Across this four-session interview, Alice Kessler-Harris discusses her research and early career which emerged from the women's movement of the 1970s. Kessler-Harris discusses her role as a lead witness in the 1986 case brought against Sears, Roebuck and Company for gender discrimination, and her related 1990 publication A Woman's Wage. Kessler-Harris talks about the beginnings of her academic career, including her experiences teaching at Rutgers University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Hofstra University. She also discusses the guidance she received from Rutgers historian Warren Sussman and her work with District 65 of the United Automobile Workers union before accepting a position at Columbia University. Kessler-Harris discusses the introduction of gender as a category of analysis in the 1990s and, upon her arrival at Columbia, the transition within the women's studies department from activist scholarship to public intellectualism, and the increasingly post-structural, theoretical direction of women's studies. Additionally, Kessler-Harris describes what she sees as a decline in student activism while also acknowledging the role of students in helping her create safe spaces for transgender students. Furthermore, Kessler-Harris discusses her program "Social Justice After the Welfare State" at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and the role of intersectionality in the future of IRWGS.

This outstanding collection of fifteen original essays represents innovative work by some of the most influential scholars in the field of women's history. Covering a broad sweep of history from colonial to contemporary times and ranging over the fields of legal, social, political, and cultural history, this book, according to its editors, 'intrudes into regions of the American historical narrative from which women have been excluded or in which gender relations were not thought to play a part.' The book is dedicated to pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner, whose work inspired so many of the contributors, and it includes a bibliography of her works. The contributors include: Linda K. Kerber on women and the obligations of citizenship Kathryn Kish Sklar on two political cultures in the Progressive Era Linda Gordon on women, maternalism, and welfare in the twentieth century Alice Kessler-Harris on the Social Security Amendments of 1939 Nancy F. Cott on marriage and the public order in the late nineteenth century Nell Irvin Painter on 'soul murder' as a legacy of slavery Judith Walzer Leavitt on Typhoid Mary and early twentieth-century public health Estelle B. Freedman on women's institutions and the career of Miriam Van Waters William H. Chafe on how the personal translates into the political in the careers of Eleanor Roosevelt and Allard Lowenstein Jane Sherron De Hart on women, politics, and power in the contemporary United States Barbara Sicherman on reading Little Women Joyce Antler on the Emma Lazarus Federation's efforts to promulgate women's history Amy Swerdlow on Left-feminist peace politics in the cold war Ruth Rosen on the origins of contemporary American feminism among daughters of the fifties Darlene Clark Hine on the making of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia