Teacher Unions conflict in New York City, 1935–1960

Abstract

While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual demise to the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s, this article situates the TU in the history of New York City teachers’ associations more generally. It argues that the Union’s fate was a consequence not simply of anticommunism, but of competition between the Union and other city teachers’ associations. In particular, the Teachers Guild fought with the Union for the mantle of teacher radicalism. While the two organizations fought for some of the same issues, the liberal Guild was accommodating to the government, while the radical Union was confrontational. When it came to the Union’s ideology, however, the Guild consistently sacrificed its commitment to academic freedom by collaborating with public authorities to reveal the extent of the Union’s Communist commitments. Using archival data – private correspondence of teacher unionists, minutes of Union meetings, and articles from the teachers’ unions’ official periodicals – this article documents the Guild’s efforts at subverting the Union, particularly at moments when the Union’s political commitments became salient in public affairs.     

The manifesto of the North American anti‐fascist alliance,New York,august 26, 1926

Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, By Ira Berlin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. xxi, 423 pp. $15.00.

Rights of Union Members and the Government. By Philip Taft. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975. xv, 348 pp. $14.95.

The Hundred Million Dollar Pay Off. By Douglas Caddy. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974. $8.75.

Mother Jones—The Miners’ Angel: A Portrait. By Dale Fetherling. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. 263 pp. $11.85

A Guide to the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Compiled and edited by Warner W. Pflug. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974. 195 pp. $8.95.

MAN!: An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries. Edited by Marcus Graham. London: Genfuegos Press, 1974. 638 pp. £7.00 ($17.00), paperback £ 3.25p ($8.00).

Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour, Industrial Relations, and the General Strike. By David Jay Bercuson. Montreal and London: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1974. pp. x, 227.

English Hunger &; Industrial Disorders: A Study of Social Conflict During the First Decade of George III's Reign. By Walter James Shelton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. ix, 226 pp. $15.00.

Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism. Edited by A.J.A. Morris. Boston: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1974. x, 277 pp. $18.00.

Les Ouvriers en grève. By Michelle Perrot. Paris: Mouton, 1974. 2 volumes. 900 pp.

The Import of Labor: The case of the Netherlands. By Adriana Marshall. Rotterdam: Rotterdam University Press, 1973. 177 pp.

The Chinese Worker. By Charles Hoffmann. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1974. xi, 252 pp. $15.00.     

gendering markets,gendering food: women,law and markets in the New York City food system, 1800–1840

This paper is a response to scholars who have called for exploring and interrogating new strategies of data collection and new approaches to more traditional methods, such as interviewing in the context of the internet. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, ‘reflexive email interviewing’ is proposed as a method for feminist research. The method is illustrated using a recent case study of email interviews with self-identified women who are members of World Pulse, an online community that aims to unite and amplify women’s voices worldwide. Through this case study, issues of power and resistance in the researcher/researched relationship and of participant reflexivity are interrogated. Lastly, criteria for reflexive email interviewing are proposed, including 1) strategies to interrogate and disrupt power hierarchies within the research process, 2) researcher reflexivity as a continuous part of the research process, and 3) continued invitations for participants to directly reflect on and respond to the research process. Reflexive questions are offered for researchers to use during research design and in each phase of their research process to ensure reflexivity is achieved.     

Workers,parties and a “New Deal:” A comparative analysis of corporatist alliances in Mexico,and the United States, 1910–1940

Mexico experienced the twentieth century’s first social revolution, a decade of struggle from which emerged a new political regime – a post-revolutionary authoritarian or single-party state one – with President Lázaro Cárdenas as leader by 1934. This post-revolutionary creation included organized labor and peasants, a strong interventionist state and a hegemonic party. Cárdenas’ U.S. counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, was leading dramatic ‘New Deal’ institutional and political revolution in the 1930s and 1940s that spawned a new order of expanded federal government, a renovated Democratic Party, and new movements and interest groups, notably, labor. Both nations featured the same major actors: the state, political parties, and organized labor. Both presidents calculated that preserving labor alliances was crucial for formation and legitimization of a new political order, for maintaining conditions conducive to private-sector investment and economic growth, and for political and economic crisis management. Labor’s growing role reshuffled corporatist alliances within and between international neighbors. This study places Mexico and the United States in comparative context in the early twentieth century and analyzes elite control and inclusion of organized labor in transformation of political landscapes in two different political regimes – a democratic one couched in an established constitution and a post-revolutionary authoritarian one born of a bloody upheaval.     

Launching a New Journal: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000

This article traces the founding and development of an online journal, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 (WASM), which Sklar & Dublin began editing in 2003. A quarterly journal, a database, and a website, WASM publishes edited collections of primary documents and full‐text sources that focus on the history of women and social activism in the United States. The journal’s editors discuss their experience in launching the journal and reach out to scholars in the UK to expand the transnational and comparative dimensions of the project.     

If Theory and Practice Were the Same,Then What? A New Approach to Designing Professional Education

Professional education has for decades been based on the premise that theory and practice are dichotomous, and that somehow a way must be found to enable professional practitioners to translate theory (the knowledge they acquire) into practice (what they actually do). The article examines the relationship between theory and practice, contending that theory and practice are the same, and proposes a model of professional education based on this premise. Based primarily on hermeneutic philosophy, a number of approaches to professional education are described that are quite different than those generally employed today.     

Cab fair: taxi driving and South Asian labor activism in New York City, 1985–1999

Abstract

The labor strike of 13 May 1998 was an historic event for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). Under the leadership of Bhairavi Desai, 98% of New York City’s 24,000 yellow cab drivers refused to work. The strike disrupted the flow of city life, but it also shattered the belief that taxi drivers were atomized and therefore unable to organize, effectively exercise power, or earn basic working rights for themselves. This unprecedented strike was thus an act of self-assertion for taxicab drivers in the 1990s, who were predominantly of South Asian origin and had been victims of unjust violence and discrimination in the city. This article questions how immigrant taxi cab drivers came to cooperate with one another in the late nineties to fight for fair wages. It also explores how members of the NYTWA overcame class disparities and ethnic differences among themselves to serve common goals.     

To ‘Better the Breed of Men’: women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935

Over the past decade the relationship between feminism and eugenics has become an increasingly important site of research. This relationship, however, remains to be examined in New Zealand. This article interrogates the ways in which female reformers, colonial feminists and female health and welfare workers engaged in eugenic debates in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It situates the 1924 Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders in New Zealand and the sterilization debate of the 1930s as representative of women’s role as both the agents and subjects of eugenics in this period. Eugenics offered women a discourse of moral and social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension, enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health. However, in their testimony before the 1924 Inquiry and in the subsequent debates surrounding sterilization, women articulated and prescribed eugenic solutions for ‘deviant women’ and cast themselves as the ‘mothers of the race’. As authors of eugenics for other women, white middle‐class female reformers, health professionals and colonial feminists complicate the history of eugenics in New Zealand.     

Grand Dames and Gentle Helpmeets: women and the royal honours system in New Zealand, 1917–2000

This article focuses on black and white Christian women's groups in the Anglican and Methodist churches in twentieth-century South Africa. While the Mothers' Union was exported from the metropolitan heartland to the colonial Anglican periphery as a nominally multiracial organisation, Methodist women set up racially divided women's groups, which, nevertheless, intersected in various ways. By the 1960s, Africans dominated the Mothers' Union, and white and mixed-race Anglican women turned to a more liberal alternative, while Methodist women faced growing pressure to form one united organisation. Democratic transition in South Africa found female church groups still wrestling with historic divisions which were not simply racially based, but the black ‘periphery’ was now clearly numerically, if not always organisationally, dominant while its spiritual style constituted the heartland of South African ‘mission’ Christianity.     

Irish Women’s Networks on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, 1864–1922

This article explores the ethnic incorporation of Irish women on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island from 1864, when the gold rushes began, until the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The central argument is that these newcomers did not choose ethnic solidarity as a means to pursue their goals and, for most, an ethnic or religious category sufficed in an environment where local communities, churches, trade unions, kinship ties and non‐ethnic political parties had far more social relevance. The small‐scale structure of West Coast localities, the relative economic homogeneity of its inhabitants and the absence of entrenched anti‐Irish elites militated against the rise of sectarian animosities and the maturation of intensified ethnic consciousness. As a consequence, Irish women did not construct and sustain informal social networks based on ‘principles of ethnic categorisation’ in which they distributed resources and channelled interaction among group members.