A Matter of Moral Justice

Jenny Carson is an associate professor of history at Ryerson University.

CoverTitle PageCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1. "We Win a Place in Industry": Black Women and the Birth of the Power Laundry IndustryChapter 2. A Miniature Hell: Working in a Power LaundryChapter 3. The 1912 Uprising of New York City's Laundry WorkersChapter 4. The Rise and Fall of Local 284: Black Women Laundry Workers' Activism in the Era of theChapter 5. "It Was Up to All of Us to Fight": Communist Laundry Organizing during the Great DepressChapter 6. Aristocrats of the Movement: The Uprising of Brooklyn's Laundry WorkersChapter 7. "It Was Like the Salvation": New York City's Laundry Workers Join the CIOChapter 8. The "Democratic Initiative": Fighting for Control of the Laundry Workers Joint BoardChapter 9. "Putting Democracy into Action": The Laundry Workers' Double V CampaignChapter 10. "Everybody's Libber": The Laundry Workers' Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar EraChapter 11. "We're Just Not Ready Yet": The Ousting of Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson fromEpilogue: Building a Democratic Initiative in the Twenty-First CenturyNotesIndexBack cover

"Even progressive organizations like the ACWA actively participated in the reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies within labour markets and within their own organizations. It is a sobering finding, albeit one tempered in Carson's account by extraordinary heroism of the laundry workers themselves." --Labour "Grounded in recent scholarship, A Matter of Moral Justice combines structural analysis of the industry with deft mini-biographies and astute assessments of industrial feminism, left organizations, and the CIO itself." --Labor: Studies in Working-Class History "An engaging book on a workforce that has received surprisingly little attention from labor historians. Carson provides a highly readable analysis of how racialized and gendered were job assignments, union organizing campaigns, and labor politics."--Dennis Deslippe, author of Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution