Why have some working women succeeded at organizing in spite of obstacles to labor activity? Under what circumstances were they able to form alliances with male workers?

Carole Turbin explores these and other questions by examining the case of Troy, New York. In the 1860s, Troy produced nearly all the nation's detachable shirt collars and cuffs. The city's collar laundresses were largely Irish immigrants. Their union was officially the nation's first women's labor organization, and one of the best organized. Turbin provides a new perspective on gender and shows that women's family ties are not necessarily a conservative influence but may encourage women's and men's collective action.

| Front Cover Title Copyright Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: New Questions, New Answers PART ONE: Work, Family, Community 1. Becoming Collar City: Diversity and Opportunity in a Nineteenth-Centruy City 2. A Good Place to Work: Women's Economic Contribution to Immigrant Families' Place in the Community 3. Activist Leaders and Occasional Militants: Variations in Working Women's Living Arrangements and Labor Activism Illustrations PART TWO: Ideology, Consciousness, and Labor Activism 4. "The Mother of Our Success": Class Consciousness, Ethnic Identity, and Gender Consciousness 5. Woman's Work and Woman's Rights: Class, Gender, and Political Consciousness 6. A "Bona Fide" Trade Union: The Collar Laundresses' Strike and Lockout 7. Fighting Fire with Fire: The Joan of Arc Assembly of the Knights of Labor 8. Autonomy and Subservience: The Strike's Outcome Conclusion: New Answers, New Questions Selected Bibliography Index Back Cover |"By going 'beyond the conventional wisdom' about gender, class, and ethnicity, [Turbin] has found ways to tell us more about the nineteenth-century collar workers of Troy than we possibly could have imagined discovering a decade ago."—Choice
|Carole Turbin is a professor emerita at SUNY, Empire State College. She is the author of Souvenir: A Memoir and coeditor of Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective.