Higgins Labor Studies Program presents: Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City
Award-winning journalist Jane LaTour
Wednesday, February 10 – 4:30pm
DeBartolo Hall Room 117
Public Lecture & Discussion
Jane LaTour, “Sisters in the Brotherhoods”
Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 4:30 pm in 117 DeBartolo Hall
LaTour is a journalist and author of the recently published Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City, an exploration of the women who broke the gender barrier to blue-collar jobs beginning in the 1970s. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris describes it as “one of the most exciting books I’ve read in years.”
Information on the Author and the Book
Jane Latour is a journalist and labor activist living in New York City. She has written for various union publications and managed the Women’s Project of the Association for Union Democracy. She is a two-time winner of the Mary Heaton Vorse Award, the top labor journalism award in New York City, and is currently the Associate Editor of the Public Employee Press, a monthly publication of AFSCME’s DC37, New York City’s largest public employee union. Her publisher, Palgrave MacMillan, describes her book as “an oral-history-based study of women who have, against considerable odds, broken the gender barrier to blue-collar employment in various trades in New York City beginning in the 1970s. It is a story of the fight against deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about what constitutes women’s work, the middle-class bias of feminism, the daily grinding sexism of male coworkers, and the institutionalized discrimination of employers and unions. It is also the story of some gutsy women who, seeking the material rewards and personal satisfactions of skilled manual labor, have struggled to make a place for themselves among New York City’s construction workers, stationary engineers, firefighters, electronic technicians, plumbers, and transit workers.”
Co-sponsored by: Center for the Study of Social Movements, Department of American Studies, Department of Economics & Policy Studies, Department of History, Department of Sociology, Gender Studies Program and Poverty Studies Minor