell and organizations such as the National Consumers' League, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the Women's Trade Union League. Locating households as important sites of class conflict, Breadwinners recovers the class and gender politics behind the marginalization of domestic workers from labor reform while documenting the ways in which working-class women raised their voices on their own behalf.

|Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The Daily Labor of Our Own Hands 11
Chapter 2. Working Girls and White Slaves 34
Chapter 3. Gender, Class, and Consumption 66
Chapter 4. Solving the Servant Problem 102
Chapter 5. Democracy Is Only an Aspiration 129

Notes 165
Index 209

Illustrations follow page 10|

"Reads almost like a prequel to When Everything Changed, a history of American women since 1960 by Gail Collins."—The New York Times

"A quite nuanced discussion of the impact of gender on the forging of class identities from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era. . . . Highly Recommended"—Choice
"Illuminates the strong connections between labor rights and political rights and enhances our understanding of the promises and the perils of cross-class organizing."—Journal of American History
|Lara Vapnek is a professor of history at St. John's University. She is the author of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary.