Author: Nancy Woloch A Class by Herself explores the historical role and influence of protective legislation for American women workers, both as a step toward modern labor standards and as a barrier to equal rights. Spanning the twentieth century, the book tracks the rise and fall of women-only state protective lawssuch as maximum hour laws, minimum wage laws, and night work lawsfrom their roots in progressive reform through the passage of New Deal labor law to the feminist attack on single-sex protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s. Nancy Woloch considers the network of institutions that promoted women-only protective laws, such as the National Consumers' League and the federal Women's Bureau; the global context in which the laws arose; the challenges that proponents faced; the rationales they espoused; the opposition that evolved; the impact of protective laws in ever-changing circumstances; and their dismantling in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Above all, Woloch examines the constitutional conversation that the laws provokedthe debates that arose in the courts and in the women's movement. Protective laws set precedents that led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to current labor law; they also sustained a tradition of gendered law that abridged citizenship and impeded equality for much of the century. Drawing on decades of scholarship, institutional and legal records, and personal accounts, A Class by Herself sets forth a new narrative about the tensions inherent in women-only protective labor laws and their consequences.

Author: Fred E. Witzig When Alexander Garden, a Scottish minister of the Church of England, arrived in South Carolina in 1720, he found a colony smoldering from the devastation of the Yamasee War and still suffering from economic upheaval, political factionalism, and rampant disease. It was also a colony turning enthusiastically toward plantation agriculture, made possible by African slave labor. In Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina, the first published biography of Garden, Fred E. Witzig paints a vivid portrait of the religious leader and the South Carolina colony he helped shape. Shortly after his arrival, Garden, a representative of the bishop of London, became the rector of St. Philips Church in Charleston, the first Anglican parish in the colony. The ambitious clergyman quickly married into a Charleston slave-trading family and allied himself with the political and social elite. From the pulpit Garden reinforced the social norms and economic demands of the southern planters and merchants, and he disciplined recalcitrant missionaries who dared challenge the prevailing social order. As a way of defending the morality of southern slaveholders, he found himself having to establish the first large-scale school for slaves in Charles Town in the 1740s. Garden also led a spiritedand largely successfulresistance to the Great Awakening evangelical movement championed by the revivalist minister George Whitefield, whose message of personal salvation and a more democratic Christianity was anathema to the social fabric of the slaveholding South, which continually feared a slave rebellion. As a minister Garden helped make slavery morally defensible in the eyes of his peers, giving the appearance that the spiritual obligations of his slaveholding and slave-trading friends were met as they all became extraordinarily wealthy.Witzigs lively cultural historybolstered by numerous primary sources, maps, and illustrationshelps illuminate both the roots of the Old South and the Church of Englands role in sanctifying slavery in South Carolina.