Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace

What defines workplace equality? In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act placed this question at the forefront of American politics. Equality on Trial examines how a generation of workers and feminists fought to infuse broad notions of sex equality into civil rights law. Their contests to fix the meaning of sex equality ultimately laid the legal and cultural foundation for the neoliberal work regimes that enabled some women to break the glass ceiling as employers lowered the floor for everyone else.

Katherine Turk is an Assistant Professor of History and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Turk received her undergraduate degree at Northwestern University and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2011. Her essays have appeared in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of theAmericas (2014), the Law and History Review (2013), the Journalof American History (2010), and elsewhere.

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center. It meets weekly during the academic year. See www.nationalhistorycenter.org for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.