2024/01/26 by Rachel Rosenberg
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #Labor Movements and Unions #Race, History, and American Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/heq.2023.49
openalex publication_date 2024/01/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Abstract This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for “equal pay for equal work” in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT’s success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were of a group of women teachers, organizing before woman’s suffrage and in an era of sex-differentiated work and pay, who convinced the city’s public and state’s legislators that they deserved pay equal to what men teachers received. They did so by strategic maneuvering in city and state politics and making equal pay look reasonable. And they did so by narrowly defining their goals and leaning on their identities as women to push a theoretically sex-neutral claim of justice. Their success, though limited, was nonetheless a victory in shifting ideas about women’s societal and professional status in New York City and the state.