For Business History Review, January, 2005

Irene A. DeVault. United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism. Ithaca and London. Cornell University Press. 2004. xi + 244 pp. Appendices, index.

United Apart is an ambitious attempt to analyze the institutional dynamics of the American emerging labor movement at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a valuable complement to the work of historians of labor during this period such as Herbert Gutman, Patricia Cooper, and Gwendolyn Mink. Irene A. DeVault has selected forty "cross-gender" strikes in the tobacco, textile, shoe, and garment industries for detailed analysis. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of the "series" as a means of thinking "about the complexities of . . . workers' identities," DeVault examines the roles of race, ethnicity, geography, concepts of family, and gender in the conduct of these strikes. Her aim is to understand the relationship between each of these factors, as they played out in local strikes, to the emerging institutional and ideological character of the broader US labor movement, notably the American Federation of Labor. She concludes that race, ethnicity, industrial sector, and applications of moral economy were variable from situation to situation, encouraging mutuality and solidarity here, proving divisive and contributing to strike failure there. But two factors-gender and the physical location of the plant undergoing a strike-proved to be constant and thus were critical factors in shaping the character of the twentieth-century labor movement.

United Apart is not an easy read. The book is organized neither chronologically nor thematically. In the introduction DeVault observes that "The serial nature of the historical narrative-the fact that one event follows another-is. . . crucial in this book." She further explains that her "examination of the narrative seriality of the case studies provides a sort of standpoint epistemology version of historical narration: the point at which actors stand in the narrative determines both their reactions to events and the unfolding of these events."(8) The result is a presentation that combines comparative case-study analysis and direct expository narration featuring extensive quotations from newspapers and other contemporary sources.

Employing this format, DeVault guides the reader through the book's complex agenda. Thus, the first chapter provides introductions to the four industries through vignettes of strikes. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the Knights of Labor and the AFL, respectively, through detailed discussions of selected strikes. Chapter 4 investigates the roles that race and ethnicity played in various cross-gender strikes, while chapter 5 examines strikes occurring outside of the nation's central industrial core. Chapter 6 "explores the various roles family ties might play in different strikes," and chapter 7 returns to the AFL to explore its efforts to adapt its craft union orientation to the changing technological, organizational, and demographic character of work. The conclusion examines the origins and early development of the Women's Trade Union League as the AFL's main means of addressing the gender aspects of the changing work environment. Throughout, DeVault makes heavy demands on her readers, as they repeatedly are asked to review strikes discussed elsewhere in the book through the various lenses that she employs.

Despite the awkwardness of the book's structure and exposition, DeVault's conclusions are sensible and well-stated. An examination of forty cross-gender strikes clustered around the turn of the twentieth century in four industries in a variety of geographical locales indicates that established labor leaders failed to make effective us of the energy and skills that women workers brought to labor struggles. While they were capable of using craft, ethnic, and even racial categories to conduct successful strikes and build enduring craft unions, "skilled male workers. . . . could reach [i.e., usually reached] the end of strikes with the same levels of scorn for their female co-workers with which they had begun the strikes." Male leaders "learned" that women, whom they usually ignored, denigrated, or marginalized during strikes, could not be good union material. Meanwhile, women workers also "learned" that, in view of their treatment by the craft unionists who tended to dominate cross-gender strike situations, there might be "little reason. . . to continue or begin paying union dues." (220-21) Meanwhile, strikes on the industrial periphery, where local protests often created ad hoc labor organizations unrelated to national organizations, often exhibited real cross-gender solidarity. The struggles of textile workers in Colorado. Indiana, and Oregon, and tobacco workers in rural Wisconsin and Florida yielded examples of de facto industrial unionism built on this solidarity. In dismissing or ignoring these strikes in "marginal" places, AFL leaders lost an opportunity to learn lessons about the possibilities of industrial unionism even as their own half-hearted efforts to adapt the federation's archaic structure and dated ideology to the emerging twentieth-century economy fizzled .

United Apart brings to light dozens of otherwise-forgotten turn-of-the-century labor struggles. It gives historical voice to local women labor activists by their contemporaries and ignored by other historians. DeVault's appendices reflect her prodigious research into turn-of-the-century workers' lives, values, and protests. They also provide useful numerical material drawn from the Census of 1900 on the communities in which the strikes took place, as well as a valuable guide to the primary sources she has mined. Her findings about the role of gender in labor struggles and the distinctive nature of labor activism in smaller communities add significantly to our understanding of the emerging institutional character of the AFL.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida