United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism, by Ileen A. DeVault, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004, 244 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8926-1 (paper).

DeVault comes to this conclusion from her analysis of women’s participation in 40 cross-gender strikes - strikes in which both women and men participated - in the boot and shoe, clothing, textiles, and tobacco industries between 1886, when the AFL was formed, and 1903, when the AFL created Women’s Trade Union League. These years offer wide scope for investigation as these industries accounted for 86 per cent of the women employed in manufacturing and both 1886 and 1903 were high points of strike activity. To her credit, DeVault makes visible the breadth of this unrest by including strikes in smaller cities and in regions outside of the industrial heartland, not previously studied. The author’s perspective is institutional. On page 6 she describes herself as a “new institutionalist,” that is, someone who has “returned to take a new look at the development of unions and that ultimate expression of working-class consciousness, the strike.” The “new” here signals the influences of women’s labour history and social history. Her project is to “bring the insights about community, race, ethnicity, gender…back into consideration of workers’ attempts at institution-building.” I came to this book not as a labour historian but as someone trained in “old” institutional industrial relations in the 1980s, and subsequently self-retrained in feminism. For me, then, United Apart is attractive because of its focus on the growth and development of labour institutions in relation to women and women issues. The issues discussed in the book - how and why women workers organize, the forces for and against collective consciousness across the gender divide, and the relative lack of formal union organization among women in the early years of the 20^th century - are issues I think and write about. What DeVault concludes about the centrality of gender bias in the structures and functioning of the AFL and its affiliates is not new. It is well established that the AFL’s privileging of skilled workers was integral to the organization’s worldview. By its measure, working-class men deserved to share the rewards of American prosperity simply because they were men. But only some men were so entitled. The AFL championed the claims of American-born white men over immigrants and blacks who were judged inferior by nature, as well as by their unskilled status. DeVault’s accounts of the AFL’s interaction with women strikers reaffirms this interpretation. But she oversteps her evidence (and the historical record) when she argues that AFL craft unionism “came to be read as ‘male’ perhaps even more than they were read as ‘white’” (p. 4). This is too broad a conclusion to draw from a study in which race is a secondary theme. What is new and significant in United Apart is the breadth and depth of the historical strike record assembled by DeVault and her research team. United Apart represents a monumental investment of time, effort, and patience. And the results demonstrate beyond question that women were engaged workers, committed trade unionists, and brave strikers. If the myth of women’s passivity as an explanation for their low rates of unionization is still alive in the academic community, it is dispelled by the trajectory of these 40 strikes. The women in this book were determined strikers who often participated in numbers that exceeded their proportion in the work force. They had their own workplace issues which, by virtue of the strict job segregation by gender of the era, were “women’s issues.” But their experiences of work intensification and low wages were not unique to women in the economic depression of the 1890s. These causes of discontent were the common ground on …