{"title":"Alice Kessler-Harris","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"difficult-woman-book-alice-kessler-harris-9781596913639","title":"A Difficult Woman","description":"Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, \"Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and' and ‘the.'\" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice  Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.  Kessler-Harris renders Hellman's feisty wit and personality in all of its contradictions: as a non-Jewish Jew, a displaced Southerner, a passionate political voice without a party, an artist immersed in commerce, a sexually free woman who scorned much of the women's movement, a loyal friend whose trust was often betrayed, and a writer of memoirs who repeatedly questioned the possibility of achieving truth and doubted her memory.  Hellman was a writer whose plays spoke the language of morality yet whose achievements foundered on accusations of mendacity. Above all else, she was a woman who made her way in a man's world. Kessler-Harris has crafted a nuanced life of Hellman, empathetic yet unsparing, that situates her in the varied contexts in which she moved, from New Orleans to Broadway to the hearing room of HUAC. A Difficut Woman is a major work of literary and intellectual history. This will be one of the most reviewed, and most acclaimed, books of 2012.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49552561930513,"sku":"GOR004878717","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50096624828689,"sku":"CIN1596913630G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51329839169809,"sku":"CIN1596913630VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1596913630.jpg?v=1751375160"},{"product_id":"out-to-work-book-alice-kessler-harris-9780195033533","title":"Out to Work","description":"This pioneering work traces the transformation of \"women's work\" into wage labor in the U.S. from colonial days to the present and identifies the social, economic, and ideological forces that have shaped our expectations of what women do. Basing her observations upon the personal experience of individual American women set against the backdrop of American society at the time, Alice Kessler-Harris examines the effects of class, ethnic and racial patterns, changing perceptions of wage work for women, and the relationship between wage-earning and family roles. By tracking the historical integration of women into the labor force, the author argues that women's current efforts to gain full economic equality are part of a larger process that is destined to succeed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49989720375569,"sku":"CIN0195033531A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50233494044945,"sku":"CIN0195033531G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51359525241105,"sku":"GOR014238181","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52817096474897,"sku":"CIN0195033531VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195033531.jpg?v=1751290558"},{"product_id":"difficult-woman-book-alice-kessler-harris-9781608193950","title":"A Difficult Woman","description":"Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, \"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'\" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice  Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time.  Kessler-Harris renders Hellman's feisty wit and personality in all of its contradictions: as a non-Jewish Jew, a displaced Southerner, a passionate political voice without a party, an artist immersed in commerce, a sexually free woman who scorned much of the women's movement, a loyal friend whose trust was often betrayed, and a writer of memoirs who repeatedly questioned the possibility of achieving truth and doubted her memory.  Hellman was a writer whose plays spoke the language of morality yet whose achievements foundered on accusations of mendacity. Above all else, she was a woman who made her way in a man's world. Kessler-Harris has crafted a nuanced life of Hellman, empathetic yet unsparing, that situates her in the varied contexts in which she moved, from New Orleans to Broadway to the hearing room of HUAC. A Difficut Woman is a major work of literary and intellectual history. This will be one of the most reviewed, and most acclaimed, books of 2012.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50407005028625,"sku":"CIN1608193950VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51417592824081,"sku":"CIN1608193950G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52602213368081,"sku":"GOR008193806","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1608193950.jpg?v=1750799348"},{"product_id":"in-pursuit-of-equity-book-alice-kessler-harris-9780195038354","title":"In Pursuit of Equity","description":"Few historians have contributed more to our understanding of the history of women, and women's effect on history, than Alice Kessler-Harris. Author of the classic Out to Work, she is one of the country's leading scholars of gender, the economy, and public policy. In this volume, Kessler-Harris pierces the skin of arguments and legislation to grasp the preconceptions that have shaped the experience of women: a \"gendered imagination\" that has defined what men and women alike think of as fair and desirable. In this brilliant account that traces social policy from the New Deal to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs has distorted seemingly neutral social legislation to further limit the freedom and equality of women. Government rules generally sought to protect women from exploitation, even from employment itself; but at the same time, they attached the most important benefits to wage work. To be a real citizen, one must earn-and most policymakers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women were not, and should not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris traces the impact of this gender bias in the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and fair labor standards, in Federal income tax policy, and the new discussion of women's rights that emerged after World War II. \"For generations,\" she writes, \"American women lacked not merely the practice, but frequently the idea of individual economic freedom.\" Only in the 1960s and '70s did old assumptions begin to break down-yet the process is far from complete. Even today, with women closer to full economic citizenship than ever before, Kessler-Harris's insights offer a keen new understanding of the issues that dominate the headlines, from the marriage penalty in the tax code to the glass ceiling in corporate America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50978524430609,"sku":"CIN0195038355VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51454069506321,"sku":"CIN0195038355G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195038355.jpg?v=1750812160"},{"product_id":"woman-s-wage-book-alice-kessler-harris-9780813145136","title":"A Woman's Wage","description":"In this updated edition of a groundbreaking classic, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women's wages in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on three issues that capture the transformation of women's roles: the battle over minimum wage for women, which exposes the relationship between family ideology and workplace demands; the argument concerning equal pay for equal work, which challenges gendered patterns of self-esteem and social organization; and the debate over comparable worth, which seeks to incorporate traditionally female values into new work and family trajectories. Together, these topics illuminate the many ways in which gendered social meaning has been produced, transmitted, and challenged.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008229769489,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008232554769,"sku":"NIN9780813145136","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0813145139.jpg?v=1750882548"},{"product_id":"faith-of-a-woman-writer-book-alice-kessler-harris-9780313259562","title":"The Faith of a (Woman) Writer","description":"Reflecting the salient undercurrents of contemporary researh on women writers, this volume is an appraisal of the work of the writer as woman and presents critics' perceptions about how women writers have dealt with the complexity of changing female visions in the twentieth century. Each of the thirty-four essays, contributed by some of today's most distinguished writers, speaks to the work of a particular twentieth-century woman writer, and each constitutes a contribution to the scholarly debate. Questions are raised as to the appropriate posture a critic should adopt, and whether a critic of women's writing should deal with the work as the product of a woman's hand, dwelling on the sensibilities of the female consciousness, or assume that the proper point of departure remains the artistic and aesthetic norms that have emerged from generations of male-defined practice.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52485339873553,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52485341151505,"sku":"NLS9780313259562","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780313259562.jpg?v=1759857576"},{"product_id":"democracy-and-the-welfare-state-book-alice-kessler-harris-9780231180344","title":"Democracy and the Welfare State","description":"Though the two Wests, Europe and the United States, differ in crucial respects, they share a common history of social rights. In Democracy and the Welfare State, leading historians and social scientists rethink this history in light of global transformations of the economic order and the onslaught of neoliberalism and right-wing populism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52715464982801,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52715465310481,"sku":"NGR9780231180344","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780231180344.jpg?v=1762864906"},{"product_id":"women-have-always-worked-book-alice-kessler-harris-9780252083587","title":"Women Have Always Worked","description":"A classic since its original publication, Women Have Always Worked brought much-needed insight into the ways work has shaped female lives and sensibilities. Beginning in the colonial era, Alice Kessler-Harris looks at the public and private work spheres of diverse groups of women-housewives and trade unionists, immigrants and African Americans, professionals and menial laborers, and women from across the class spectrum. She delves into issues ranging from the gendered nature of the success ethic to the social activism and the meaning of citizenship for female wage workers. This second edition adds artwork and features significant updates. A new chapter by Kessler-Harris follows women into the early twenty-first century as they confront barriers of race, sex, and class to earn positions in the new information society.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52994873458961,"sku":"GOR013271498","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53668473078033,"sku":"CIN025208358XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780252083587.jpg?v=1767627728"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-alice-kessler-harris.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}