In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America by Alice Kessler-Harris, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 374 pp., ISBN: 0-19-503835-5.

Lawmaking in the employment arena in the U.S. and Canada has both converged and diverged, depending on the subject. On the one hand, provincial lawmakers looked to the U.S. National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as a model for labour relations laws in Ontario and other provinces. Cross-border relationships among social movements and unions led to the development of similar human rights acts and commissions in both U.S. states and Canadian provinces. On the other hand, when the U.S. Congress passed the 1963 Equal Pay Act, Canadian provinces were already moving beyond similar equal pay models that had been passed as early as 1951 in Ontario. Currently, Canadian equal pay and pay equity law is recognized as one of the most advanced in the world, while the U.S. Equal Pay Act has not changed in 40 years. In 2001, the synergy between U.S. and Canadian labour and employment law was brought into stark relief by the Canadian Supreme Court decision, Dunmore v. Ontario ([2001] S.C.J. No. 87). In Dunmore, the Canadian Supreme Court decided that Ontario’s 1995 repeal of the Agricultural Labour Relations Act violated the Canadian Charter of Rights. Prior to 1994, Ontario’s Labour Relations Act excluded farm workers from organizing and collective bargaining protection—as did the U.S. NLRA upon which it was in part modelled. The synergy, convergence and divergence of Canadian and U.S. labour and employment law and policy make Alice Kessler-Harris’ 2001 book In Pursuit of Equity a must-read for both Canadians and Americans. Kessler-Harris’ book works on at least two levels. On one level, it views the development of social protection and employment policy through the prism of gender and race. On another level, it provides a colourful history of the formation of most of the major U.S. laws affecting the employment relationship developed in the last century. Thus the book can appeal both to gender scholars and to labour scholars. Chapter One lays the groundwork for the next chapters (and the next century) by discussing the gendered views of work in the U.S. in the 19^th century. Wage work was a manly prerogative that allowed men to view themselves as men—and distinguish themselves from more lowly beings such as women, slaves and children. During this time the concept of a “family wage” developed—whereby a man would earn enough to support his family. In this world, women did not own their own labour and were limited in the kinds of work they could do. Work-related policies and employer programs reflected the cultural view that women were primarily wives and mothers. For example, in 1905 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected work hour protections for men because it interfered with their freedom and power to contract, but in 1908 it rejected the same argument and allowed work hour protections for women, finding that women are at a disadvantage physically and contractually. Part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning was that it wanted to protect women’s role as mothers (pp. 28-31). Chapter Two builds on the concepts of masculinity and femininity in the development of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in the 1930’s. Kessler-Harris argues that the American Federation of Labor (AFL) did not support protective wage and hour legislation because it wanted to preserve its power (and that of its male membership) to contract and bargain for what the men wanted, without being constrained by protective laws. Nor did the AFL want an administrative board with the power to intervene in the wage bargaining process by setting a minimum wage rate (p. 103). It was precisely the values …