On Gender, Labor, and Inequality, by Ruth Milkman. University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2016, 328 pp., ISBN: 978‐0‐252‐08177‐4, $28.00, paperback.
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Fenella Porter |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12232 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12232
55:2 June 2017 0007–1080 pp. 450–459
BOOK REVIEWS
On Gender, Labor, and Inequality, by Ruth Milkman. University of Illinois Press,
Champaign, 2016, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-252-08177-4, $28.00, paperback.
This book is a collection of Milkman’s work, spanning four decades from the 1970s.
Milkman, one of the first to formulate the field of gender and labour, locates her
intellectual roots in social movements, particularly the socialist feminist scholarship
emerging in the ‘second wave’ of feminism in the United States at that time. The
book brings together her contribution to the scholarship of gender and work,
and ‘interrogates the historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender
inequalities in the US labour market, as well as eorts to challenge those inequalities’
(p. 3).
This book appeals a wide audience: for those who have followed Milkman’s work
over the years, to have a collection which outlines the development of her ideas in
one place is a treat. But it will also be read with interest by labour studies/industrial
relations students and academics who are relatively new to these ideas, and for whom
this kind of collection provides a comprehensive examination of the issues around
gender and class, which have become even more urgent as capitalism has evolved to
increase and add further layers to these inequalities. It is also of importance – and
indeed relevance – for those interested in issues of women and work in other areas
(e.g. International Development),as the ideas contained in this volume are important
for our understanding of women’s lives in both global North (the United States in
particular), and in the global South, where the inequalities among women in the
context of capitalist development are often forgotten in the rush to integrate women
into the market economy. Beyond academia, this book will be of interest to activists
in the labour movement both in the United States and further afield. Milkman’s
contribution is not just to the understanding of gender and class inequalities, but also
to the theoretical and empirical underpinning of the labour and women’s movements’
challenges to the system, which creates and perpetuates these inequalities.
We are living in a tumultuous era, where many of the progressive ideas around
equality and justice, which were emerging at the turn of the century have been
challenged and undermined by the seemingly unstoppable march of free-market
neoliberalism. Analysis of gender inequality within this context is often limited
to discussions of ‘glass ceilings’ and the need for women to ‘lean in’. This risks
misunderstanding the problem quite fundamentally, and this collection of Milkman’s
work reminds us of the importance of understanding the dynamics of the economic
structures in which we live and work, the gender dynamics of capitalism, and the
‘intersection’ between class and gender. This is crucial if those who would challenge
these structures are to have the depth of understanding and argument they need in
order to bring about meaningful changes in the lives of womenworkers in the United
C
2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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