'There shall be no sex in industry': Women and gender in the Knights of Labor of North America, 1878-1893

There Shall Be No Sex in Industry analyzes the role of women and gender in the Order of the Knights of Labor, the first male-led general labor union to organize female workers in North America. It examines the Knights' international structure as well as case studies in Toronto, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Women were initially barred from membership, but the union began organizing them in 1881. Women's power in the Order increased over the course of the 1880s, reached its height in 1886, and then declined at the end of the decade. Rather than following a gender-blind policy, the Knights attempted to encourage female participation in the union by treating women differently. They established a women's department and set aside specific leadership posts for women.;The Knights used gendered rhetoric to advance their cause. Initially they portrayed their union as masculine and its opponents as lacking masculinity, but as more women joined the organization they changed its ideology to place more emphasis on femininity. The Knights came to see themselves as upholding appropriate gender norms, both manhood and womanhood, while accusing employers and other opponents of violating gender norms. The Order came to advocate a version of women's rights based on gender essentialist assumptions. At the end of the 1880s the union endorsed "equal rights regardless of sex" but abolished the women's department and reduced women's power within the Order, using its rhetorical commitment to equal rights to mask its retreat from women's empowerment. Changes in the Order's gender ideology corresponded with changes in the role of women in the union.;This dissertation shows that women had agency in the labor movement, that a rhetorical commitment to equality may mask practices that are actually unequal, and that policies which appear gender-neutral may have the effect of increasing gender inequality. It also shows that even radical movements are influenced by the prevailing ideas of their time period and may internalize portions of the dominant ideology. However, even when subaltern groups internalize the dominant ideology they do not always do so wholesale but may modify that ideology to better suit their own needs.