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What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British. Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges preconceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state--and a momentum for public policy--unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy.

In 1964, as part of its landmark Civil Rights Act, Congress outlawed workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as sex, race, and religion. This provision, known as Title VII, laid a new legal foundation for women's rights at work. Though President Kennedy and other lawmakers expressed high hopes for Title VII, early attempts to enforce it were inconsistent. In the absence of a consensus definition of sex equality in the law or society, Title VII's practical meaning was far from certain.The first history to foreground Title VII's sex provision, Equality on Trial examines how the law's initial promise inspired a generation of Americans to dispatch expansive notions of sex equality. Imagining new solidarities and building a broad class politics, these workers and activists engaged Title VII to generate a pivotal battle over the terms of democracy and the role of the state in all labor relationships. But the law's ambiguity also allowed for narrow conceptions of sex equality to take hold. Conservatives found ways to bend Title VII's possible meanings to their benefit, discovering that a narrow definition of sex equality allowed businesses to comply with the law without transforming basic workplace structures or ceding power to workers. These contests to fix the meaning of sex equality ultimately laid the legal and cultural foundation for the neoliberal work regimes that enabled some women to break the glass ceiling as employers lowered the floor for everyone else.Synthesizing the histories of work, social movements, and civil rights in the postwar United States, Equality on Trial recovers the range of protagonists whose struggles forged the contemporary meanings of feminism, fairness, and labor rights.

What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British.

In Nursing Civil Rights, Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army. As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. Threat tells how progressive elements in the campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, she follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.

Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers’ Rights addresses an important legal case that set the stage for today’s LGBTQ civil rights–a case that almost no one has heard of. Marjorie Rowland v. Mad River School District involves an Ohio guidance counselor fired in 1974 for being bisexual. Rowland’s case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices declined to consider it. In a spectacular published dissent, Justice Brennan laid out arguments for why the First and Fourteenth Amendments apply to bisexuals, gays, and lesbians. That dissent has been the foundation for LGBTQ civil rights advances since.   In the first in-depth treatment of this foundational legal case, authors Margaret A. Nash and Karen L. Graves tell the story of that case and of Marjorie Rowland, the pioneer who fought for employment rights for LGBTQ educators and who paid a heavy price for that fight. It brings the story of LGBTQ educators’ rights to the present, including commentary on Bostock v Clayton County , the 2020 Supreme Court case that struck down employment discrimination against LGBT workers.  

American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired them and the reforms they secured from employers and the state.

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations—dignified, collaborative, and illicit. At the same time he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite races. Stranger Intimacy reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bigotry distractions are strategic invocations of racism, transphobia, or negative stigma toward other marginalized groups to shape political discourse. Although the vast majority of Americans agree on large policy issues ranging from reducing air pollution to prosecuting corporate crime, bigotry distractions divert attention from areas of agreement toward divisive identity issues. This article explores how the nefarious targeting of identity groups through bigotry distractions may be the tallest barrier to health reform, and social change more broadly. The discussion extends the literature on dog whistles, strategic racism, and scapegoating.

This year, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. Hopkins reaffirmed what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), lower courts, and the Supreme Court itself had long observed about Title VII's prohibition on discrimination in employment on the grounds of sex.

Introduction It was over thirty years ago that Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA” or “the Act”).1 The ADA is an ambitious and comprehensive legislative mandate, designed to guarantee protections for, and prohibit discrimination against, people living with disabilities, thus ensuring them the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in everyday life.2 The ADA was “[m]odeled after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin – and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,” which forbids organizations and employers from excluding or denying individuals with disabilities an equal opportunity to receive program benefits and services.3 Since the ADA’s implementation, the nation has evolved in terms of technological advancements and their increasingly critical function in the life of an average American. Whether this is for online shopping, schooling, banking, social networking, or beyond, such online access has empowered many visually impaired Americans to reap the benefits of internet use.4 However, accessibility barriers remain a major stumbling block to the visually impaired enjoying all the internet has to offer, even though nearly all American adults use the internet in their daily lives.5 With divergent case law and a lack of legislative guidance, many complications regarding the applicability of the ADA to the internet remain unresolved. [...]this Note will examine why the internet ought to be understood as a place of public accommodation under the ADA and will encourage the development of guidelines instructing the federal judiciary to consider the internet as a place of public accommodation for the benefit of visually impaired users. [...]this Note will consider the future of internet accessibility and what guidelines may be implemented to further ensure equal access for Americans with disabilities. The only consequence of a Section 504 violation was that Congress would deny federal funding to any discriminating entity.34 It was even shown that state laws attempting to prevent discrimination could be rendered ineffective.35 In Pennhurst v. Halderman, the Supreme Court ruled that a federal district court could not enforce a Pennsylvania state law offering protections for the mentally disabled, saying the Eleventh Amendment prohibited federal courts from ordering states to comply with their own state law.36 Despite activism pushing Congress to draft the ADA, opponents to its passage remained, such that thousands of Americans felt compelled to participate in the “Capitol Crawl” three months prior to its passage, abandoning wheelchairs and crawling up the steps of the Capitol to pressure Congress to pass the ADA.37 Congress responded to the pressure in July 1990, passing the broadest disability protection and anti-discrimination law yet seen, the ADA.38 The statute begins by detailing congressional findings regarding the discrimination people with disabilities experience every day, and so