Synopses & Reviews
Offering fresh insights into the history of labor policy, the New Deal, feminism, and southern politics, Landon Storrs examines the New Deal era of the National Consumers' League, one of the most influential reform organizations of the early twentieth century.
Founded in 1899 by affluent women concerned about the exploitation of women wage earners, the National Consumers' League used a strategy of "ethical consumption" to spark a successful movement for state laws to reduce hours and establish minimum wages for women. During the Great Depression, it campaigned to raise labor standards in the unregulated, non-union South, hoping to discourage the relocation of manufacturers to the region because of cheaper labor and to break the downward spiral of labor standards nationwide. Promoting regulation of men's labor as well as women's, the league shaped the National Recovery Administration codes and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 but still battled the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment threatened sex-based labor laws.
Using the National Consumers' League as a window on the nation's evolving reform tradition, Civilizing Capitalism explores what progressive feminists hoped for from the New Deal and why, despite significant victories, they ultimately were disappointed.
Review
[An] expertly researched and richly woven history.
American Historical Review
Review
Storrs's evaluations of historiographical arguments . . . are extremely valuable, particularly to the non-specialist.
Journal of Women's History
Review
Civilizing Capitalism convincingly shows the complex, frustrating, and ultimately inadequate development of federal labor regulation during the 1930s.
Journal of American History
Review
[Provides] fruitful and original analyses of the relations among women's political movements and consumption.
Reviews in American History
Review
[A] clearly written and deeply researched book.
Enterprise and Society
Synopsis
Landon Storrs examines the New Deal era of the National Consumers' League, one of the most influential reform organizations of the early twentieth century. Her book offers fresh insights into the history of labor policy, the New Deal, feminism, and southern politics.
Synopsis
Storrs's evaluations of historiographical arguments . . . are extremely valuable, particularly to the non-specialist.
Journal of Women's History Civilizing Capitalism convincingly shows the complex, frustrating, and ultimately inadequate development of federal labor regulation during the 1930s.
Journal of American History [Provides] fruitful and original analyses of the relations among women's political movements and consumption.
Reviews in American History [An] expertly researched and richly woven history.
American Historical Review [A] clearly written and deeply researched book.
Enterprise & Society
Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Investigate, Agitate, Legislate: The National Consumers' League
2. Toward Feminist Social Democracy: The Entering Wedge Strategy
3. A Subtle Program Come Down from the North?: The Consumers' League Develops a Southern Strategy
4. The Acid Test of the New Deal: The National Recovery Administration, 1933-1935
5. Bucking the Bourbons: Lucy Mason Organizes for the Consumers' League in the South
6. Agents of the New Deal: Consumers' League Women Campaign in Virginia, South Carolina, and Kentucky
7. Ambiguous Victory: The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938
8. Reaction: The Consumers' League Program under Attack
9. Always Democracy: The Consumers' League in the Post-New Deal Era
Conclusion
Appendix 1. National Consumers' League Officers, 1933 and 1941
Appendix 2. Biographical Data on Fifty Consumers' League Activists in the 1930s
Appendix 3. Selected Landmarks in the History of Labor Standards Regulation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Women factory inspectors, 1914
Frances Perkins and Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943
The NCL expresses its opinion of the Adkins v. Children's Hospital ruling, 1923
Textile workers struggle with a National Guardsman in Gastonia, North Carolina, 1929
Lucy Randolph Mason, ca. 1920s
Josephine Casey on the cover of Equal Rights, 1931
Josephine Roche and John L. Lewis, 1936
New York City garment workers declare their determination to enforce NRA codes, ca. 1934
Women's Advisory Committee on the NRA coat and suit code, 1934
Clara Beyer, ca. 1931
Gastonia, North Carolina, textile strikers celebrate Labor Day, 1934
Gastonia, North Carolina, strikers wear posters demanding enforcement of the textile industry's NRA code, 1934
Women at work in a Louisville, Kentucky, garment factory, 1942
Anna Settle and Annie Halleck, 1941
"Southern solons band to fight wage-hour measure," 1938
Lucy Mason testifies at the Black-Connery bill hearings, 1937
Italian women packing asparagus in Pennsylvania, 1941
Elinore Herrick, 1937
Mary Dublin, ca. 1938
Eveline Burns, 1943