Homework clarifies the past and present of home-based labor using case studies which offer a rich portrait of homework. The authors recognize that we must examine the influence of gender, race, and class to fully comprehend the history of homework -- taken from back cover.
In the minds of most people, the home has stood apart from the world of work. By bringing the factory or office home, homework challenges this division. Home to Work restores the voices of homeworking women to the century-long debate over their labour. It provides a historical context to the Reaganite lifting of New Deal bans. Where once men's right to contract inhibited regulation, now women's right to employment undermined prohibition. Economic and political justice, whether based on rights to homework or rights as workers, will depend on homeworkers becoming visible as workers who happen to mother.
Feminists have recently begun to challenge the powerful influence of the law on the social and cultural construction of women’s roles, identities, and rights. At the Boundaries of Law is a timely and path-breaking work that provides a series of non-technical, interdisciplinary explorations into the nature and effects of legal regulation on women’s lives. Together the essays examine the fertile – and radically revisionary – links between feminism and legal theory. But At the Boundaries of Law rejects the abstract ‘grand theorizing’ of traditional feminist legal theory, focusing instead on the concrete and material implications of the legal injustices endured by women. These essays emphasise the complex diversity of female experience, collectively arguing for legal theory and practice that both recognises and accommodates the concept of ‘difference’ – in gender, class, race and sexual orientation. At the Boundaries of Law also raises provocative questions about the methodology and future of feminist legal theory itself. In its rich variety of issues and approaches, this volume will command the interest not only of legal theorists, but of those interested in women’s studies, philosophy, politics, sociology and history. It is sure to set the future agenda for scholars, policymakers and anyone concerned with the role of law in society.