Research files of Jon Weiner relating to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, Roebuck and Company.

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Research files of Jon Weiner relating to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, Roebuck and Company.

The documents in this collection are the research files of Jon Weiner, who wrote The Nation article "Women's History on Trial", September 7, 1985. Aside from a few press clippings 1984-86, all the documents in this collection are legal records of the EEOC v. Sears case from 1985-1986, when the controversy between historians Rosalind Rosenberg and Alice Kessler-Harris came to the fore of the trial. Included in the collection are trial transcripts, depositions, briefs, and Judge Norberg's opinion and order as well as Sears' extensive billing for the costs of the case. These records constitute only one linear foot and so are arranged in the approximate chronological order as they were received from the donor, Jon Weiner. The collection is remarkable not only for its documentation of the court proceedings on this landmark case, but also for the expert testimonies of the two historian witnesses. Each provides a valuable historical discussion on the nature of women's work and employment opportunity, and each is carefully argued and thoroughly documented. This collection is important for researchers in the history of equal employment opportunity as well as for more general readers of women's history. The Rosenberg/Kessler-Harris debate constitutes a significant delineation of theories on working women, and reviews the history of women's work in the USA. It probes patterns of corporate sex bias as well as legitimate corporate programs for equal opportunity. Finally, because the historians' opposition generated such a lively controversy within the discipline, there is some basic material here on the uses of historical research in public policy.

1 linear foot.

Information

SNAC Resource ID: 7584030

Churchill County Museum

Related Entities

There are 5 Entities related to this resource.

Sears, Roebuck and Company

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6mt4j4m (corporateBody)

Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in 1892, and reincorporated by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald in 1906. Formerly based at the Sears Tower in Chicago and currently headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, the operation began as a mail ordering catalog company and began opening retail locations in 1925. The first location was in Chicago, Illinois. In 2005, the...

Rosenberg, Rosalind, 1946-

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6b0209q (person)

A professor of history at Barnard College, Rosalind Rosenberg was an expert witness in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's lawsuit against Sears, Roebuck and Company. The EEOC charged Sears with sex discrimination, claiming that women were underrepresented in high-paying commission sales jobs, and that there were disparate salary rates for men and women in certain managerial and administrative positions. Sears maintained that the government's statistics did not prove discrimination, an...

United States. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6qp0sxv (corporateBody)

Weiner, Jonathan.

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w69w0xn8 (person)

In 1979 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed an antidiscrimination action against Sears, Roebuck and Company. The complaint covered patterns of sex discrimination between 1973 and 1980. It was the last of the major corporate sex bias cases to be litigated by the Commission, and the only one not to be settled out of court. Central to Sears' arguments was the expert testimony of Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at Barnard College, and a writer in wom...

Kessler-Harris, Alice

http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w6zs5rsr (person)