Transformations: The New Deal through the 1950s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.

A Class by Herself

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Impact

This book explores the historical role and influence of protective legislation for American women workers, both as a step toward modern labor standards and as a barrier to equal rights. Spanning the twentieth century, the book tracks the rise and fall of women-only state protective laws—such as maximum hour laws, minimum wage laws, and night work laws—from their roots in progressive reform through the passage of New Deal labor law to the feminist attack on single-sex protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The book considers the network of institutions that promoted women-only protective laws, such as the National Consumers' League and the federal Women's Bureau; the global context in which the laws arose; the challenges that proponents faced; the rationales they espoused; the opposition that evolved; the impact of protective laws in ever-changing circumstances; and their dismantling in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Above all, the book examines the constitutional conversation that the laws provoked—the debates that arose in the courts and in the women's movement. Protective laws set precedents that led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to current labor law; they also sustained a tradition of gendered law that abridged citizenship and impeded equality for much of the century. Drawing on decades of scholarship, institutional and legal records, and personal accounts, the book sets forth a new narrative about the tensions inherent in women-only protective labor laws and their consequences.

Liberal Feminism and the Reshaping of the New Deal Order

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Funding ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Liberal Feminism ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter addresses the view that liberals have failed to marry the demands of identity- and class-based politics. It argues that in the 1970s, liberals built a powerful alliance between feminists and New Deal-style economic reforms that expanded the Democratic coalition and continues to exert influence upon it today. Although feminists failed in many of their symbolic or legal goals—particularly in the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment or federal funding for abortion—they succeeded in passing legislation that vastly improved the lives of homemakers and women workers. The chapter maintains that, surely, incorporation of gender issues into the liberal agenda contributed to the rise of a conservative countermovement, but without equal rights, the universal promise of New Deal economics would remain empty.

“The Spice of the Department Store”: The “Consumers' Republic,” Imported Knock-Offs from Latin America, and the Invention of International Development, 1936–1941

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augustine Sedgewick
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
International Development ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Us History ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The New Deal

AbstractMajor recent work in US history has credited the New Deal with a dubious double legacy. One group of historians has shown how Roosevelt's domestic policies subsidized the consolidation of a political economy and culture of mass consumption, while another has described how his foreign policies generated the strategies and institutions of neoimperialism. Scholars have analyzed these developments in isolation, but this essay demonstrates that they were linked and synergistic. Working from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to the nascent program for multilateral international development, it argues that an integrated complex of New Deal domestic and foreign policies harnessed the rise of the United States as a “consumers' republic” to the forms of imperialism refined in Latin America in the thirties and forties and deployed globally after the war. This policy complex rationalized the global production of US mass-consumer prosperity, displaced the costs of the Keynesian rehabilitation of US capitalism abroad, and evolved to regulate the metabolism between domestic mass consumerism and international hegemony after 1945.

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN CALIFORNIA, 1950–1964

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 497-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
National Level ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Democratic Ideology ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

In the 1950s the Democratic Party in California grew from a struggling, rump organization into the major political party in the state. This was in large part due to the activities of a network of liberal activists in the California Democratic Council, a group formed in 1953 to encourage the creation of local Democratic ‘clubs’ across California in which those interested in left-of-centre politics could debate issues of the day and campaign for Democratic candidates in elections. This article argues that the rise of the Democrats in the Golden State was predicated on the espousal by both amateur activists and party politicians of an explicitly social democratic ideology that provided a bridge between the policies of the New Deal in the 1930s and the more ambitious goals of the Great Society at the national level in the 1960s. The article examines the ideas embraced by liberal politicians in the 1950s and looks at how those ideas underpinned a massive expansion of California's welfare state in the early 1960s.

DEMOCRATIC OPPOSITION TO THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT OF 1938

2002 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Fleck
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
The South ◽  
Roll Call Voting ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Fair Labor

This article uses roll-call voting and constituency data to provide an improved understanding of how and why the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 divided the Democratic Party. The evidence suggests, first, that the predominance of southerners among Democrats who opposed the FLSA resulted in part from the widespread disfranchisement of low-wage workers in the South and, second, that Democratic opposition to the FLSA in the House of Representatives reflected a weakening of the coalition that had passed so much legislation during the earlier years of the New Deal.

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

Changes in the US Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 143-148
Author(s):  
Martha J. Bailey ◽  
Thomas Helgerman ◽  
Bryan A. Stuart
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
The Us ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
Women's Wages ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Equal Pay Act ◽  
The 1960S

The 1960s witnessed landmark legislation that aimed to increase women's wages, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Although the gender gap in pay changed little at the mean/median during the decade, our distributional analysis shows that women's wages converged sharply on men's below but diverged above the median. However, the bulk of women's relative pay gains are not explained by changes in observed attributes. Our findings suggest an important role for legislation in narrowing the gender gap in the 1960s.

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