Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History, specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender.

She received her B.A. from Goucher College in 1961 and her Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1968. Her published works include Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (1981), Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982), and A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990). She is co-editor of Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, Australia, and the United States, 1880-1920 (1995), and U.S. History as Women's History (1995). Her newest book, In Pursuit of Equity: How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship, has won several prizes, including the Joan Kelly, Phillip Taft and Bancroft Prizes. It explores how gendered ideas became embedded in such twentieth-century U.S. social policies as old age and unemployment insurance, and equal employment opportunity legislation.