Book Description

Sarah Boston recounts the story of women workers from the early nineteenth century to the present day: the struggles and strikes, successes and failures in their strenuous efforts to organise and win recognition from employers and male trade unionists. Women Workers and the Trade Unions - now republished with the addition of two new chapters covering the period from 1987 to 2010 - is the only comprehensive account of this neglected overlap of women's history and labour history. Sarah Boston argues that male trade unionists' exclusionary treatment of women workers contradicted not only the socialist aims of most trade unions but also the very logic of trade unionism itself. The account is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of industrial relations, but also with the history of feminism and of women in the workplace. --