With the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that mandated that no employer with fifteen or more employees could discriminate against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion, equality became the remedy for improving women's condition in the workplace. Katherine Turk's terrific book explores how the reliance on equality as a remedy worked out for the rest of the twentieth century. She begins with a wonderful analysis of female workers’ very specific and diverse expectations for the legislation and then tells this story through a series of chronological case studies highlighting different workplaces, workers, and issues, often provocatively challenging the standard chronology of US women's and labor/working-class history.

As a result of systemic and widespread unequal treatment, women at the New York Times formed a Women's Caucus; collected; organized; reached out to unions, professional associations, and allies within the organization; and, in 1974, filed a class-action suit on behalf of 545 women. A settlement days before the trial provided for affirmative action and transparent personnel policies for women in professional jobs. This was prescient as both employees (often in different positions in any given firm or company) and employers struggled to define what equality meant. Turk concludes that settlements like this “permitted employers to weather the rights revolution by reinforcing a strain of sex equality that privileged the male standard” (70–71).

The National Organization for Women (NOW) came into existence in response, in part, to an unresponsive Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the enforcement arm of the Act. By the early 1970s it was the most important feminist organization in the US, with chapters directly taking on workplace discrimination. The Chicago NOW set its sights on one of the biggest corporate retailers in the US, Sears Roebuck, Inc., with a multifront campaign – “picketing local stores, writing press releases, making contacts with Sears workers and shoppers, and encouraging employees to file discrimination charges” (91). The EEOC did focus on the Sears problems in the mid-1970s, but Turk argues that this effort waned, a liability of a shift of focus in NOW to a more centralized organization mobilized to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

In the 1980s, however, certain groups achieved real progress in the application of Title VII. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) began to use Title VII to argue for wage equality through an analysis of the comparable worth of jobs. This argument gained support from NOW and the EEOC headed by civil rights lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton. Despite rollbacks from this position when President Reagan's appointee, Clarence Thomas, took control of the EEOC, many groups continued to subscribe to comparable worth as a remedy for inequality at work.

Turk offers additional stories that demonstrated the complicated ways workers understood what equality meant for them. Hotel chambermaids in NYC wanted pay equal to the male workers who moved furniture, but did not want any substantial change in the definitions of their jobs. Male workers who wanted to break into traditionally female jobs, like nursing, used Title VII to argue for their rights. And LGBTQ workers claimed that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was sex discrimination and that they should be covered under Title VII.

These stories challenge us to rethink the 1980s as a “backlash” decade, but, by the 1990s, according to Turk, a limited application of Title VII had hardened. She claims that

She describes corporations’ efforts to protect the unborn children of women at work to the detriment of working-class women, the passage of a limited Family and Medical Leave Act in the early 1990s, and, despite the national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace after the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings, a general lack of unified action to combat the dangers women still encountered in the workplace.

Because equality is such a limited remedy, we need this book. The stories are fascinating, vivid, and satisfying. At points the case-study approach can appear disjointed but there is a unifying theme on the fleeting possibilities and limits to equality as a remedy to improve the lives of women at work.