A Lifetime of Labor: The Autobiography of Alice H. Cook

The work of the indefatigable Alice Hanson Cook has benefitted the lives of working people—and especially working women—on four continents. Her pioneering work in union organizing, worker education, and equal rights for working women took her across the country and around the world, across racial, ethnic, national, and class lines, and across boundries she refused to accept as impassable.

In A Lifetime of Labor, Cook recounts a remarkable life that spans a century and intersects with progressive movements at home and abroad. Booklist calls A Lifetime of Labor “the autobiography of an enduring and persistent activist. Appropriately, the book closes with Cook’s ‘Agenda for Change,’ which calls for a ‘new definition of equality’ to recognize the needs and rights of women and men in their roles as both parents and workers. At age 94, Alice Cook was still fighting the good fight.”

Alice H. Cook (1903-1998) was a professor in the New York State College of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and a member of the executive board of Cornell's Women's Studies Program. Her books include The Most Difficult Revolution: Women and Trade Unions and The Working Mother: A Survey of Problems and Progress in Nine Countries.