The view of New York Harbor was a welcome sight for Samuel Siegal, one of nearly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1922.Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 38–68; Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881–1910 (New York, 1969). For Siegal and his shipmates it was the end of an enfeebling boat journey as well as their first glimpse of the goldene medinah (golden land) they had heard and talked about so much in the Pale of Settlement (the region of Czarist Russia open to Jews). Like the overwhelming majority of his coreligionist immigrants, Siegal had traveled to the United States in steerage. There, he ate nearly inedible food—and then only when he was not too nauseated to swallow.

In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating the two groups was simply too wide to cross. Indeed, male subway drivers could not understand why the stewardesses would object to their glamorous sex-object image. Deeply held gendered notions of unionism and politics also stood in the way of communication. For even if the complaints of stewardesses were accepted as “real,” to many male union leaders they seemed petty: matters not deserving of serious attention, let alone concerted activity.

In summing up and commenting upon a series of articles which examined the “postwar social contract” in International Labor and Working-Class History, Charles S. Maier observed that one theme which the authors raised but did “not systematically scrutinize [was] the role of gender differences” in the making of that contract.Charles S. Maier, “The Postwar Social Contract: Comment,” International Labor and Working-Class History 50 (1996):150. This article takes as its point of departure the importance of this remark both for and beyond the United States. It argues that in Australia, a country where postwar reconstruction was marked by intense labor factionalism, gender relations were in fact central to labor relations and to union strategy. Specifically, arguments and policies concerning women's rights to paid work, to equal pay, and to an active role in unions in large part defined the lines of internal labor movement division in unions with large numbers of women as members. This article charts these developments in three major areas of women's work and unionism: the clothing and footwear trades and in clerical work.

It is no coincidence that syndicalism emerges in a historical period when industrial discipline, economic efficiency, and social regularization are the guiding imperatives in the reconstruction of power and authority in the workplace. The syndicalist tendencies that mark the working-class response to this early twentieth-century effort at reconstituting workplace rules and regulations not only arise to combat capitalism but also to contest the respectable reformism of craft-based labor unions. “Syndicalism,” as Wayne Thorpe argues, “was simultaneously a contributing cause, a symptom, and a beneficiary of dissatisfaction with the dominant labor strategies of the period.”Wayne Thorpe, “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923 (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1989), 30. On the historical and in- ternational context for the emergence of syndicalism, see Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, England, 1990). Furthermore, as David Montgomery contends: “Revolutionary syndicalism extracted from the solidarities and ethical code of workers' daily lives a merciless critique of the existing structures of exploitation, power, and authority. It did not spare the institutions that workers had created for themselves.”David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1987), 310.

In his recent ethnographic history of the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island, Bruce Grant employs the “Soviet House of Culture” as a metaphor of cultural construction and the “hybrid identities produced by the Soviet state.”Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture (Princeton, 1995), xi. Yuri Slezkine's rendition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a communal apartment (kommunalka), where each national group had its own room but shared the kitchen, bathroom, and corridors, serves a similar metaphorical purpose, enabling the reader to envision the complexities of superstate–nationality interaction in more familiar spatial terms.Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (1994):414–52. For the USSR as a “superstate,” see Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1995). Both the communal apartment and the house, or palace, of culture were venerable Soviet institutions. Each was the product of the reimagining of sociability in the wake of the October Revolution, representing different types of imagined communities that only subsequently assumed material reality. The communal apartment has been the subject of novels (both utopian and dystopian), film, song, painting, economic and cultural history, and several (absurdist) exhibits.For the treatment of the communal apartment as “the cornerstone of the now disappearing Soviet civilization,” see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 121–67, quotation on 123. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 200–4, 213–19; and Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1983), 20–24, 138–58. The avant-gardist artist Ilya Kabakov has made the kommunalka the subject of paintings and exhibits. See Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushcheby to Korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 232–33; and Dina Vierny et al., Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol (Paris, 1995), 128–29. By contrast, little attention has been given to palaces of culture or to the less grandiloquently titled workers' clubs.Western scholarship on workers' clubs and palaces of culture has been limited to the formative decade of Soviet power and the post-Stalin decades. In addition to articles by John Hatch cited below, see Gabriele Gorzka, “Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers' Clubs, 1917–1921,” in Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism, ed. John W. Strong (Columbus, OH, 1990), 29–55; and Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London, 1990).

In 1935 George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England. This book, which soon became a classic of sorts, claimed to explain the passing away of a political tradition allegedly unable to thrive in the postwar climate. Nationalism, class politics, and militant trade unionism were the characteristics of the mature twentieth century. However, Dangerfield's condolences were premature. In April 1992, almost sixty years after the publication of this famous obituary, issue No. 7755 of The Economist appeared with a surprising cover illustration: It represented William Ewart Gladstone, the Victorian statesman, wearing a flowery (postmodern?) waistcoat and surrounded by the microphones of journalists obviously eager to pick his brain on the current political situation. The caption was: “A prophet for the left.” The leading article presented Gladstone not as a historical figure but as a model for the Labour party. This was certainly remarkable, especially after twelve years of Conservative governments which claimed to be intent on restoring some of the traditional values and policies associated with Gladstonian liberalism.S. Evans, “Thatcher and the Victorians: A Suitable Case for Comparison?,” History 82 (1997):601–20. After a century of political oblivion, old Gladstone had suddenly become fashionable again, and his mantle was apparently being fought over by the three main parties.

The twentieth annual North American Labor History Conference (NALHC), held at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, October 15–17, 1998, offered three days of intellectual forays into the history of workers in the United States, Latin America, Africa, Canada, Poland, and New Zealand. Conference participants enjoyed discussions concerning the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, skill, nationalism, communism, masculinity, education, political economy, imperialism, and citizenship have shaped labor history from the seventeenth century through the 1990s. The following is small sample of some of the panels and events included at the 1998 NALHC.

The Southern Historical Association's 1998 conference was held November 12–14 in Birmingham, Alabama. Consistent with long-established patterns, the conference featured panels chiefly focused on colonial-era issues: slavery, the Civil War, regional cultural and social history, and southern politics. Still, one session and several individual papers presented research in southern labor history. Reflecting the conference's location at the hub of Alabama's industrial heartland, the panel addressed coal miners' contests with organized operators, first in unionizing drives surrounding World War One and later during the long 1977–1978 United Mine Workers' strike.

These three very different books address the longstanding dialogue about domesticity and labor, work and home, in nineteenth-century England. British history has a strong tradition of empiricism and it is particularly evident in Meg Gomersall's Working-Class Girls in Nineteenth-Century England: Life, Work and Schooling. The title is misleading in that the book is not about working-class girls per se. Rather, it examines the education working-class girls received with particular attention to how the gendered division of labor shaped expectations and experiences for girls' education. Significantly, Gomersall's evidence reveals important regional differences before 1870. In agricultural districts, girls were more likely to remain in school longer even than boys compared to urban, industrial districts, where girls' domestic or waged labor had value from a very young age and education was not seen to improve a girl's earnings. Gomersall concludes that the “operation of gender divisions of labour rather than ideology was the key determinant on girls' access to schooling” (97).

This excellent collection of articles on interwar socialism shows the bottom line of socialist political theory: The vast majority of party leaders utterly refused to surrender the male bonus of political and economic privilege—even if it meant losing political wars. Under the banner of class solidarity, the various European parties generally refused to bring in women on equal terms to men, to address economic issues that would have benefited women workers, or to concern themselves with what they saw as women's insignificant problems. The situation became even worse as these parties bureaucratized in the interwar years and devoted themselves to guarding entrenched positions for well-paid functionaries. Parties with the potential to become massive and majoritarian gave up the goal of victory by keeping out an electoral clientele of working-class women and perhaps male sympathizers who saw that domination—whether economic or gender—was domination no matter what the form.

Among the radical intellectuals of the thirties devoted to depicting the lives of the American working class were women who paid special attention to the lives of their working-class sisters. Few, if any, were able to overcome their own middle-class perspectives, their gendered assumptions, and, ultimately, the reality of political and economic inequality in order to truly render agency to their female subjects. Jacqueline Ellis's study examines some important efforts to represent working-class women: first, the works of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers, Dorthea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Esther Bubley; then, writers, Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen. Ellis leaves the reader with an appreciation of their attempts and an understanding of the vast limitations of their endeavors.

If you are looking for a book about the relationship between gender and technology in the conventional sense—machines, science, manufacturing—you might be disappointed by Francesca Bray's Technology and Gender. What Bray offers instead is a sweeping analysis of how the objects encountered in daily life gave meaning to women's experience during that long period known as “late imperial China” (1000–1800). The work will certainly become a classic in Chinese women's history, but it also deserves to be read by a much larger audience, including those interested in subaltern studies, economic history, and the current debate about world-systems history.

At first glance, one might not think these two important works are about the same national experience during overlapping periods from 1870 to 1945, and their differences testify to the very diverse results historians can obtain from using completely different sets of sources. Anne Cova studies the elite discourse of parliamentary debates and political pressure groups to analyze legislative processes that culminated in the pronatalist Family Code of 1939. Her sources portray the French as preoccupied, if not obsessed, with falling birthrates and the consequent need to protect motherhood. Charles Rearick uses song lyrics, stage performances, film scenes, and film reviews to understand how the French viewed themselves through periods of tragedy and disappointment and thus as a method to understand national character. Reading these books together offers an unexpectedly rich opportunity for deepening our understanding of French character and behavior.

Part of a new series called Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, this is the first of what eventually is going to be a two-volume collection of essays on the experience of three European capital cities during the Great War. The work under review privileges the material conditions of the lives of the inhabitants “of London, Paris, and Berlin between 1914 and the early 1920s in order to study the new social relations and hierachies which they constructed, and the representations they themselves gave to their wartime reality” (527). Volume two will focus on an appreciation of the wartime reactions and perceptions of families, social groups, and social movements (527). Volume one of Capital Cities at War is an impressive book in several ways: in overall length and the density of its prose; in the heft of the primary research that supports almost every essay; in the theoretical jolt it means to deliver to comparative history; and in the extent of scholarly turf it commands at the junction of a “chronological history, that of the Great War, and a thematic history, that of urban history” (527). When the project is completed, editors Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert will have published more than a thousand pages on the subject.

For a century after 1870, labor unions and working-class political movements grew steadily in virtually all industrialized capitalist economies. By the late 1970s, unions enrolled 40 percent of the total labor force in Germany and New Zealand; 50 percent in Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom; over 60 percent in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway; and over 80 percent in Finland and Sweden (24). In addition, unions' political allies held important political offices in many of these countries, including control of the government in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Scandinavia.

This study is the antidote to an overdose of what the author labels “globaloney.” Undoubtedly, the term “globalization” tends to overwhelm more than it explains, and this book is designed as a guide for readers seeking to plant the seeds of a progressive future in the many fractures and weaknesses of the international economy. In place of a monolithic process of globalization, Moody reveals the gradual economic and political construction of the new world order, which contains more opportunity for change than most tend to see. Moody does not depict workers and their unions as stupefied and bewildered victims of the immense scope and pace of international change; instead, we see how recent transformations have pushed many wage earners into active resistance on the local level and how they have even managed to create crucial linkages of solidarity across the economic landscape. Workers in a Lean World frames globalization as an open-ended process, one that the world labor movement can affect profoundly.

This is the fourth volume in an ongoing series. James Klugmann brought his history of the British Communist party through the general strike of 1926 in two initial volumes. Noreen Branson covered the years 1927–1941 in volume three. Now she takes the story up to the fall of Clement Attlee's Labour government in 1951. It is an important story she wishes to tell, for the Communist party was influential out of all proportion to party membership, especially during the war years, which, in retrospect, were something of a climacteric. The party's precipitous fall from grace during the early years of the Cold War marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. The period Noreen Branson treats in the present volume was a crucible.

In his book on the 1945 Labour government's economic policy, Jim Tomlinson makes a useful addition to an already large literature, and in two ways particularly. First, he synthesizes an extensive number of secondary works, often providing useful correctives to dominant interpretations on the basis of his own research. Second, he relates Labour's economic policy in this period to the party's ideas about socialism, both the assumptions with which it arrived in office in 1945 and the ideas that emerged while it was in power. The result is a book that sets the policies that Labour followed in a broad intellectual and political context, thus making as much sense as we are likely to of the economic decisions that Labour leaders made during the one moment in history (until Tony Blair, of course) when they had a large enough parliamentary majority to do what they wanted.

It is well known to readers of this journal that the British labor movement is in a state of precipitous decline. A recent government White Paper, for example, reports that since 1990 alone the percentage of workplaces with no union members at all has risen from 36 percent to 47 percent. Perhaps more ominously, the percentage of workplaces that recognize trade unions has dropped from 66 percent in 1984 to 45 percent in 1998. From 1979, when trade union density was estimated at over 55 percent of the workforce, it is now hovering somewhere between 30 and 35 percent. It is safe to say that this low level has not been seen in Britain since before World War Two. Chris Wrigley's contribution to Manchester University Press's fine series on contemporary British history offers a timely collection of documents on the origin and development of these events. By design, this collection focuses on documents generated by the government, political parties, and private interest groups, most notably the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Thus six of the book's nine chapters provide a chronological overview of the vagaries of the British government's industrial relations policies during the postwar era, adequately supplemented with extracts from official TUC responses. Wrigley himself provides an effective and thoughtful editorial introduction that emphasizes not only just how precarious the trade unions' former position actually was, but also just how deep resentments against unions ran among certain sections of the Conservative party.

While it is clearly ridiculous to judge a book by its cover, the title as a signpost does offer a realistic description of the book. Aris is indeed concerned with trade unions and their management of conflict—the use of the ideologically loaded term in this context being well chosen. Less immediate are other parameters of the work: It concerns Great Britain, the state's management of conflict, and the period 1910–1921. The validity of these parameters is partially explained and partially assumed, but I think those within the field of labor history will recognize them as an acceptable balance between scope and length. The work does not seek to serve any particular sectional interests and their relationships with trade unions. I found the focus acceptable, indeed warranted, and Aris develops a useful (if not flawless) contribution to the literature.