1. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

2. Michael Kazin, “Daniel Bell and the Agony and Romance of the American Left,” introduction to Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 24.

3. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Harry Boyte, Backyard Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

4. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).

5. See John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Clarence Stone, “The Study of Politics in Urban Development,” in The Politics of Urban Development, ed. Clarence Stone and Heywood Sanders (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987).

6. See Paul Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

7. David Robertson and Dennis Judd, The Development of American Public Policy: The Structure of Policy Restraint (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1989), 9–14.

8. Roger Friedland, Frances Fox Piven, and Robert R. Alford, “Political Conflict, Urban Structure, and the Fiscal Crisis,” in Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, 2d ed., ed. William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

9. This is reflected in Hobsbawm's assertion that “we know of societies which have the same material base but widely varying ways of structuring their social relations, ideology, and other superstructural features.” Eric. R. Hobsbawm, “Marx and History,” New Left Review 143 (January–February 1984): 44, cited in Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1992), 83.

10. Katznelson, Marxism and the City, 208.

11. Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 21.

12. See the excellent review article by Aristide Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms?” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).

13. Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases,” 21.

14. Katznelson, Marxism and the City, 210.

15. James Vance, “Housing the Worker: The Employment Linkage in Urban Structure,” Economic Geography 42 (October 1966).

16. This refers to the Marxian class concept. The neighborhoods were classhomogeneous in Weberian class terms. See Katznelson, Marxism and the City, chapter 6, and City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

17. See Katznelson's discussion of studies of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Detroit, Marxism and the City, 273–74.

18. Katznelson, City Trenches, 19.

19. Ibid., 16.

20. Ibid., 42, 44.

21. Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation and the State: NineteenthCentury England in American Perspective,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

22. Katznelson, City Trenches, 58–67; Skowronek, Building a New American State, 272–73.

23. Katznelson, City Trenches, 51–52, 53.

24. Ibid., 63–64, 67.

25. Ibid., 6, 19.

26. David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 37.

27. See Katznelson, City Trenches, 20.

28. Katznelson, Marxism and the City, 213.

29. Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher, “Dimensions of American WorkingClass History,” in Life and Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class History, ed. Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 3.

30. Katznelson, City Trenches, 19.

31. Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases,” 13.

32. Katznelson, City Trenches, 196, 195.

33. Katznelson recommends that we “explore whether side by side with capitalism we may discover other large-scale social processes that have likewise had a fundamental impact in shaping the modern world. The main candidates for such a parallel status, deserving comparable theoretical treatment, are the development of coherent national states and the emergence of networks of relationships in civil society with a high degree of autonomy from both the economy and the state in the West since the sixteenth century.” Marxism and the City, 85.

34. This also represents a gradual move away from a unique reliance on Marxism. Earlier in City Trenches, Katznelson claimed that “the Weberian failure to treat the relationship of work and community is inherent in the limitations of the social theory, but… the Marxist shortcomings are not.” City Trenches, 200–201.

35. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 153–98.

36. Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases,” 17, 22, 21.

37. Katznelson, City Trenches, 209; Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases,” 29; Katznelson, “Social Justice, Liberalism, and the City,” 274.

38. Katznelson, City Trenches, 205.

39. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 103–4.

40. Katznelson, City Trenches, 18, 199.

41. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday Press, 1989).

42. Katznelson, Marxism and the City, 212.

43. Two points should be kept in mind here. Because I wish to problematize the apparent essential identity of workers, the term “worker” should be read within scare quotes, although I dispense with this convention for sake of convenience. Second, obviously I can do no more in the following discussion than to suggest a series of hypotheses and directions for further historical analysis, rather than a fully completed analysis.

44. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 6.

45. Sally Alexander, “Women, Class, and Sexual Difference,” History Workshop 17 (1984): 125–35.

46. Carolyn Daniel McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880–1917 (New York: Garland, 1985), 66.

47. Katznelson, City Trenches, 63–64.

48. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988); Heidi Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs 1 (1976): 168.

49. Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation and the State,” 264.

50. Katznelson has conceded the absence of gender relations in his and related work. But he argues (justifiably in my view) that to speak of the separation of work and home does not necessarily imply that domestic labor was either nonexistent or historically insignificant. The domestic sphere was both an integral part of the economic structure of capitalist cities and a realm set off from the newly emerging factories and autonomous workplaces. Yet the fact that many labor unions restricted women from their ranks and often fought for economic justice on the basis of a “family wage” is enough to demonstrate the salience of gender and the separation of workplace and home for workers themselves.

51. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 146, 159.

52. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 113.

53. Ibid., 51–52, 109, 112.

54. Ibid., 126.

55. Ibid., 124.

56. The advantage of drawing upon a psychoanalytical model of identity is that the gendered dimension of the subject is integral to it.

57. McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 12–13. See also Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

58. Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper & Row), 1973.

59. United Garment Workers, Proceedings of the Founding Convention (New York, 1891), 1; Jesse Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York (1905; New York: B. Franklin, 1970), 223–30; McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 46.

60. See John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), especially chapter 2.

61. United Garment Workers, Proceedings of the Founding Convention, 4–6.

62. McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 48; Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 236.

63. See, for example, McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 117–20, and Roger Waldinger, “Another Look at the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union: Women, Industry Structure, and Collective Action,” in Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

64. Harry Best, The Men's Garment Industry of New York and the Strike of1913 (New York: University Settlement Society Press, 1913), 9; Melvyn Dubofsky, When Workers Strike: New York City in the Progressive Era, 1910–1918 (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1968).

65. Roy Lubove, The Progressive and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962). “Like so many of her Progressive contemporaries, Robins could not conceive of personal fulfillment or self-realization except in terms of social efficacy and civic responsibility…. Protective legislation was to safeguard the role for women as mothers, for motherhood guaranteed social bonds and human connections.” Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Drier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 145; Stanley J. Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the1920's (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 145–47.

66. Christine Stansell, “The Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City,” in Working Class America, ed. Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 97. Yet in her analysis, Stansell oddly attributes no role to working-class men in keeping women “in the home.” If she had, she would have been forced also to reconceive class formation in a more fundamental and rigorous way. For she does not interrogate the identity “woman” that plays the central part in her story: it is assumed as a given.

67. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 51; Boydston, Home and Work, chapter 7.

68. Fania Cohn, Our Educational Work—A Survey, quoted in McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 228.

69. Ibid., McCreesh, Women in the Campaign, 197, 217.

70. See Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 153.

71. Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 224.

72. Nina Asher, “Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca: Women Clothing Workers and the Runaway Shops,” in A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike: Women Needle Workers

73. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 224.

74. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers did propose government-funded child care and antidiscrimination legislation against women at the workplace, notably during the “People's Platform” of 1944. See Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 509–10. But I am suggesting that these measures are not inconsistent with the defense of the gendered patterning of home/work, public/private.

75. As the founder and president of the WTUL remarked of Hillman, “We saw things alike especially in regard to the Labor Movement.” Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism, 193. See also May Wood Simons, “Cooperation and Housewives,” The Masses: Women's Issue, no. 1 (December 1911): “The larger part of the agitation, even in the socialist movement, among women have been directed at whom? Why, the girls in industry. Not the housekeepers.”

76. There is no judgment implied in this assessment as to the relative importance of these strategies, and it is not meant to suggest that this achievement was not an important accomplishment in itself.

77. See Mathew Edel, Elliot Sclar, and Daniel Luria, Shaky Palaces: Homeownership and Social Mobility in Boston's Suburbanization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), especially chapter 9. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 191. It is perhaps of interest for the argument here to quote William Green, president of the AFL, justifying the labor movement's orientation toward the household economy. “In former days, when each family unit was practically self-sufficient economically, the wife made as objective a contribution to the home as the husband. As changes have come in our social and industrial organization there have come protests against this division of responsibility that it narrowed women's sphere to the home and excluded her from work….As a fundamental principle American labor feels it is far wiser and of greater permanent value to strive to keep the wages of the head of the family adequate to maintain standards of living for the family than to sanction the practice of outside employment for the mother.” William Green, “The Husband's Wage,” The Survey, February 15, 1927, 280; also, Martha May, “Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family,” in Milkman, ed., Women, Work, and Protest.

78. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 1.

79. See Jane Addams, “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers (Boston: Thomas Crowell & Co., 1895).

80. See “Feminists Design a New Type Home,” New York Times, April 5, 1914; “Feminists Debate Plans for a House,” New York Times, April 22, 1914, 12. See also May Walden Kerr, Socialism and the Home (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1901).

81. Cited in Gail Eileen Radford, “Modern Community Housing: New Responses to the Shelter Problem in the 1920s and 1930s” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1989), 118. The quotation is from William James, a contemporary of the Philadelphia Co-ops. The architect of the Carl Mackley Houses, Oscar Stonorov, a socialist from Vienna, drew on the municipal experiments of that

82. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 3.

83. Mary Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism: 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 292.

84. “Consumptionism…is the greatest idea that America has given to the world: the idea that workmen and the masses be looked upon not simply as workers or producers, but as consumers.” Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer (New York: The Business Bourse, 1929), 4–5. Frederick and Lillian Gilbreth were perhaps the key ideologues of the antifeminist, proconsumer suburban home movement. See, for example, Lillian Gilbreth, Management in the Home (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1959).

85. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 223.

86. Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, trans. David Fernbach (London: New Left Books, 1979), 155–69. See also essays in Mickey Lauria, ed., Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Politics in a Global Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).

87. It is symptomatic of the continuing marginalization of gender, race, or other bases of social identity by the labor movement that one of the most critical treatments of postwar unionism relegates the question of “other” identities into chapters entitled “Other Social Movements in the U.S. Working Class” and “Other Voices.” See Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988). What this overlooks is precisely the way in which these other identities are constitutive of the identity “working class.” An important development has been the rise of public-sector unions since the 1970s that have tried to fuse the feminist, civil rights, minority rights, and labor movements. See Deborah E. Bell, “Unionized Women in State and Local Government,” in Milkman, ed., Women, Work, and Protest.

88. See Katznelson's discussion of Gutman and Greenstone in City Trenches, 11.

89. Edel, Sclar, and Luria, Shaky Palaces, chapter 9.

90. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911), apparently derives the term “androcentric” from Lester F. Ward's Pure Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1903), which contrasts it with “Gynaecocentric Theory.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (1989), also cites Ward's as the first usage.

91. On the late-nineteenth-century European linkage of femininity, city spaces, and consumption, see Gillian Swanson, “Drunk with the Glitter: Consuming Spaces and Sexual Geographies,” in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995).

92. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 120.

93. Katznelson, City Trenches, 19.

94. The term “Other” in Lacan's work, in distinction from the common term “other,” refers to the symbolic order of language—or more broadly, of culture— within which individuals come to acquire an identity. The symbolic order is constituted

95. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, chapter 3; Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), chapter 1; Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London, Verso, 1993), chapter 6; Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations (London: Verso, 1996), 56–60.

96. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 178.

97. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 172: “The radical heteronomy that Freud's discovery shows gaping within man can never again be covered over.”

98. Laclau, New Reflections, 61–67.

99. Ibid., 38, 36.

100. See Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyers, 1978).

101. Katznelson's charge in Marxism and the City (303) that Laclau and Mouffe have dissolved the tension between structure and agency is half right. I agree that the latter have not developed an adequate explanation of the large-scale processes that they acknowledge as the source of dislocations of the modern period (that is, commodification and bureaucratization; see, for example, Laclau, New Reflections, 51, 53). Because of this, I have sought to supplement their work with systems theory. But, pace Katznelson, their inadequacy in this area is not because they dissolve the tension between structure and agency into discourse theory. On the contrary, I hope I succeeded in showing why Laclau's approach is helpful in grasping the tensions between structure and agency as internal to the failed objectivity of each, rather than as two independent orders ranged against each other.

102. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier, 1961), 298.

103. I leave to another occasion the question of how compatible this approach is with my use of deconstruction and Lacanian notions of alterity and overdetermination.