About:

Alice Kessler-Harris is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University where she is also Professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and twentieth century social policy. Her books include In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001), which won the Bancroft, Taft, Joan Kelly and Herbert Hoover prizes; Gendering Labor History (2007), which contains her essays on women, work and social policy, and A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990). She is perhaps best known for the now classic, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982, 2001). She is co-editor, among other books of Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, Australia, and the United States, 1880-1920 (1995), and of Democracy and Social Rights in the ‘Two Wests’—which explores the impact of expanding citizenship rights in Western Europe and the U.S. Her most recent book is A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012). Kessler-Harris is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.