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Working-Class Women: On the Front Lines of Feminism
When we think of 20th
century U.S. women’s movements, the events that come to mind are the feminist
battles of the 1960s and before that, the suffragettes of the early 20th
century.
But in between those two
eras, working women were not silent. And many of the women in the 1940s and
1950s who agitated for fair pay, equal access to jobs and other fundamental
workplace rights not only laid the groundwork for the gains of the recent
years, they did so from a strong foundation: Their unions.
These women, largely
forgotten in popular memory, were instrumental in maintaining the drumbeat for
a workplace environment that benefited women and men, and set
the stage for the successes that followed.
Although active on the
picket lines and on the forefront of organizing workers in industries with some
of the most vicious employers in areas hostile to unions such as the South and
West, their efforts have not captured popular imagination as have events such
as the “Bread and Roses” strike. In that 1912 walkout, 30,000 primarily female
textile workers protested a cut in wages in Lawrence, Mass., were attacked by
state militia that sought to prevent them sending their children out of state
to safety.
But as steadfast champions
of low-wage women, they were the critical link between women in the Progressive
era and the modern day women’s movement. Betty Friedan, the ultimate modern-day
champion of women who died earlier this year, was among those inspired by their
struggles on the picket lines and in the political process.
In the late 1940s, after
working for The Federated Press, a news association for labor and progressives,
Friedan became a reporter for the United Electrical Workers (UE, a union that
exists today). It was while covering a strike at a New Jersey plant, where
nearly all the workers were women, that Friedan
suddenly realized what it meant to be a low-paid working woman.
In her autobiography, Life
So Far, Friedan
wrote:
I discovered, with a
strange sense of recognition…that the women were getting paid much less than
the men for that job….There was nothing I had studied, at economics class at
Smith or in the classes on radical economics I now took…that explained or even
described the special exploitation of women.
This “Other Women’s Movement,”
according to labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble, whose 2004 book of the same name brings to light these women’s
struggles, carried forth an agenda for social reform. While many scholars have
portrayed this era as time when unions were “engines of reaction,” Cobble takes
issue with this notion, arguing that in part because of the role of women, the
union movement was anything but “tamed” and conservative.
By midcentury, increasing numbers of women were in
unions. Fewer than 1 million women belonged to unions at end of 1930s. But in
the early 1950s, 3 million were union members and in addition, another 2
million made up union “auxiliaries,” organizations that supported
male-dominated unions by organizing boycotts of nonunion goods, helping out
during strikes and serving as social, fraternal and charitable organizations.
Among these unionists were women whose “labor feminism rested on American
workers’ heightened sense of economic rights and their success in building
permanent and influential labor institutions in the postwar era,” writes
Cobble.
Esther
Eggersten Peterson is one of the most influential of this generation. The
Mormon daughter of Danish immigrants, Peterson traveled far from her home in
Utah to become the first female lobbyist for the AFL-CIO Industrial Union
Department in the 1950s and as assistant Secretary of Labor, the highest
ranking woman official in the Kennedy administration.
Peterson started out with
the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, worked as an organizer for AFT,
the national teacher’s union, and organized textile workers in the South with
Bessie Hillman for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, headed by the
legendary Sidney
Hillman.
The mother of four
children, Peterson well understood the needs of wage workers who did not have the
luxury of staying home with their children: At one point, she was earning $15 a
week, while paying someone $20 a week to look after her children.
In fact, working-class
women were the first to feel the effects of paid work and all its
inequities—only later in the 1960s, after large numbers of middle-class women
became full-time workers, did the women’s movement become largely the cause of
the middle class.
And because union feminists
were wage-earners, they championed a feminism that often sought equality
at the workplace through laws that recognized women have a special burden to
care for their families. As Cobble writes, “theirs was a vision of
equality that claimed justice on the basis of their humanity, not on the basis
of their sameness with men.”
Most labor feminists in
this book never resolved the tension between equality and difference
strategies, not did they see the necessity of doing so. They wanted equality and
special treatment, and did not think of the two as incompatible. They argued
that gender differences must be accommodated and that equality cannot always be
achieved through identity in treatment.
As we look back now, some
of the earliest legislation mandating shorter work weeks (think 48 hours) or
making night work illegal, applied only to women and perhaps
to children. (By 1899, 20 states had passed laws limiting the hours women
worked in factories, according to historian David Brian Robertson).
From a contemporary vantage
point, such legislation, which began to be introduced at the turn of the 20th
century (and always enacted at the state level), seems perversely
discriminatory. But in assessing the evolution of U.S. labor law, these
measures very often were the starting point for the passage of more sweeping
laws encompassing women and male workers.
When the nation’s
midcentury labor feminists argued for special treatment of women, they faced a
reality their middle-class feminist daughters and granddaughters often did not:
Even though they engaged in wage work to help support their families, their
burdens at home were not reduced. American society had not transitioned to a
point where “parenting” had become a verb. And so when it came to demanding
equality at the workplace, these women proposed their own version of the Equal
Rights Amendment, one that did not wipe out all sex-based laws because some
were helpful, such as those that addressed anatomical or social gender
differences.
As a result, from the 1920s
to the 1960s, the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment had “distinctly class,
interest group and ideological overtones, pitting affluent, business-oriented
and politically conservative women against poor, union-oriented and political
liberal women,” writes Cobble, quoting historian Carl Baruer. Further, says
Cobble:
Like their equal rights
opponents, labor feminists indicted American society in the postwar years for
its discriminatory treatment of women, and they called for an end to such
policies. But they differed from equal rights feminists was over how to define
discrimination and how to overturn statutes deemed discriminatory. Labor
feminists supported some sex-based laws, although they realized laws
prohibiting women from certain jobs or from night work should be amended or
eliminated.
Women in the 1940s first
worked through the Women’s Trade Union League and like Peterson, through the
federal Women’s Bureau, where they instigated and sustained the national
alliance that emerged among labor feminists. Later, some were active in the
National Committee for Equal Pay operating out of the IUE union’s building,
where they coordinated federal and state equal pay campaigns from 1953 to 1963.
They were involved with the NAACP and other civil rights coalitions, as well as
a full range of Democratic politics.
And at a time when Betty Friedan
was just shedding her privileged notions of womanhood and her self-described
potential for wanting “to be asked to join the country club and thus be truly
free to disdain it,” these midcentury union feminists had long been on the
frontlines, fighting to improve the workplace conditions of their sisters in
the factories, plants and mills and educating a new generation of women.
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/03/working-class-women-on-the-front-lines-of-feminism/
Sept. 3, 2006