Civilizing Capitalism: the National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era.

By Landon R. Y. Storrs. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xvi], 392. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4838-7; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2527-1.)

As little scholarly work has been done on the National Consumers' League (NCL) after the Progressive era, this book is a welcome contribution. Storrs's stated major aim is to demonstrate how the NCL's "entering wedge" strategy in the South during the 1930s "transformed wage-hour regulation ... from a state-level policy that affected women alone to a national policy extending to men and women alike" (p. 4). She examines how the NCL (which was led by Virginian Lucy Mason, who succeeded Florence Kelley in 1932) sought to secure regulatory benefits for southern female workers, whom it believed were among the most exploited of workers, while simultaneously working with the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to promote broad support for extending these benefits to all workers. Storrs demonstrates how this strategy ultimately led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. State campaigns had limited success, and even the weak and often-unenforced NRA gender-neutral codes were overturned. But, according to Storrs, by 1937 the NCL had generated enough public participation in labor regulation--a specific aim of the NCL since its inception--to embolden Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to revive an old federal wage and hour proposal. NCL agitation under new leader Mary Dublin, supported by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was crucial to passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Though weaker and covering fewer workers than the NCL had wanted, these women counted it as a real victory toward safeguarding the health of all workers, thereby "civilizing capitalism."

Storrs uses an impressive array of archival materials from the national and local leagues and their leaders, the Department of Labor and its Women's Bureau, unions, and the National Recovery Administration. The book is persuasive on several fundamental points. Storrs clearly demonstrates the importance of the NCL for instituting fair labor standards. She also shows that NCL strategy intended not merely to protect women workers, but to use the power of public participation to work from the particular to the general in order to secure a social justice agenda rooted in women's activism from the Progressive era. This strategy conflicted with the equal rights strategy of the National Woman's Party (NWP), as well as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) approach that preferred collective bargaining to government regulation and balked at organizing women; and it earned only moderate support from the leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The book's main flaw is a scattershot approach to its objective. It concentrates on the 1930s southern strategy yet tries to be a history of the NCL; it uses the NWP as a conservative foil to the progressive NCL but does not sufficiently consider the NWP position to prove the contrast; it contrasts the social justice and "entering wedge" strategies to the union-building strategy but without adequately exploring either their distinctions or gender dimensions. Nonetheless, there is much to learn and contemplate in this book. Storrs presents strong evidence for appreciating the NCL's wage and hour strategy as an alternative vision for resolving capitalism's worst aspects and for contradicting the flattening out of political differences among middle-class women in the cause of class interpretations.

MAUREEN A. FLANAGAN
Michigan State University