This article explores the relationship between legislated wage floors and the more elusive concept of a living wage. Wages are one way that society has signaled gender and racial identity and constitute an important social practice for shaping gender relations. In the debates over passage of the...

We examine two key US labor market policies: state-level minimum wages for women from 1912-23 and the federal minimum wage established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Each of these regulations implicitly defined which groups were and were not expected to conform to the hegemonic male...