HIST G8500 US Historiography
Fall 2011
Professor Mae Ngai
Manuel A. Bautista González
Policy
Alice Kessler-Harris traces the quest of American women to obtain economic citizenship,
the “independent status that provides the possibility of full participation in the polity” from
the 1930s to the early 1970s1. Kessler-Harris understands gender as a “continual and
changing process”, as well as “a system of thought and a category of analysis” 2. Her story
unveils the embedded values and habits of mind on women (the gendered imagination)
hidden in state actions and social policies, which in turn restricted women’s access to
economic citizenship. Her sources are mainly official records from the “legislative, judicial
and policy-making apparatus” 3.
Kessler-Harris’s book can also be read as a historical explanation of gender-based
inequality. Labor economists have assessed the difference in male and female wages but
rarely have they historicized their explanations4. Kessler-Harris shows unexpected channels
through which policy measures create incentive mechanisms that perpetuate the state of
things. It is fair to say that her book explores the scope and limits of the gendered
imagination and its economic and legal performativity in 20th century America.
The gender approach to economic citizenship advocated by Kessler-Harris can
certainly inform not only political and labor histories but other disciplines as well. Valuable
insights are to be found in this book for scholars of management, fiscal history and the
history of economic, such as with the experiments and studies on the work of women in
different American corporations (Chapter 1), and the direct taxation policies of the New
Deal era (Chapter 4), as well as the frequent references throughout the book to economists
engaging in public debates regarding women’s labor.
The hiring (and firing) practices of corporations such as General Electric, Ford and
the experiments in the Western Electric Company not only are cases of gender
discrimination and scientific approaches of the Progressive era to productivity differences
between the sexes: they can also inform legions of businessmen and management scholars
to shape better guidelines for human resources policies based on historical evidence5.
In her revision of the taxation policies of the 1930s and 1940s, Kessler-Harris ably
produces a gendered view of aspects that might escape to fiscal historians studying income
tax policies in America and elsewhere: the efforts of fiscal officers to jointly tax married
1
Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity. Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th
Century America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 5.
2
Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: 6.
3
Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: 295.
4
The classical work from an economic history approach is Claudia Goldin. Understanding the Gender Gap:
An Economic History of American Women. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
5
Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: 45-56.
couples and the resistance Treasury found in Congress and the public add to unexplored
aspects of fiscal policymaking6.
The epilogue of the book is worth mentioning as a valuable example of the
relevance that the personal experiences of a historian are in her framing of a problem and
her writing of a tale. Kessler-Harris’s own involvement as a rebuttal witness in a judicial
case on gender-based discrimination against Sears illustrated the resistances to change that
she explored throughout her book7.
Kessler-Harris offers a compelling demonstration of how relevant historical
readings are when guided by concepts such as gender, class, ethnicity and race. To my
understanding, the most important lesson we can obtain from her book is that seemingly
neutral laws and policy measures are never addressed to the individual in abstract, but are
biased by ideas and prejudices common to any society in a period of time and might in fact
reproduce (and amplify) their effects in daily life.
Kessler-Harris’s approach to an economic and political problem made me question
my own assumptions and preconceived ideas on gender inequality. It also made me think
about the pertinence of applying historical methods of inquiry to scholarly literature:
academic texts are also embedded with habits of mind, the biases and prejudices of their
authors, and thus historians must be prepared to have a critical gaze and expose whenever
possible the impact of the “gendered imagination” and other imageries in existing
scholarship.
6
7
Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: 177-202.
Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: 290-292.