The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls' Clubs, 1884-1928.

By Priscilla Murolo (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xiv plus 227pp. $14.95/paperback).

Priscilla Murolo contributes her careful examination of the Association of Working Girls' Societies and its successor organization the National League of Women Workers to the growing body of literature on women's cross-class alliances. This book examines the forty-four year history of clubs that united working-class women - factory workers, department store workers, dressmakers, milliners, office clerks, and teachers - and genteel women in class-bridging alliances. The first part of the book, centered on the Association of Working Girls' Societies, analyzes how working class women and genteel women created a same-sex alliance grounded in mutual respect and shared gender identity. The second part of the book, based on the National League of Women Workers, suggests ways in which class structures undermined this gender-based alliance. Working girls' clubs provide Murolo with the opportunity "to problematize sexual sameness" by analyzing how women united by gender difference created a cross-class sisterhood and how class structures gradually destroyed that alliance.

Murolo's study gives a strong voice to working-class women who engaged in the cross-class discourse with genteel women. In comparison with other turn-of-the-century class-bridging organizations - settlement houses, the federation of women's clubs, and the YWCA - working girls' clubs gave greater autonomy to working-class women by organizing members on "the basis of cooperation, self-government, and self-support." This greater equality challenged both the working women and their genteel sponsors to negotiate mutually acceptable positions. Using club minutes, convention proceedings, organizational publications, and government reports, Murolo demonstrates how working-class women and genteel women reconciled different class interpretations of current issues including: True Womanhood, women's rights, women's wage-work, mixed-sex recreation, and organized labor.

Like Kathy Peiss's, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn. of the-Century New York (1986), Murolo's study broadens the understanding of working-class women by exploring their social activities outside the workplace. Murolo demonstrates that working girls' clubs provided an arena where working-class women could increase genteel sponsors' empathy for working-class life and concomitantly assert new independent social authority. For example, working-class women capitalized on genteel women's interest in imposing middle-class standards on social behavior by promoting chaperoned mixed-sex recreations at clubs as an opportunity for "the training of our future men." These invitation-only mixed-sex socials not only allowed working-class women to mitigate sponsors' fears about working-class sexual morality but also regulated working-class men's social behavior.

Although clubs united genteel women and working-class women in a cooperative alliance, Murolo argues that each group maintained a separate class-based perspective. Murolo suggests that genteel women established clubs to indoctrinate working-class women into the ideals of True Womanhood while working-class women joined clubs to identify themselves as respectable women and wage-earners. Clubs' organizational hierarchy replicated class structures with genteel women sponsors serving as club officers and working-class women participating as members. However, working-class women were not passive recipients of the sponsors' largess; from the beginning working-class women asserted their pride of ownership and independence as wage earners by renting club offices and paying monthly dues. Initially, close personal contact and social interactions strengthened mutual respect. Later, when club sponsors separated themselves from members, the organizations faltered.

Murolo does an excellent job of analyzing how clubs evolved from support for government regulation of labor to the endorsement of organized labor. Working girls' clubs frequently sprang up in mill towns and cities of the Northeastern and Midwest that had been strongholds for the Knights of Labor. Murolo suggests that the influence of the Knights can be seen in the clubs' support for equal pay, belief in legislation to improve labor conditions, reluctance to strike, and confidence in educating employers to improve working conditions. She deconstructs club records to establish how members and sponsors eventually came to endorse the American Federation of Labor.

Murolo contends that when working girls' clubs began to replicate the contemporary class structures in organizational hierarchies they doomed the movement to failure. In an 1897 attempt to reverse a decline in membership, the Association of Working Girls' Societies established the National League of Working Women (NLWW). Genteel women in the NLWW adopted daytime executive meetings that separated sponsors from working-class members and re-enforced the existing class structures. Genteel women reversed the earlier democratizing trend of including members in decision making by isolating the organizational leadership. The NLWW board increasingly allied itself with employers by adopting scientific methods of reform that imposed top down solutions for social issues. Eventually, the NLWW abandoned its support for organized labor and shifted its focus to vocational education. This change in organizational strategy eroded the girls' club movement.

Although Murolo argues for "broader visions of the social terrain where workers' class and gender consciousness takes shape," she misses the opportunity to extend her analysis by contextualizing the ethnic and urban influences on club formation. Murolo offers an insightful analysis of the racial distinctions that white club members constructed to identify themselves as "American Girls" and to exclude African-Americans from clubs. However, the ethnic tensions among the native born, Irish, German, and Northern Europeans members are largely absent from her story. The conflicts created by religious differences among Jewish, Catholic, and Protestants club members also merit further attention. In addition, the effects of competing sources of commercialized urban leisure that vied for working-class women's free time - dance halls, nickelodeons, amusement parks - remain unexplored.

These criticisms aside, Murolo's study of working girls' clubs documents an important example of working-class women's agency outside the workplace. Murolo writes a well-researched and penetrating study that achieves her goal of integrating women's history and labor history. This study is of interest to those who seek an insightful analysis of the complex dynamic between gender and class.

Loretta Sullivan Lobes

Carnegie Mellon University