Breadwinners

Lara Vapnek is a professor of history at St. John's University. She is the author of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American Revolutionary.

"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 "[Vapnek] writes with directness about the class rifts that emerged in social movements and the difficulties of women workers trying to keep their own organizations from being hijacked by more affluent supporters."--Feminist Review blog "I know of no other research that renders so fully laboring women's advocacy for inclusion as homesteaders and independent landowners and for access to skilled, higher-paying jobs. . . . One of the most revealing studies that I have read recently."--The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era "This work is the best history we have of the class tension between elite women reformers and wage-earning women. Vapnek adds a strong, new perspective to interpretive debates over the meaning of dependence, independence, protections, rights, and citizenship."--Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara "A stirring account of the independent spirit that led women to seek self-reliance in the labor market. Lara Vapnek lucidly illustrates how a group of courageous women rejected poorly paid work and domestic service jobs to gain financial autonomy and the right to vote. This book adds a significant dimension to our understanding of the lives and aspirations of women of all classes."--Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History, Columbia University "So far, the struggles of nineteenth-century women seeking independence through paid work has largely focused on the middle class. Lara Vapnek's attention to the efforts of working class women to escape the dependence of domestic work fills in a huge gap in this engrossing story."--Susan Armitage, coeditor of Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West

• Acknowledgments   ixList of Abbreviations   xiIntroduction   1Chapter 1. The Daily Labor of Our Own Hands   11Chapter 2. Working Girls and White Slaves   34Chapter 3. Gender, Class, and Consumption   66Chapter 4. Solving the Servant Problem   102Chapter 5. Democracy Is Only an Aspiration   129Notes   165Index   209Illustrations follow page 10