Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi + 374 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-19-503835-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Joyce P. Jacobsen, Department of Economics, Wesleyan University.

Alice Kessler-Harris, Professor of American History at Columbia University, has produced in this book an integrative piece of scholarship that brings together cohesively a number of strands of her thinking that were mainly implicit in earlier works. Its main theme is that the quest for "economic citizenship," i.e. "the independent status that provides the possibility of full participation in the polity" (p. 5), characterizes U.S. women's struggle for equality in the labor market over the past century. This book lacks the color of Kessler-Harris's substantial history of women's work in America, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford, 1982), which relied extensively and effectively on primary sources to develop working women's voices through the years. It also lacks the provocativeness of her set of essays on gendered wage determination, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (University Press of Kentucky, 1988), which provided an enjoyably combative counterweight to the stereotypical economist's view that wages are mainly determined by market forces. Instead, it is a mature, balanced work that argues for use of a consistently gendered focus in interpreting relevant parts of U.S. legislative history (mainly those parts dealing with employment policy, including income tax and social security legislation). The other main theme, that gender stereotyping, or as Kessler-Harris characterizes it, the "gendered imagination," plays at all times a substantial role in employment policy formulation, is developed convincingly. The book's heavy reliance on the substantial number of secondary sources now available for women's economic history in the United States, while necessary in order to develop this theme, makes it less than a compelling read, but it is a serious book that should and no doubt will receive wide readership among professional historians, whether labor, social, political, or economic. Hopefully it will also reach a wider audience; students of political science and public policy in general; current and future policymakers in particular.

The book develops these themes through an approximately chronological series of case studies of the political debates surrounding various federal initiatives. These include unemployment insurance, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Social Security Act and its subsequent amendments, the development of the income tax code (in particular with how it related to separate v. joint income taxation for married couples), and Title VII. In each case, Kessler-Harris illustrates the nature of the assumptions that various participants brought to the debate in terms of what roles men and women do and should hold in the economy. In addition, the roles in these debates of various women political leaders, both feminist and afeminist, both political appointees and elected officials, are scrutinized throughout, often with an eye as to how these women either echoed the status quo, or tried to widen the views that the policymakers held regarding what roles women play in the economy.

Narrow conceptualizations of workers and/or families led to large groups of uncovered persons in several of these cases. In the case of unemployment insurance, many "so-called marginal members of the labor force" (p. 95) were not covered, leading to exclusion of a majority of wage-earning African-American women (p. 96). In the case of Social Security, the view that women would generally withdraw from the labor force upon marriage and have limited future participation led to the belief that having their social security payments determined by their husband's contributions rather than by their own contributions would be advantageous to them. But this led to a number of problems in dealing with all the exceptional cases. For example, how should young widows be treated, and should it matter whether they have children or not, and if they remarry or not? And what about widowers? As Kessler-Harris points out, the 1939 amendments "did not extend benefits to the surviving children of covered women or to aged husbands, aged widowers, or widowed fathers of small children. Thus fatherless children might learn the sweet lesson of continuing parental support beyond the grave, and aging wives would continue to be dependent, though on phantom earnings. But motherless children and aged husbands without resources received quite another lesson in citizenship rights" (p. 141).

Kessler-Harris also considers how implementation proceeded in these various cases, and how various problems with the policies came to the forefront during implementation, leading in many cases to policy modifications. Chapter six provides a particularly penetrating discussion of the early history of the EEOC. No one expected five thousand complaints to be filed with the EEOC in its first eight months of operation, let alone that over a third of them would be complaints of sex discrimination. Hence the implementation process led to additional information on which to base future policy. It is also clear from this discussion that an implementing agency may end up being the arbiter when competing interest groups clash. Early procedures and remedies were applied quite differently by the EEOC for minorities than for women (p. 278), and affirmative action programs focused initially on race rather than gender (p. 275).

The six-page Epilogue, starting with a discussion of the EEOC v. Sears case and Kessler-Harris's role in it (discussed in greater degree in her 1988 article, "Academic Freedom and Expert Witnessing," Texas Law Review 67, no. 2: 429-440), and ending with Justice Antonin Scalia's minority opinion in a 1987 reverse discrimination case, is the most thought-provoking part of the book. Both of these matters relate (in sparse economists' terms) to whether occupational gender segregation is viewed as a supply side or a demand side phenomenon, and how much this continuing phenomenon is viewed as a limitation on our imagination as to what work roles men and women might assume. Indeed, the continuing centrality of occupational gender segregation as a defining characteristic of the workforce is one of the central puzzles for social science to unravel. Modern U.S. society provides plenty of fuel for the argument that gendered imaginations still predominate.

Whether a gendered imagination indicates lack of imagination, a tendency to believe received knowledge and tradition rather than statistics, or a willful wishing that gender roles were clear-cut and stable over time is not clear. One might argue that the history presented in this book is the history of how governmental policymaking has moved away from legislation aimed at the norm to legislation aimed at covering the exceptions. This movement has been furthered by the more visible heterogeneity in American society and by the increasing availability of reliable statistics (which help to make clear that heterogeneity exists in a way that earlier policymakers did not have access to). However, this book lends a strong argument for the importance of diversity in government so that diverse views will be represented (even out of proportion to their weight in society as a whole) in policy-formulating bodies.

Joyce P. Jacobsen is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University. Her publications include The Economics of Gender (Blackwell, second edition, 1998).