""An eye-opening recounting of how little legal protection women had in the workplace just 40 years ago."" - New York Post

""An important and powerful acknowledgment of what tradeswomen have accomplished."" - Women's Review of Books

""Jane LaTour's Sisters in the Brotherhoods, is a conscientiously researched oral history of the first women who organized for gender equality in New York City unions. What's startling about the book is the freshness of its narratives: the women remember everything that happened to them. They remember it like it was yesterday. LaTour's urgent voice breathes color into the old days of all-male and nearly-all-white telephone companies and fire departments. LaTour, who describes her process of writing the book as ""quilting,""embroiders the events (legal actions, organizing drives, intra-union battles) that surrounded the women's apprenticeships with the words of the women themselves. LaTour is a documentarian who uses her own voice in service of rendering the invisible visible."" - Booklsut

""Latour's documentation of the experiences of these forerunners in notational, blue-collar jobs is a testament to their legacy to the young women of the next and future generations ... enlightening and empowering."" - Feminist Review""Sisters in the Brotherhoods is an engaging read for anyone interested in both the historical background and the present status of women's work in traditionally male jobs."" - Labor Studies Journal

""By presenting these stories within the context of labor history, Jane LaTour goes far in dispelling misunderstandings of blue-collar women's engagement with the Second Wave Feminist movement. Sisters in the Brotherhoods adds important voices to labor history, New York history, and the history of the feminist movements."" - Oral History Review

""Jane LaTour documents the stories of courageous women who persevered, despite all odds, in some of the most hostile work environments imaginable."" - New Labor Forum

""Jane LaTour skillfully weaves together the stories of New York women pioneer electricians, fire fighters, police officers, truck drivers and iron workers. In this book you'll meet the brave pioneers who had the gumption to break the barriers, often facing heart-breaking contempt, in other cases, earning an uneasy peace and acceptance as their pioneering efforts opened the door."" - Grand Prairie Union News

""Compelling."" - Oral History Forum d'histoire orale

""Injects the suspense of a thriller into a portrait of women breaking into blue-collar jobs ... LaTour shatters tradeswomen's invisibility by providing in-depth portraits of the vast range of women who challenged exclusionary practices."" - Working USA

""Sisters in the Brotherhoods is a gem of a book. With it, LaTour has given us important documentation of an inspiring piece of history that is too little known."" - Z Magazine

""A reminder of how much has changed, and how much hasn't."" - World Wide Work

""Sisters in the Brotherhoods is one of the most exciting books that I've read in years. It is nothing less than a history of the late twentieth century movement of women into non-traditional jobs as recalled by and through the voices of the women who opened the doors. Jane Latour seamlessly melds the aspirations, experiences, doubts and achievements of the courageous women who earned their livings in trades reserved for men into a persuasive analysis of generational change. Every young woman should read this resonant and moving book."" - Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America

""Jane LaTour's book Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City is a great reminder that when we have equal opportunities in every line of work we thrive. When women change the way work is done, they make lasting change in the culture of the workplace."" - Billie Jean King

""Jane LaTour tells the history of the tradeswomen movement by focusing on events in New York City. She captures the real lives of tradeswomen through stories that are poignant, raw, and uplifting.It brought back to me the frustration of trying to engage the Women's Movement in seeing tradeswomen as more than role models for our daughters.In our sex-segregated economy tradeswomen are on the front line in the battle for economic justice."" - Dale McCormick, the first woman to complete the carpentry apprenticeship with the International Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, Local 1260 in Iowa City, in 1975

""In Sisters in the Brotherhoods, Jane LaTour draws on extensive interviews and oral histories with women who broke into the building trades in New York City over the last several decades.The interviews are enormously rich sources, filled with stunning stories of male resistance, abuse, and hostility toward the integration of women and equally stirring tales of women's determination to survive this treatment.Even as they were subjected to various hair-raising and harrowing forms of harassment and intimidation, the women whose oral histories form the heart of this compelling and moving book sought to challenge and reform the system.Reform could be incredibly hard and scary work; it took one woman fourteen years to find the courage to speak at her own local.But they did speak out and by their individual and collective efforts, they organized women and sympathetic men and empowered them to fight for their rights.Sisters in the Brotherhoods illuminates an aspect of women's and labor history that has been understudied and overlooked.In the women's challenge to existing union arrangements and their own deployment of labor movement principles and practices to achieve their ends lies a fundamental contradiction of post-World War II labor history.Jane LaTour's book compels a reassessment and revision of the view of post-World War II unions as inimical to working women's interests and as vehicles for conservatism rather than progressive change."" - Nancy Gabin, Department of History, Purdue University

""Sisters in the Brotherhoods profiles the indomitable women who fought their way into some of the best-defended male monopolies in the U.S. labor force: the skilled trades of New York City. Jane Latour's engaging oral histories reveal the diverse routes women traveled to claim these jobs, the alliances that sustained them, and the strategies they developed to master their crafts in the face of employer hostility, co-worker harassment, union corruption, and a government that all but abandoned them in the 1980s. Tradeswomen, feminists, labor and civil rights activists, h