Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea

"Anyone interested in discovering why the sweatshop is still with us and why it still holds an important place in our nation’s discourse will do well to read this book."—Richard A. Greenwald, coeditor of Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Global and Historical Perspective

"Adding a critical new perspective to existing political, social, and economic histories, Laura Hapke has crafted a book on the sweatshops of our imagination. Hers is an important project precisely because this particular space for the production of goods carries extensive symbolic and political weight."—Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

"A wholly unique, compelling, and marvelous survey. Laura Hapke once again astonishes the reader with her salutary blend of historically based interdisciplinary scholarship and wide-ranging references that treat ideology, gender, and ethnicity with appropriate clarity and sophistication."—Alan Wald, author of Exiles from a Future Time

"A scholar of the sweatshop, Laura Hapke expands the boundaries of cultural studies while never losing sight of the worker behind the machine."—Janet Zandy, author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work

Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the forms, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told.

Drawing on sources including antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop Web sites, Hapke illustrates how the sweatshop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives.

An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.