With a focus on the histories of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tax shows how working-class socialist women navigated the terrain between the seemingly oppositional demands for suffrage and labour rights. The Rising of the Women also contains detailed case studies of two germinal moments in American labour history: the uprising of shirtwaist workers in New York City in 1909 - 1910, the real beginning of the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union; and the 1912 IWW strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., making it an essential text for students of American labor history as well as readers interested in twentieth-century feminism.
First published in 1980, the book is reissued by Verso as part of the highly successful Feminist Classics series, where it takes its place alongside texts by Sheila Rowbotham, Kathi Weeks, Stella Dadzie, Lynne Segal and more. The result of years of archival research, Tax blends original source material from the participants of the movements with her own sharp analysis into a rich narrative of women workers' struggle. The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history whose time has come to find the wide audience it deserves.