Sarah Boston recounts the story of women workers from the early nineteenth century to the present day: the struggles and strikes, successes and failures in their strenuous efforts to organise and win recognition from employers and male trade unionists. Women Workers and the Trade Unions - now republished with the addition of two new chapters covering the period from 1987 to 2010 - is the only comprehensive account of this neglected overlap of women's history and labour history. Sarah Boston argues that male trade unionists' exclusionary treatment of women workers contradicted not only the socialist aims of most trade unions but also the very logic of trade unionism itself. The account is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of industrial relations, but also with the history of feminism and of women in the workplace. --

This study focuses on working-class women, catering and cleaning workers, and the way their interests were presented in trade unions. It argues that there is an institutional bias within trade unions which precludes the full representation of women's interests. Based on empirical research into two trade unions in the National Health Service, the book stresses the importance of how women's work is structured, in order to investigate the role of trade unions in challenging or reproducing inequalities.

First published in 1999, this volume aims to examine the extent to which such a partnership has been developed between women workers and trade unions, with a comparative emphasis. Jennifer Curtin analyses how women trade unionists have sought to make trade union structures and policy agendas more inclusive of the interests of women workers in four countries: Australia, Austria, Israel and Sweden.

The book examines the history of women's labor organization and the relationship of working-class women to the campaign for woman suffrage.