Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
This brief book examined the changing economic structure of the United States between the years 1885 to 1914. The most powerful aspect of the book for me was that it regarded the women as a historical subject. It’s also a beautifully written book which I still refer my students to for knowledge and the clarity of its prose.
Your second choice, The Response to Industrialism, was written by your mentor Samuel P Hays.
Yes, he was my mentor at the University of Pittsburgh, where I took my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. He and my other mentor, David Montgomery, supervised my PhD.
This brief book examined the changing economic structure of the United States between the years 1885 to 1914. The importance of this book, which has become a historical classic, is that it looked at a broad variety of responses to economic change during the American Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
The most powerful aspect of the book for me was that it regarded the women as a historical subject. It’s also a beautifully written book which I still refer my students to for knowledge and the clarity of its prose.
Studying Sam’s book, as well as talking to my two mentors, enabled me to formulate a research project that focused and still focuses upon the relationship between economic, demographic and political forces. Both Hays and Montgomery looked behind the labels to determine the origins of public protest and policy.
Pittsburgh when I started my PhD in 1968 was very much a steel industry town. What interested me was the lives of the women who lived in the shadow of the steel mills and how all the work they did at home enabled their husbands, sons and lodgers to work the way they did in the mills. Apart from Margaret Byington, there had never been a study of these women. What I wanted to do was to look at the ordinary women’s lives who were not working in the mills and see the impact they had on the men around them. And my mentors encouraged me to do that.
Maybe it was because Sam was a Quaker, I don’t know, but what I liked about him was he took what I was interested in seriously and agreed that I could teach a course entitled The History and Social Role of Women in 1969/1970. This was one of the first courses in the United States on the history of women and I was a postgrad at the time.
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Jay Kleinberg, author of History of Women in the Americas, shares her book choices on her specialist subject for World History Week and says that abortion will always remain a flashpoint in American politics because so many powerful groups focus on it as a political, rather than a medical issue. She herself worked at a free clinic giving pregnancy and birth control counselling because the Women’s Liberation Movement was very much involved around the issue of abortion. ‘I think that is partially a result of our own age group at the time and the Summer of Love,’ she says.
