Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor

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Rutgers University Press, 2004 - Business & Economics - 272 pages

In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined.

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.

 

Contents

Race Class Gender and Defining the Sweatshop
19
Factory Inspectors Jewish
42
Sweatshop
61
Home Work Homework
77
Women and Gender in the Sweatshop
101
Factionalism
155
Our Marching Orders Advance
181
AntiSweatshop Campaigns in a New Century
188
Notes
197
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Daniel E. Bender is an assistant professor of history at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, and co-editor of Sweatshop U.S.A.: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective.

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