Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This chapter examines the historical link between gender and unionism by focusing on variations among labor unions in policies and practices affecting women from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. After reviewing the debate about women's participation, membership, and leadership within unions, the chapter discusses four major waves of unionization that have produced four distinct cohorts of labor organizations, each of which formed in a different era of labor movement growth: the craft unions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the industrial unions that took shape in the needle trades in the 1910s; the larger wave of industrial unions that emerged in the 1930s, and the public- and service-sector unions of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on sociological theories of organization, it then considers the conditions under which unions have been effective political vehicles for women workers. It shows that the political effectiveness of unions for women workers is correlated with the historical conditions under which each wave of unions first developed, as well as their age and maturity as organizations.

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