Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work

“As one of the few practitioners of comparative history, Green makes real contributions to both French and American history.” - Olivier Zunz , Journal of Modern History

“Equipped with an impressive scholarly apparatus, Ready-to-Wear is a readable history with a happy minimum of social science jargon. - Jonathan Frankel , Dissent

“Green has written a book that is both delightful and profound. Comparing the women’s ready-to-wear businesses of New York and Paris over the last century and a half, she tells the stories of the industry’s structural imperatives, organizational variants, changing workforce composition, workplace relationships, union struggles, and ethnic kaleidoscope in a beautifully integrated and engagingly written narrative.” - Christopher H. Johnson, American Historical Review

“Nancy Green’s magisterial view of the garment industry focuses upon two ties, each terribly conscious of the other. As different as New York City and Paris are, she yet finds similarities in the organization of needlework and the composition of the labor force.” - Journal of American Ethnic History

"Green's study is ambitious not only in its chronological and comparative breadth, but in analytical sophistication as well." - Jefferson Cowie , International Labor and Working-Class History

“Nancy Green consistently challenges the narratives and categories by which labor historians, sociologists, economists, and journalists have addressed the history of urban garment production. Green’s analysis is a tour de force.” - Donald Reid, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“This is a terrific, wide-ranging, and convincing comparative study. It provides the big picture, analyzing the garment industry and particularly ‘ready-to-wear’ from the point of view of economic, social, cultural, political, and gender history. Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work provides a much-needed synthesis which is all the bolder for the original research on which it is built.” - John Merriman, Yale University