Rethinking the “Doldrum Years”
Women’s Labor Organizing in the United Electrical, Radio & Machine
Workers of America, 1940-1955
Samantha Valente
Hampshire College
Spring 2014
Thesis Committee
Susan Tracy & Amy Jordan
Cover Photo:
“Equal Pay for Equal Work” UE News Photography Collection, 1933-1998, 1946, University of
Pittsburg. http://digital.library.pitt.edu/images/pittsburgh/uenews.html
Contents
Introduction
1. “Winnie the Welder”: Women’s Union Work during World War II, 1940-1945
12
2. The “Woman Question”: The UE’s “Civil War” and Gender Politics in the
Postwar Left, 1946-1949
36
3. “Men’s Business Too--”: The UE’s Cold War Fight against Gender
Inequality, 1950-1955
57
Conclusion
82
Bibliography
90
Acknowledgments
I first approached this topic as a young activist hoping to find the voices of other radical
women hidden in history. The electrifying images of women standing on soapboxes and walking
picket lines during the 1930s captivated my academic attention and provided a source of personal
empowerment. Refusing to believe that working-class women suddenly abandoned the ideals
they believed in as the 1930s came to a close; my project initially began as a frantic search for
radical women in the “doldrum years” of women’s history. Over the course of my Division III,
this project has evolved from an individual academic and personal interest to a study in women’s
labor history that could provide important lessons for our struggles today.
This transformation could not be possible without the invaluable support of many
professors, friends, family members, and comrades. I am tremendously grateful to my committee
Susan Tracy and Amy Jordan for dealing with many messy drafts and half formed ideas. I would
also like to thank Professors Jennifer Guglielmo, Lili Kim, and Uditi Sen for their guidance
throughout my time at Hampshire College, as well as the archivists at the Sophia Smith
Collection for their caring assistance during the research process. I will forever cherish the
support and encouragement I received from my comrades in the International Socialist
Organization. And I owe a great debt to the many individuals who helped push this project to be
what it is today.
Finally, I would like to thank the women of the “doldrum years” for their dedication and
commitment to women’s liberation and a better world for everyone. Their dedication is an
inspiring chapter of women’s history and provides important guidance for activist today. Most
importantly, the women in this study believed that their work would make a difference and their
legacy continues to provide hope that what we do today will matter as well.
Introduction
This past year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the acclaimed and controversial book
believed to have sparked the modern feminist movement. Published in 1963 by Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique openly discussed the widespread unhappiness and dissatisfaction of
housewives in the 1950s. Friedan wrote: “Each Suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she
made the beds, shopped for groceries….lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask
even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”1 The book claimed that throughout the 1950s,
there had been no words to describe this yearning. After World War II, propaganda from
women’s magazines, experts, and politicians taught women to be “healthy, beautiful, and
educated” but “concerned only about her husband, her children, and her home”. Furthermore,
women were taught to “pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets
and physicists or presidents.”2 Friedan used the term the feminine mystique to describe the
physiological effects of the limitations placed on women. Finally addressing the “problem that
has no name”; Friedan’s work struck a chord with millions of women who felt dissatisfied with
domesticity and contemporary gender expectations.
1
2
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). 15.
Friedan, 16.
1
The book’s success transformed Friedan’s life, from an unhappy housewife, into the
spokesperson for the emerging feminist movement. She would eventually help establish the
National Organization of Women (NOW), which advocated for childcare services, equal pay for
equal work, divorce rights, and an end to sexual violence in the late 1960s and 1970s. Looking
back on her life before she wrote The Feminine Mystique, Freidan claimed that she “wasn’t even
conscious of the woman problem” and that she, herself, was “still in the embrace of the feminine
mystique.”3 Friedan emphasized that her political consciousness came from her personal
experience as a middle-class housewife, as well as her interviews with other college educated,
white women. Friedan’s work also helped create the narrative that the late 1940s and 1950s were
“doldrum years” in women’s history.
This personal narrative that Friedan carefully crafted has been challenged by recent
publications, examining Friedan’s political work before she wrote The Feminine Mystique.
Daniel Horowitz, for example, has uncovered her earlier experience as a labor journalist for the
United Electrical, Machine & Radio Workers of America (UE). From 1946 to 1953, Friedan
worked as a staff member for the union’s official newspaper, the UE News. Friedan’s writing
from this period provides numerous examples that would destroy any myth that the postwar
decades were a period of dormancy. During World War II, Friedan wrote on the UE’s campaign
for affordable childcare for working women. In 1946, she interviewed female strikers on picket
lines across the electrical industry. Before Friedan left, she also worked with the union’s
National Fair Practice Committee on campaigns for equal pay for equal work, fair housing, and
3
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique the American Left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 133. During Friedan’s time with the UE, she
published under her maiden name Goldstein although she had been married to her husband Carl Friedan since 1947.
However, she changed her name to Friedan when she began to publish articles in mainstream women’s magazines.
Horowitz argues that this name change highlights Friedan’s attempts to distance herself from radical politics and to
reinvent herself as a quintessential suburban housewife, which is the narrative she relies on in The Feminine
Mystique. 2.
2
desegregated industries.4 Daniel Horowitz has shown that “her work as a labor journalist and
activist provided her with the intellectual depth, ideological commitments, and practical
experiences crucial to her emergence as a leading feminist in the 1960s.”5 Ultimately, Friedan’s
work with the UE is part of a larger hidden story of women’s activism during the 1940s and early
1950s.
The decades between the explosion of class anger in the late 1930s and the emergence of
the civil rights in 1955, are viewed as a graveyard of activism from a number of overlapping
fields of history. Women’s participation in the UE during the postwar years intervenes in the
“waves” of feminism timeline. Recent interventions have credited important gender and racial
equality campaigns to the work of black radical women in the 1940s and 1950s, before reform
movements in the 1960s and 1970s. This history also interacts with a broader account of the
Communist-Left and the labor movement during the Cold War. Similarly, working-class
women’s fight for gender reforms through the UE challenges the view that the labor movement
was an “uninspiring chapter” during the postwar years.
One of the most important ways historians have challenged this dominant narrative is
through the activism of women of color from the 1930s into the Cold War. Historically, women
of color have been marginalized from mainstream scholarship on women’s history, which has
privileged the work of Betty Friedan and other white, middle-class feminists. Similarly, women
of color have been underrepresented in scholarship on black liberation struggles and workingclass activism. When women of color have appeared in the histories of social movement, they
4
Horowitz, 7.
Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism
in Cold War America,” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1996): 1–42. 22; Dennis A. Deslippe, “Rights Not Roses”:
Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2000); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern
America. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nancy F. Gabin, Introduction to Feminism in the Labor
Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990).
5
3
are described as part of the scenery, holding what Vicki Ruiz terms “landscape roles.” This
emerging field attempts to re-evaluate the role that women of color have played within these
important struggles during the mid-twentieth century. 6 Recent scholarship has documented the
“rich and complex (yet little know)” history of black women’s radicalism in the post-World War
II political period.7 Their activism was located at the “crossroads” of the black liberation
struggle, women’s rights movement, and a broader challenge to global inequality under
capitalism.
Following a network of black working-class radicals active in a number of political
organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, historians have highlighted the important
theoretical contributions that laid the foundation for feminist scholars in the 1970s. Claudia
Jones, Marvel Cook, Thelma Dale Perkins, and number of black women developed the theory of
“triple oppression”, arguing that black working-class women faced “interlocking” oppression
from their position in society as African Americans, women, and workers. Believing that
liberation from one form of oppression required the dismantling of all oppression, black
working-class women proved their centrality to a number of intersection struggles. Historians
have labeled these women “protofeminists”, to describe the activists who “preshadowed
contemporary black feminist radicalism” and provided “models and strategies for resistance.” 8
From this vantage point, women of color were not the periphery or the landscape but rather the
“vanguard” leading the struggles against racism, sexism, and economic inequality.
6
Vicki Ruiz, Introduction to Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California
Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950. (The University of New Mexico Press, 1987). xiv.
7
Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2011). See also: Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women,
American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke University Press, 2011). Carole Boyce
Davies. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008.)
8
Gore, 13.
4
In contrast, the pioneering work attempting to disrupt the notion of the dormant 1950s in
women’s history focused primarily on middle-class feminist organizations that learned from the
suffrage movement during the early twentieth century. One of the first studies published in 1987,
Survival in the Doldrums, looked to the National Women’s Party as an example of the missing
link in the chain of women’s history. Although these studies make an important contribution, by
illustrating women’s activism between 1945 and 1960, a re-evaluation of the “doldrum years”
requires more than documenting gaps in the mainstream timeline of history. The “missing link”
scholarship privileges white, middle-class women, like Betty Friedan, and woman’s
organizations, like NOW or the National Women’s Party that self-identified as “feminist”.9 A
fuller study of women’s activism in the post-World War II era requires a shift in focus from selfidentified feminist spaces to political organizations that encompassed broader demands. For
example, Claudia Jones and Thelma Dale Perkins worked with women in the UE through the
Congress of American Women (CAW) from 1946 to 1950, to demand childcare services and
equal pay for equal work. Rather than a single-issue organization, the CAW also raised broader
demands.10 Radical organizations that encompassed a variety of intersecting demands were
important political spaces for working-class women, particularly women of color.
Throughout the twentieth century, working-class activism was expressed primarily
through radical political organizations and trade unions. The uncovered history of Betty
Friedan’s relationship with the UE illustrates this important and overlooked history. Trade
unions have been ignored in women’s history for a variety of reasons. Unions have had a legacy
9
Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival In The Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the
1960s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
10
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002). See also: Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist
Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in U.S. History as Women’s History, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and
Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chaple Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296–312.
5
of being male dominated, unsympathetic to the social oppression workers’ faced, and historically
organized in industries that denied women employment. However, scholars of women’s history
have highlighted these limitations while also recognizing the important political space that the
trade unions can provide struggles for women’s liberation. Historian Nancy Gabin was among
the first scholars to challenge the lack of scholarship examining working-class women’s
experiences with feminism between 1920 and the 1960s, as well as the lack of scholarship
written on women in labor history in the post-World War II era.11 Without brushing over the
problems women faced in the labor movement, Gabin argued that trade unions provided an
important vehicle for working-class women to collectively organize and fight for reform.12
The view that trade unions were a political space for gender reform challenges the
timeline of women’s history, but also challenges a similar view in labor history that the 1940s
and 1950s were an “uninspiring chapter” characterized by trade unions’ “slow decline and loss of
militant fortitude”.13 The Great Depression in the 1930s ushered in a period of political unrest,
responding to high unemployment, severe droughts, escalating racial violence, and growing class
inequality. Workers across industries looked to the newly formed Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) to express this discontent and advocate for fundamental change. The CIO
broke with the conservative “business” unionism under the American Federation of Labor (AFL)
when the CIO was created in 1935. The “business” union model accepted the social relationship
between capitalists and workers, narrowly focused on campaigns for higher wages and better
working conditions, and rejected the labor movement’s responsibility to challenge issues facing
11
Nancy F. Gabin, Introduction to Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 19351975. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990) xi.
12
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America.
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004) 10.
13
Dennis A. Deslippe, “Rights Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980 (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 6.
6
workers outside of the shop floor. 14 In contrast, the labor struggles in the 1930s ushered in a new
model that encompassed a larger working-class challenge to the fundamental relationships of
capitalism. The Communist Party and other radical trade unionists advocated for “social”
unionism. This model embraced the labor slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all”, rejected
racial and gender discrimination in individual shop floors and connected their work to broader
community organizations. 15
Although the implementation of these ideals varied across unions and individual Locals,
the birth of the CIO created new possibilities for the labor movement. By 1956, eighteen million
workers were represented by a trade union. This number was six times higher than the three
million workers represented in 1933, before the CIO was created.16 But many trade unions had
become increasingly bureaucratic and conservative by the mid-1950s. This transformation
limited the role of the labor movement, shifting it from a vehicle of working-class activism to
another “boss” workers were forced to negotiate with. The decision of the CIO to merge with the
AFL in 1955, symbolized the death of social unionism.17 Although the postwar period
experienced the declining labor movement, trade unions remained an important political space.
14
The term used to describe different types of unionism has had a number of names. Kim Moody and Alice
Kessler-Harris have used the term “social unionism”. This model has also been referred to as: social justice
unionism, social movement unionism, community unionism and citizen movement unionism. For a discussion of the
history of social unionism in the twentieth century see: Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American
Unionism (Verso, 1988); For the variation on terms see: Stephanie Ross “Varieties of Social Unionism: Towards a
Framework for Comparison” Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 11. (Autumn 2007); Bruce
Nissen “Alternative Strategic Directions for the U.S. Labor Movement: Recent Scholarship” Labor Studies Journal,
Vol. 28, No.1 (2003) 133-155.
15
The Communist Party USA was established in 1919 after breaking with the more reform oriented Socialist Party.
The CP (also referred to as CPUSA) was the American affiliate to the international Communist Party, the
Comintern. Believing that the Russian Revolution in 1917 had brought about a communist workers revolution, the
Comintern was lead by directives from the Soviet Union. The red scare in the 1920s drove the CP underground,
limiting its size and influence. For a history of the CP see: Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
Communists During the Great Depression (The University of North Carolina Press, 1990).; Mark Naison,
Communists in Harlem during the Depression (University of Illinois Press, 2004).; John Earl Haynes and Harvey
Klehr, “The Historiography of American Communism: An Unsettled Field,” Labour History Review 68, no. 1 (April
2003): 61–78.
16
Cobble, 15.
17
Moody, 15.
7
In addition, the discussion of a declining labor movement in the post-World War II
period rarely featured the experiences of working-class women. Surveys on the labor movements
decline have failed to analyze the impact of these trends on women’s history. In broader studies,
it is unclear how struggles for gender reform were affected by the Taft-Hartley Act passed in
1947 or how women’s positions in unions were affected by a transition to “business” unionism.
The histories documenting working-class women’s participation in trade unions during the
postwar period make an important intervention into this chronology. Following the call from
Nancy Gabin, historians have analyzed women’s participation in various trade unions under the
backdrop of a declining labor movement. Although this decline limited the possibilities, leftwing trade unions provided women with new vocabulary, theoretical frameworks and
organizational resources to fight for gender reforms.18 Working-class women were able to win
important gender demands through their union, including childcare services for working
mothers, an end to wage inequality, racial integration, and training courses to gain higher paying
skilled positions. 19 Ultimately, women’s participation in the labor movement disputes the
scholarly view of the labor movements as “uninspiring chapter”, by illustrating both the
challenges and possibilities.
A study of women’s participation in the UE is important, in part, because it challenges
the myth that middle-class, white women sparked the modern feminist movement. Although
Friedan helped to popularize this myth, she experienced firsthand the organizing efforts of
working-class women to demand childcare services in World War II, provide theoretical
contributions to an understanding of women’s oppression in the postwar years, and use their
18
Cobble,15.
Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975 (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1990). Cobble, 22. See also: Lisa Kannenberg, “The Impacts of the Cold War on
Women’s Trade Union Activism: The UE Experience,” Labor History 34, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 1993): 309–23.
19
8
union as a vehicle to demand equal pay for equal work during the Cold War. Although there are
a number of reasons why Friedan chose to hide this personal connection, it cannot be denied that
the political foundation for the modern women’s rights movement rests with the activism of
working-class women during the 1940s and 1950s.20 The “waves” of feminism timeline makes
invisible the important contributions of working-class women, many of these victories won by
women of color.
Regardless of Friedan’s connection to this history, women’s participation in the UE is an
important contribution to this revisionist history in its own right. The UE was the third largest
CIO union and largest left-wing union.21 During the postwar period, women represented over
forty percent of the UE’s total membership.22 By the end of World War II it had wall-to-wall
union representation in electrical manufacturing plants.23 The UE’s left-wing leadership
maintained social unionism throughout the postwar period, leading trade union struggles against
economic inequality in the workplace and the social oppression workers faced in society.
However, the union’s left-wing politics also made it a main target in the anti-communist witchhunt during the Cold War. It suffered from internal debates between the left-wing leadership and
a conservative minority. Government investigations and “raids” by competitor unions weakened
the UE’s stronghold on the electrical industry. In 1949, the UE was one of eleven left-wing
unions expelled from the CIO but continued to face increasing pressures from the labor
20
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism. 12.
21
Ronald L Filippelli and Mark McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United
Electrical Workers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 69. See also: James J. Matles and James
Higgins, Them And Us: Struggles of A Rank-and-File Union (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1974); Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
22
Cobble, 17.
23
Filippelli and McColloch, 45. The electrical industry manufactured consumer goods, including television sets,
washing machines, refrigerators and radios. The two main companies UE negotiated with were General Electric and
Westinghouse. Throughout the twentieth century, the electric industry hired female labor. As a result, women
represented a significant minority within the UE from its inception.
9
movement, the government, and employers. The history of women’s participation in the UE
illustrates a larger history of working-class women’s negotiation with a vibrant Left that offered
possibilities to institute fundamental change during a period of increasing limitations.
This study will challenge the history the “doldrum years” through an analysis of the UE’s
work from World War II until 1955 when the UE lost its influence in the electrical industry.
Although the UE had Locals throughout the country, this project will focus primarily on the
history of the UE in the greater New York area. The Schenectady Local 301, in upstate New
York, was a key plant for the UE and a major site for the Cold War battles. New York City was
the center of radical politics during the Cold War. In addition, both the Communist Party and the
UE’s headquarters were located in New York City. The UE District Four oversaw the organizing
of Locals in New York City and New Jersey and won important struggles for women workers.
Both Schenectady Local 301 and District Four were leading the UE’s campaign against gender
inequality. This story follows the work of Ruth Young, Helen Quirini, and Elaine Perry members
in New York City, Schenectady, and New Jersey respectively.
However, this study concentrates on the activities of Ruth Young, as she was one of the
most prominent women in the UE during this period. She was elected to the highest leadership
body of the union. Throughout WWII, she became a spokesperson for the issues facing working
women, working with the government, leading union education for women, and spearheading a
fight for childcare. Young was also a member of the Communist Party during the postwar period.
Following her through the postwar period allows scholars to connect the work of the UE with the
broader left that women were working within. Finally, the end of Young’s vibrant labor career
intersects with the UE’s declining influence in the labor movement and the loss of important
Locals. By 1950, Young had left both the UE and the CP to become a housewife for a UE
10
member in Schenectady, New York. Throughout this period, Young was interviewed by Betty
Friedan and organized in similar political circles. Although Young would embrace the feminine
mystique, her personal story reveals the personal costs and difficulties of radical activism during
this time. Young’s labor career, the work of the UE, and the efforts of the union women she
worked alongside illustrated the possibilities for fundamental change.24
Rethinking the “doldrum” years challenges the dominant “waves of feminism” narrative
and makes central the organizing of working class women, especially working-class women of
color in the 1950s. A study of the UE’s political agenda during the post-war years interacts with
this field by rethinking the roles of radical trade unions in women’s history. Although the 1950s
are remembered as a period of rigid gender expectations and political repression, women were
able to organize a radical anti-sexist and anti-racist movement through work in their union. The
activism of women in the UE, and other trade unions, challenged Cold War conformity while
laying the foundation for the later women’s rights movement. Ultimately, this project will bring
together different strands from these fields to understand women’s participation in the UE and to
understand the postwar years as a period of both immense possibility and simultaneously
increasing limitations. This is a history of both the limitations on working-class women’s
activism during the “doldrum years” as well as the possibilities for fundamental change.
24
Although many other women, who will be featured throughout this piece, had held important leadership roles in
the UE, Ruth Young has, by far, the most secondary literature written on her. The focus on Young is also the result
of limited primary research available on other women. For Young’s story, I will draw on secondary literature as well
as her oral history and FBI files held at the Tamiment Archives at New York University Library.
11
Chapter One
“Winnie the Welder”: Women’s Union Work during
World War II
When Winnie was first hired in,
The pay was pretty thin,
So she set out to get her chums awake.
Tho’ many said, “You can’t,”
She organized her plant,
And now the workers get a better break.
She heads their union now,
And fast is learning how
1
One of the most famous pictures in American history is the iconic “Rosie the Riveter” in
front of the phrase “We Can Do It!”. This World War II image has become a symbol of women’s
patriotic wartime duty and an image of women’s advancements within the workplace. Most
Americans would be able to recognize this image and place it within the context of women’s
employment in defense industries during the early 1940s. However, the icon “Winnie the
Welder” and women’s participation in the labor movement during World War II is much less
known. “Winnie the Welder” was a character created from a song written by participants of the
“Union Leadership Training Courses for Women” sponsored the United Electrical, Radio &
Machine Workers of America (UE). This song, quoted above, was created to provide an
alternative image to “Rosie the Riveter” that depicted women’s participation in the workforce as
a patriotic duty. Instead, “Winnie the Welder” provided another dimension to women’s wartime
participation by highlighting women’s labor activism. World War II created new openings for
1
Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Union to the Present (United
States of America: The Free Press, 1979) 379.
12
women to advance within the UE and the larger labor movement. These new position were
supported by training courses and gender reform that lifted the “double burden” of women’s
wartime labor. However, World War II also ushered in an alliance between the labor movement,
the government, and employers under the National War Labor Board. This tri-partite alliance
initiated a shift away from social unionism of the 1930s to a form of “business” unionism that
would solidify in the 1950s. The experience of “Winnie the Welders” in the UE complicates our
memory of a crucial political moment in women’s history that is often viewed as a “watershed”
moment that was lost to the ensuing “doldrum years”.
Women’s Wartime Work
Although the United States did not formally enter World War II until 1942, American
factories began the shift from manufacturing to war production by the end of the 1930s.
Industries which had produced consumer products, including textiles, automobiles, and
electronic appliances, began to manufacture army uniforms, tanks, canned food, aircrafts and
radios. During this initial transition, few women were actually hired for defense industries jobs.
The Great Depression had devastated the economy throughout the 1930s, creating
unemployment that reached as high as twenty-five percent. By the beginning of World War II,
more than five million men remained unemployed in the United States.2 Therefore, many
women were overlooked for defense industry jobs in favor of the large pool of unemployed men
that industries could hire from.
The process of gaining higher paying, skilled labor was not an automatic gain for women.
Throughout the twentieth century, men were seen as the “breadwinners”, or the primary financial
supporters of their families, while women were viewed as secondary workers. As a result, men
2
Foner, 338.
13
were given preference in wartime hiring practices. During the initial process, married women
were rarely hired. Employers justified their actions by claiming that married female workers
provided one family with two incomes and another family with none. When women were hired,
their positions were concentrated in upholstery, “small parts assembly”, or “cut-and-sew” plants.
These sections of the factory required detail oriented work, dexterity, and little physical strength.
Companies used the myth that women were biologically more qualified for repetitive, low wage,
detail oriented work.3 The perceived biological differences between men and women were used
to celebrate women’s participation in factories during the war without legitimizing them as true
workers. Throughout World War II, employers used traditional gender roles and the sexual
division of labor to justify discriminatory hiring practices and unequal wages for women.
When defense industries did begin to hire women en masse, employers systematically
discriminated against workers of color. Defense industries actively recruited white women for
skilled positions and denied women of color who had the same qualifications. In the
documentary Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, Lyn Child recalls one example of such
discrimination when she applied for a position at a shipyard that had four openings. The foreman
took the three white women that were with Child into a room and arrived forty-five minutes later
to inform her that the company did not have openings.4 Edna Miller, an African American
woman, faced similar discrimination when she applied to work at the General Electric factory in
Schenectady, New York. Miller had attended Howard University, taken classes at a business
school, and worked as a secretary for a local church. Miller thought her qualifications would
easily lead to one of the many available factory jobs. However, General Electric only offered
3
Ruth Milkman, “Redefining ‘Women’s Work’: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World
War II,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): 336–372.342.
4
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Directed by Connie Field. 1980.Clarity Educational Productions, Inc..
14
Miller positions as a sweeper, custodial worker, or an elevator operator. 5 This outright refusal to
hire women of color was a common discriminatory hiring practice. Racial discrimination also
impacted the jobs for which African American and Latina women were hired. They were often
offered positions that were the most dangerous, labor intensive jobs that offered the lowest pay,
and often required women to work longer hours. African American and Latina women were
hired for the jobs that were seen as “unfit” for white women.6 Although gender placed all women
at a disadvantage within the workforce, racial discrimination created a significant gap between
the experiences of women of color and white women during the war.
When the United States officially declared war on December 8th 1941, war production
increased dramatically. At the same time, the military draft severely decreased the number of
eligible male workers. These factors led to a high demand for female labor in new areas of
production. Over the course of the war, three million women entered manufacturing jobs,
increasing female labor, in general, by one hundred and forty percent.7 Within war industries,
female labor increased by four hundred and sixty percent. Among these female workers, fortynine percent had no previous work experience, twenty-seven percent had moved from low wage
positions, and only twenty-four percent were “old hands” at their jobs.8 Although racial
discrimination in employment meant that African American women were underrepresented in
defense industries, black women worked during the war at a higher rate than white women from
the same economic class. For example, one in three African American women were employed
5
Quirini, Helen. Helen Quirini and General Electric: A Personal Memoir of World War II. Albany, New York:
University of Albany, 1997.http://www.albany.edu/history/ histmedia/Hq.html.
6
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America
(Princeton: Princeton University, 2004).71.
7
Nancy Gabin, “‘They Have Placed a Penalty on Womanhood’: The Protest Actions of Women Auto Workers in
Detroit-Area UAW Locals, 1945-1947,” Feminist Studies no. 2 (1982): 375.
8
Emily Bass, “‘Why Rosie Went Home’ review of Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto
Workers, 1935-1975 by Nancy F. Gabin,” Women’s Review of Books 8, no. 4 (1991): 18–19.
15
during the 1940s, where as white working class women were employed at a ratio of one in five.9
These wartime conditions created new positions and opportunities for women in manufacturing.
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
As illustrated above, the U.S. involvement with the war opened up new industries for
women in manufacturing. Similarly, the war created new opportunities for women within their
trade unions. The transformation of the workplace paralleled the shifting demographics of the
labor movement.10 When the UE was established in 1936, women were one-third of the electrical
industry’s workforce, but only represented fourteen percent of the union’s membership.11 To
address this discrepancy, the union established women’s committees and prioritized campaigns
for equal pay for equal work and childcare to address the issues specifically facing female
workers. As prominent male political leaders were drafted or volunteered for the war, women
stepped into these positions the same way they stepped into defense industry jobs. Ruth Young,
Jewish-American UE organizer from New York City, recalls that many men in the UE enlisted in
the army forces during the war, creating new openings for women within the union.12 In many
cases, men could not fill union positions or work outside of defense industries without being
subject to the draft. Therefore, the union was forced to hire women as shop stewards and union
officials.13 Under the conditions of World War II, female union membership rose to 3 million at
the peak of the war, which represented over twenty percent of the unionized workforce. Female
9
Foner, 346.
Dayo.Gore Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York and
London: New York University Press, 2011.36
11
Lisa Kannenberg. “The Impacts of the Cold War on Women’s Trade Union Activism: The UE Experience.”
Labor History 34, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 1993): 309–23, 311. The low percentage of initial female membership
was affected by the initial union drives which focused on Westinghouse and General Electrical plants that were
predominantly skilled work performed by white men. Women held less than 20% of the positions in these plants.
12
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax., August 29, 1985. Ruth Young Papers.
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York, 35. See also Cobble, 16.
13
Ibid.
10
16
representation within the UE was much greater. By 1944, women represented approximately
fifty percent of the UE’s total membership. 14 This advancement offered women greater influence
within the labor movement.
At the union’s annual convention in 1943, UE president Albert Fitzgerald argued “Day
by day we are losing more of our staff members, organizers, local union officers, to the armed
service of this country. Unless we develop the proper leadership, unless we encourage women to
take an active part in the affairs of our organization, the men of this union are going to find
themselves in a position where the structure of the union will be weakened.”15 To facilitate this
process, the UE created training courses to educate women as organizers and advocated for
gender reforms, lifting the traditional domestic responsibilities that excluded women from union
work. By the end of the war, Ruth Young was elected to the General Executive Board of the UE
and more than one-third of all full time organizers were women. Over the course of the war, the
UE hired thirty-six women for positions on the national staff, in comparison to the two positions
women held before the war. 16 Women also held eighteen union president positions and thirtythree vice-president offices.17 The specific conditions of World War II required the UE to
aggressively advocate for female leadership.
The UE’s most prominent female union organizer during World War II was Ruth Young.
After graduating high school in 1932, Young held various low wage jobs eventually working at a
factory under Eisemann Magneto. Young worked as a solderer, soldering “little lugs on
flywheels that went into washing machines”. While at Eisemann, Young was elected shop
14
Cobble, 17. Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions
(Cambridge University Press, 2003). 202.
15
Quoted in Ruth Milkman, “American Women and Industrial Unionism” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two
World Wars. Edited by Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (Yale University: 1987) 173.
16
Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge University
Press, 2003). 204.
17
Ronald L, Filippelli and Mark McColloch. Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United
Electrical Workers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, 81.
17
steward. Throughout the 1940s, Young helped to organized electrical plants under the UE in
New Jersey and New York. Young worked as the membership activities director for UE’ District
Four. Through this position, Young organized educational conferences, training courses, and
special classes on the problems facing women workers. Young also spoke at a number of
wartime conferences, wrote numerous editorials, and worked on government agencies.18 In
addition, Young wrote a weekly column “Work and Play” in the union’s official newspaper, the
UE News. The column often addressed the need for women’s wartime participation to win the
war, while acknowledging the problems that working women faced. In 1944, she was elected the
first woman to the UE’s General Executive Board, while holding a number of other positions;
including Executive Secretary and National Officer.19
Most female leaders were drawn to the labor movement as a method to address their
immediate working conditions. Many working-class women accepted leadership positions to
change working conditions they were unhappy with and to address the issues they faced as
female workers. During World War II, Elaine Perry worked as a clerk typist at the Brooklyn
Navy Yard and later the United Transformer Company. Her company would pay the office staff,
most of whom were African American workers, lower wages than the white workers in
production. After difficult organizing, Perry won UE recognition for her workplace and equal
pay measures. Perry initially joined the union “simply because it was more beneficial for me…”
She chose to work for the UE because she was interested in its political agenda and because
“they seemed to work so hard for us”. Similarly, Helen Quirini of Schenectady Local 301,
18
“Ruth Young” Federal Bureau of Investigations (Newark, New Jersy: 1944) Ruth Young Papers. Tamiment
Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York.; Cobble 29-30; Foner, 377.
19
Cobble, 17-19.
18
remembers joining the UE staff because “I did not like the conditions I saw around me”.20 Many
female union leaders joined the labor movement as a form of protection for their individual labor
rights. Leadership positions within the UE were also viewed as an important vehicle to challenge the
discrimination women faced in defense industries. Perry viewed her union work as a tool to help
other workers. “I liked helping people, and I felt as a steward…I would be able to do something
for the people”. Elaine Perry continued to work with the UE throughout the postwar period,
becoming the union’s first black female district organizer. 21 Ultimately women joined and
participated in the UE because they saw it as a way to challenge the individual and collective issues
they faced as female workers.
When women stepped into these new union roles, their experience with male union
members varied across Locals. Margaret Darin, from Local 601 in Pennsylvania, believed she
had always been respected by both union officials and other rank-and-file members. Seventy-five
percent of the workers employed in Elaine Perry’s shop in New Jersey were women and as a
result her workplace had women “leading the shop”. Surprisingly, she remembers little tension
between female leaders and male union members. “We always…were the leaders of the shop and
we never had many problems. And most of the leaders in the shop were black women”.22 In
contrast, Mary Voltz from St. Louis, experienced instances of “male chauvinism” (the term for
sexism during the 1940s) by male UE members. “They were men. And they tried very hard to
make me into an office clerk.”23 The war provided the possibility of new roles in the union but
the support “Winnie the Welders” received once they were in those positions varied greatly.
20
Gerald Zahavi, “Uncivil War: An Oral History of Labor, Communism, and Community in Schenectady, New
York, 1944-1954,” in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, ed.
Robert W Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
21
Elaine Perry, interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left
22
Ibid.
23
Deslippe, Dennis A. “Rights Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980. Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.93
19
To help facilitate women’s leadership in the union, the UE advocated for training classes
to provide women with important organizing skills. Many of the female union organizers had no
previous experience with industrial unions or the labor movement. To address this gap in
knowledge and tradition, the union sponsored special education courses to train women in their
new positions. In the New York area, Ruth Young and other UE female workers pressured the
New York City Board of Education to sponsor training programs for women entering factory
work. Thousands of women participated in skill trainings on wiring, assembly work, and welding
through the classes offered by the local government.24 The ten week program, “Union
Leadership Training Courses for Women”, began in January 1942 and provided classes on the
role of women in American history, tips to navigate contract negotiations with employers, and
classes focused on public speaking.25
Training courses were important for the UE to educate a new layer of leaders in the
tradition of the labor movement and strategies for union organizing. More importantly, training
courses provided women with a new language to discuss their oppression, knowledge of
important skills and tactic, and the confidence to lead. 26 Although Elaine Perry was active in her
shop, she was initially reluctant to join the UE staff because she believed she did not have the
necessary experience for an organizer. For instance, Perry was able to talk union politics to
workers one-on-one but did not confidently feel that she could give larger talks. She believed;
“That wasn’t my speed”. 27 Helen Quirini had a similar reaction when asked to join the UE staff
in Schenectady, New York. Although she was “dying” for the union secretary position, Quirini
24
Foner 377-378.
Foner 378. Philip Foner taught classes on women’s labor movement sponsored through the UE’s leadership
training courses during the war.
26
Cobble, 7-9.
27
Elaine Perry, interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left
25
20
felt under qualified for the job and initially turned it down. 28 The union’s training programs
provided women with resources and opportunities to grow their own confidence as leaders
within the union.
Social Unionism
Workers in defense manufacturing, including automobile, steel and electrical industries,
were represented by trade unions under the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). When
the UE officially joined the CIO in 1936, the original constitution read that it would fight for “all
workers in our industry on an industrial basis, and rank and file control, regardless of craft, age,
sex, nationality, race, creed or political belief.”29 The UE saw labor rights as more than a fight
for “bread and butter” issues, like higher wages and shorter hours. The UE’s struggle also
encompassed equal job opportunities, desegregated industries, improved maternity leave,
national health insurance, fair housing, daycare centers for children of working mothers, price
control, and lower taxes on “the people”. Part of the union’s mission was to fight for a “better
life at home as well as in the shop”.30 For the UE, childcare and housing rights were not separate
struggles from workplace grievances. Rather the union saw these issues as central to the fight for
labor rights.
At the same moment that new opportunities were opening up for working-class women in
trade unions, the labor movement entered into an agreement with the government that would
limit the strength of the trade unions as important political spaces for women to challenge gender
28
Gerald Zahavi, “Uncivil War: An Oral History of Labor, Communism, and Community in Schenectady, New
York, 1944-1954,” in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, ed.
Robert W Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2004).38.
29
Foner, 314.
30
“Women Fight For A Better Life!: UE Picture Story of Women’s Role in American History,” United Electrical,
Radio and Machine Workers of America, n.d. Vol. 23 Employment Collection, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
College, Northampton, Mass.
21
discrimination in the postwar period. The UE and other trade unions under the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) tied themselves to the government through the National War
Labor Board, which acted as an arbitrator between corporations and the labor movement.
Through the National War Labor Board, the CIO established a partnership with the government
that prioritized war production over worker’s rights, bargained away trade union’s strongest
weapon, and impelled the labor movement towards top-down bureaucratic “business” unionism.
On January 12, 1942, one month into the war, the Roosevelt administration established
the National War Labor Board, appointing business leaders, government officials, and CIO labor
leaders to a tri-partite administration. The administrative body was endowed with the power to
“finally determine” labor disputes across industries “which might interrupt work which
contributes to the effective prosecution of the war.”31 The Commission established a four-step
grievance process for labor disputes through bureaucratic arbitration with union officials and
prohibited direct action to solve workplace disagreements.32 To establish this tri-party alliance,
trade union officials, employers and the government agreed to significant concessions. Labor
leaders quickly agreed to a no-strike pledge believing direct action strategies to address labor
grievances in defense industries would interfere with national security and the war effort. Labor
leaders also agreed to a wage freeze across all industries during the war. In addition, the UE
general officers Albert Fitzgerald, Julius Emspak, and James Matles urged UE members to
sacrifice overtime work and to agree to a “speed-up”, which would increase production by 15
percent without raising subsequent wages.33
31
Jesse Friedin, “The National War Labor Board: An Achievement in Tri-Partite Administration,” Guilford Press 7,
no. 1, Institute on Problems of the War (1943). Julius Emspak was appointed to the National War Labor Board, as a
representative for labor.
32
Moody, Kim. An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. Verso, 1988.33.
33
Fillipelli and McCollouch, 68. The UE responded to the war with patriotic zeal. At the 1943 annual convention,
the UE sponsored a “win-the-war” rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. At the rally, the UE
22
In return for these significant labor concessions, the government gave union leaders a
“maintenance of membership” condition which required workers in defense industries to join
unions and pay monthly membership dues.34 It was in the interests of union leaders to accept the
no-strike pledges, insuring they would have a growing, stable membership and steady stream of
finances from union dues. In 1941, the UE represented 316,000 members in 578 plants, but by
the end of the war the UE grew to represent over 750,000 workers in 1,137 plants.35 Although
this tri-party alliance gave defense workers mandatory union representation and short-term
benefits, the long term costs for the labor movement would outweigh any immediate gains.
The government benefitted from this agreement by establishing a relationship with labor
that ensured the labor movement’s support of the Democratic Party, a lopsided partnership that
continued throughout the twentieth century. The no-strike pledge also forced union officials to
discipline militant rank-and-file organizing and essentially banned a form of political protest.
Tying labor leaders into a partnership allowed the government to quell the growing political
dissent that grew tremendously throughout the Great Depression.36 Employers were also afraid
of the labor movements growing power, and similarly saw the tri-party alliance as a means to
control the labor movement’s strength. Employers benefited from the government administration
because it guaranteed that labor unions could not use its strongest tactic, the strike. 37 Throughout
the 1930s, the strike proved the power workers’ possessed when they stopped production by
withholding their labor and therefore withholding employers’ profits. Most war manufacturing
plants ran twenty-four hours, six days a week. If work stoppages occurred during the war,
publically endorsed Roosevelt for a fourth term and even “introduced” James Matles into the army. The UE raised
over 3 million dollars for war relief, receiving an award from the National War Fund.
See Filipelli and McCollouch, 68-75.
34
Moody, 18.
35
Filipelli and McCollouch, 80.
36
James Green, “Fighting on Two Fronts: Working-Class Militancy in the 1940s,” American Labor in the 1940s 9,
no. 4–5, Radical America (August 1975): 7–49.20
37
Moody, 18.
23
employers would risk losing double the profit. A no-strike pledge guaranteed employers would
be able to exploit the temporary war economy to its fullest potential.
The National War Labor Board threatened women’s new positions within the UE. This
new strategy moved labor disputes out of individual workplaces and neighborhoods into
bargaining tables and conference rooms. The new strategy threatened the power and
independence of the rank-and-file members. Although women held a number of union positions
during WWII, female labor activism was centered in community organizing. Ruth Young
remembers that most of her time during the war was spent organizing in individual shop floors
and attending Local union meetings. “There were long hours of work—ringing doorbells and
visiting people in their homes and trying to persuade them to join the Union.”38 For Young and
other UE women “organizing was about getting out, cranking out newspapers which we
distributed at the gate, organized or unorganized shops.”39 However, the more specific issues of
wages and working conditions, like wages for piece work and policies against speed-ups, were
not decided through these negotiations. Therefore, smaller issues that often directly affected the
wages and working conditions of women workers were disputed on a Local level. Through
community organizing and “wildcat” strikes, women continued to influence the direction of the
UE.40 Although the tri-party alliance threatened rank-and-file militancy, female union members
were able to find pockets of resistance on Local and community levels.
An increase in women’s leadership occurred alongside a more general growing militancy
among rank-and-file women. Mothers in Overalls, a Communist Party pamphlet published in
1943, described a CIO union meeting during the war where women asserted themselves as union
38
Gerald Zahavi, “Ruth Young Jandreau,” Department of History, University at Albany-SUNY, History and Media
M.A. Program & Digital Mutlimedia Initiatives, June 2, 2000,http://www.albany.edu/history/histmedia/
ryjandreau.html.
39
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax, 35.
40
Moody, 26.
24
members. At a Bohn Aluminum plant, organizers asked women, who were the majority in the
room, if they wanted their husbands to join them at union meetings. The crowd’s answer was an
“emphatic No!”. One woman stood up declaring “My husband went to his A.F. of L. meeting
and I had to stay home. So now he’ll have to stay home when I go to my CIO meeting!”41
Another clear example of workers growing militancy occurred through the use of “wildcat
strikes”. “Wildcat” strikes were unauthorized workplace actions organized by rank-and-file
members to challenge unfair labor practices. These strikes were a tactic learned by veteran labor
activist into the 1930s. This form of resistance, especially under the no-strike pledge agreement,
“clearly demonstrated the mood of defiance that carried over from the 1930s” among thousands
of rank-and-file members.42 The view that labor became increasingly more conservative during
the 1940s into the 1950s is in large part due to the increasing conservatism of official union
leaders. However, the reality in shop-floors was much different. By 1944, the number of national
wildcat strikes reached an average of twelve strikes per day. In 1945, there were 4,750 work
stoppages that year alone.43 Most of these strikes were over small workplace grievances, ranging
from the suspension of individual workers to jurisdiction disputes. Although wildcat strikes were
used to win immediate material gains, they were also tactic used by rank-and-file union members
to demonstrate worker’s agency.44
Although the dedication to challenging racial and gender discrimination did not occur
evenly across Locals, the UE was at the forefront of these struggles. The UE’s large female
membership and the unique conditions under World War II propelled the union in a progressive
41
Lapin, Eva. “Mothers in Overalls,” October 1943. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18. Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
42
Smith, Sharon. Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States. Chicago, IL:
Haymarket Books, 2006.166.
43
Lipsitz, George. A Rainbow at Midnight: Class and Culture in Cold War America. Second Edition. Amherst,
Massachusetts: A.J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982.28. The highest number of strikes per year was held by 1919 (the
year World War I ended) for having 3,630 strikes.
44
Lipsitz, 29.
25
direction. However, the UE’s relationship to the Communist Party also facilitated a “social”
union model that connected fights against workplace exploitation to struggles against social
oppression in society. The left-wing trade unions, with connections to the Communist Party,
viewed the labor movement as a movement for working-class self-emancipation.45
Although the history of the Communist Party is often limited to the 1930s, the Party’s
influence in mainstream politics grew during World War II. During the 1940s, the CP had over
65, 000 members, played a key role in trade unions, and was a leading organization around antiracist struggles.46 Members of the Communist Party lead or held significant positions in at least
seventeen CIO unions, including the UE. In addition, left-wing unions represented more than
one-third of the CIO’s entire membership. As Kate Weigand argues, the CP was “the
institutional center of a large, influential, and uniquely American radical political moment.” 47 As
a result, Party members were involved in numerous campaigns for civil rights, gender equality,
and the labor movement.
Many of the UE’s leading members had political ties to the Communist Party or another
radical political organization on the Left. Ruth Young was exposed to radical politics at a young
age through her father’s work as a Communist. During the Great Depression, she participated in
the Young Communist League (YCL) in New York City. As part of the CP’s youth division, the
YCL brought together a number of young radicals, including future UE national secretary45
Bruce Nissen “Alternative Strategic Directions for the U.S. Labor Movement: Recent Scholarship” Labor Studies
Journal, Vol. 28, No.1 (2003) 133-155. 138.
46
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002., 26. In 1930, the Party could only claim 18,000 members. Within a decade, Party
membership more than tripled in size.
47
Weigand, 10. During the “Americanization” period of the 1920s, the CP discouraged ethnic ties, believing they
were obstacles to unity and the class struggle. In 1928, the CP implemented the “Black Belt Theory”, supporting a
resolution from the Soviet-led Comintern that argued African American workers represented an oppressed nation
within the United States. Therefore, black workers had the right to self-determination in the Southern states. Under
this directive, the CP prioritized anti-racist work throughout the 1930s and established an interracial organization.
Providing legal defense for the Scottsboro case, initiating campaigns for housing relief, and labor organizing in trade
unions, solidified the CP’s role as a significant working-class organization.
26
treasurer James Matles. 48 Young continued to participate in the Communist Party throughout the
1940s. In 1945, Young spoke on the topic, “Reconversion and Jobs”, at the Communist Party’s
national convention. 49 Given Young’s work on the position of women in defense industry, her
speech probably highlighted the demands for childcare, equal pay for equal work, and maternity
rights.
Most UE workers did not reveal their Party membership and the Communist Party did
not recruit large numbers of rank-and-file union members to their cause throughout this period.50
However, the CP continued to influence the direction of left-wing unions and won important
leadership positions. Communist-affiliated union members proved their leadership through
action. They gained workers’ support by tirelessly advocating for the immediate needs of
workers and calling out workplace injustices.51 Joe Mangino, former union organizer in
Schenectady recalls that: “I never heard anybody say ‘we ought to overthrow this government’.
They were arguing for better schools, health care, for pensions, vacations, holidays, more wages,
better working conditions, better safety conditions, better compensation.”52 Communist-affiliated
labor organizers won leadership by advocating for any reforms that would benefit workers and
raise their political consciousness. Left-wing leaders were also equipped with a long-term belief
in working-class revolution that sustained their organizing through long hours and tedious, often
48
“Ruth Young” Federal Bureau of Investigations Young continued to work with the Young Communist League in
the postwar period. In 1944, Young signed a manifesto created by the YCL titled “Forward to build a strong and
powerful Communist Party, Forward to the American October” The “American October” is reference is to the
worker’s revolution that took place in Russia.
49
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax ,28. According to Young, Eisemann
Magneto was initially organized under the International Association of Machinist under the leadership of James
Matles before it merged with the UE in 1943.
50
Ibid.
51
Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. New York: Bedford Books, 1994. 31.
52
Gerald Zahavi, “Passionate Commitments: Race, Sex, and Communism at Schenectady General Electric, 19321954,” Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (September 1996): 514–548.
27
demoralizing work.53 This dedication was coupled with years of valuable experience attending
organizing meetings, giving public speeches, and studying political theory.54 The theoretical and
practical experience of Communist-affiliated trade unionists won support from UE workers.
Party members were also able to win respect because they were often the most outspoken
union members against discrimination. 55 UE organizer for Schenectady Local 301, Helen
Quirini, was raised in a religious, traditional Polish household that opposed the Communist
Party. She initially joined the union to help remove Party members influence in the Local. At
first she was skeptical of the Communist Party members. “When I first went to meetings I used
to just sit back and listen…And when I listened to these guys and what they went through…[I
thought] these people were great!”56 One non-communist UE member in Schenectady, New
York remembers most workers were “militant when it affected them. But left wingers would be
more militant on just about [all] the other areas---helping other people, stuff like that. They had
more heart than the rest of us I guess.”57
Aprons and Overalls
Demands for childcare and domestic services were central campaigns for both left-wing
trade unions in the CIO and the Communist Party. The CIO created the Congress of Women’s
53
Ronald Schatz, “Union Pioneers: The Founders of Local Unions at General Electric and Westinghouse, 19331937,” Journal of American History 66, no. 3 (1979): 586–602. 595.
54
Filippelli and McColloch, 9. The left-wing of the UE also included radical trade unionists, socialists, and workers
who were not affiliated with radical organizations but agreed with the CP’s position of political issues.
55
Schrecker, xiii. The history of the Communist Party has been highly contested. Most historiographies divide
scholarship on the CPUSA into two camps, the “traditionalists” and the “revisionists”. Traditionalist histories, first
developed during the Cold War, viewed the CP within a broad international context and emphasize the CP’s
allegiance to the Soviet Union. Through this literature, the CP was characterized by a totalitarian, bureaucratic
structure and ideology. In contrast, revisionist history, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, used localized case studies
to depict the CP as a site for progressive social change. Scholarship of the CP continues to debate the nature of the
CP as a progressive organization and the influenced of the Party on American politics in the twentieth century. For
an overview of the debates within the field see Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. “The Historiography of
American Communism: An Unsettled Field.” Labour History Review 68, no. 1 (April 2003): 61–78.
56
Zahavi, “Passionate Commitments” 528.
57
Zahavi, “Passionate Commitments”, 520.
28
Auxiliaries in 1941 to demand that “adequate child care be available to every child of a working
mother”. The CIO also called upon local boards of education to provide childcare services in
public schools.58 When women’s wartime work drastically increased in 1942, the CIO launched
“The Conference for the Care of Young Children in War Time”, co-sponsored by trade unions,
religious groups, and government organizations. 59 In her op-ed, “Work and Play”, Ruth Young
urged UE Locals to send delegates to the conference and “take a lead in this important
campaign!” 60
In 1943, Ruth Young was interviewed for the left-wing newspaper Federated Press by an
emerging labor journalist, Betty Friedan. 61 At the war’s end, Friedan would leave the Federated
Press to join the staff of the UE News. Although some scholars have argued that her work,
specifically The Feminine Mystique (1963), sparked the second wave feminist movement,
Friedan’s views on traditional gender roles and necessary services for gender equality were
greatly shaped by the work of Ruth Young and other left-wing female labor activists during the
1940s.62 In her interview with Betty Friedan, Young asserted that unions, women’s organization,
and government institutions could not solve the problems of gender inequality if “women still
have two jobs to do”. For Young, the fight for equality between men and women could not be
won without the end to the “double burden” of traditional gender roles. In her article for
58
Cobble, 133-136.
Ruth Young, “Work and Play,” UE News, June 13, 1942, Ruth Young Papers, Tamiment Library & Robert F.
Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York.
60
Ruth Young, “Work and Play,” UE News, June 13, 1942.
61
When Friedan worked for the Federated Press and later the UE as a labor journalist, she published under her
maiden name Goldstein. When Friedan began to publish articles in women’s home magazines she used her married
name Friedan. For my project I will refer to her as Friedan, which is the name most readers will know her by and
although she distanced herself by changing her name, part of my project is to bridge the gap between Friedan’s time
at the UE and her later activism during the 1960s. Therefore, I will refer to her as Betty Friedan throughout my
piece, although references to Betty Goldstein will appear in footnotes. See Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the
Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1998.
62
Horowitz, Daniel. “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and
Feminism in Cold War America.” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1996): 1–42. 4.
59
29
Federation Press, Betty Friedan also argued that the government could not solve wartime labor
shortages “merely by pinning thousands of glamorous posters designed to lure more women into
the industry”.63 Friedan’s article echoes the politics of many left-wing labor activists, who
demand government assistance to lift the “double burden”. In Communist Party literature, Eva
Lapin, argued that the government must provide assistance and planning to help the women that
wore “aprons and overall”. For women to fully participate as workers, Lapin believed the
government needed to provided nurseries, day care centers, public laundries, shopping services,
and community kitchens. 64 These reforms would provide public assistance for domestic
services, often seen as private responsibilities for individual women.
Before the war, many working-class women were forced to rely on family networks for
childcare. Often, women relied on their mothers to take care of their children while they worked.
Mary Callahan “expected to marry and spend her days raising a family, as her mother did.”
However, this vision of her life was shattered when her husband died in a car accident in 1934.
At nineteen years old, Callahan was a widow responsible for raising her two year old son. During
the Great Depression, Callahan worked at an electrical plant in Philadelphia and quickly began a
vibrate labor career through the UE. After a one-month strike, led by Callahan, her plant won
union recognition becoming UE Local 105. In 1946, Callahan was elected president of her Local,
which was 85% female. She held this position until her retirement in 1977. 65 While Callahan
worked and participated in her labor union, she relied heavily on the support of her mother to
63
Ibid.
Lapin, Eva. “Mothers in Overalls,” October 1943. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18. Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.4.
65
Cobble, 31.
64
30
care for her son. Callahan recognized that her public life as a prominent union member was only
possible through the support of her mother and a network of women.66
Ruth Young was a strong advocate of childcare reform through her work with the UE.
Young also had her first child during World War II, experiencing firsthand the challenge of
balancing union work with domestic responsibilities. Young recalled that “I didn’t want a kid at
first…and then when I had her, you know, it was such a revolution in the union. Who had a kid
in 1942?” When Young became pregnant, she was membership activities director of District 4
and oversaw the UE’s organizing across New York and New Jersey. While she was pregnant,
Young worked from home until two weeks before her delivery. The UE split her positions, hiring
two new women to take over the workload. Two weeks after her delivery, Young was back to
labor organizing and was soon elected secretary of District 4. When her daughter was older,
Young would bring Karen to numerous union meetings and political events. “She used to write
me little notes. I’d be running a staff meeting of organizers and she’d send me pictures. If I had
to speak from a platform she sat there”.67 For Young, and other women with children, full
participation in union activities required the breakdown of the divide between personal, private
responsibilities at home and the public, political work.
However, Young’s position as a union organizer provider her with the privilege to hire a
domestic worker to help her manage her responsibilities with her growing labor career. To
balance her personal and public life, Young hired a live-in-nanny to care for her daughter, Karen.
The wife of a UE News editor suggested Young hire an African American woman, Phala, who
had just moved from Alabama and was looking for work. When Phala married, Young hired
66
67
Ibid.
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax, 19.
31
Phala’s sister-in-law, Minnie. 68 While Phala and Minnie were seen as part of the family, their
roles as domestic workers highlight the systematic racial inequality that existed between working
women. Historically, domestic work has been the main source of employment for women of
color.69 White working-class women were able to benefit from the systematic racism that forced
many black women into domestic work. Young was able to pay women of color to relieve her
from domestic responsibilities so that she could advance her own labor career. While Young
challenged racial inequality within factories, her personal choice to hire domestic workers
highlights the complicated racial hierarchy between working-class women.
Gender reform campaigns led by working-class women through the labor movement
successfully provided women with forms of child care during the war. Unable to ignore issues
interrupting war production, the government opened daycare facilities, funded by agencies at
both the state and federal level. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration
(WPA) had provided day care services to mothers that qualified for government relief. However,
these services were seen as a “relief effort” and were cut when the WPA was liquidated in
1943.70 That year, the government initiated childcare centers through the Lanham Act. The
legislation offered government funding for the construction of wartime facilities.71 In 1943, the
government ruled that daycare centers fell under the jurisdiction of wartime facilities and could
be funded by the Lanham Act. The government spent almost 53 million dollars over the course
of the war and oversaw the creation of hundreds of day care centers near defense plants.
68
Gerald Zahavi,“Ruth Young Jandreau.” Department of History, University at Albany-SUNY. History and Media
M.A. Program & Digital Multimedia Initiatives, June 2, 2000.
http://www.albany.edu/history/histmedia/ryjandreau.html.
69
Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Harvard
University Press, 1997) 108-110.
70
Foner, 351.
71
There are a number of agencies involved in government childcare and many political debates. For this paper, I
will only look at the Lanham Act. This legislation is the most well known and farthest reaching policy to provide
childcare during WWII. For more information see: Susan E. Riley, “Caring for Rosie’s Children: Federal Child Care
Policies in the World War II Era,” Polity 26, no. 4 (1994): 655–675.
32
Although these agencies provided women with important services, they were also marked by
bureaucratic red tape, unevenness across localities, and limitations on what women could
receive. 72
Conclusion
As the war progressed, the UE shifted its campaigns to the pending reconversion process.
The union anticipated the shift from wartime production back to consumer manufacturing as
early as 1944. On January 22, Ruth Young published an article in the UE News entitled “To Jobs
for All Women Who Want or Need Work”. The article advocated for a “post-war world” which
provided job opportunities to all women, regardless of race. The UE advocated for programs that
would continue to provide women with jobs after the war, as well as equal pay for equal work,
job training, government childcare, seniority rights, and safer working conditions. 73 That same
month, the CIO’s Political Action Committee sponsored the “Conference on Full Employment”,
lead by Ruth Young, Jeannette Brown, executive secretary of the National Council of Negro
Women, and Dorothy Bellanca, from Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The conference
advocated for equal opportunity employment after the war and the continuation of childcare and
domestic services74.
By the spring of 1945, defense industries began the transition from defense production
back to peacetime, consumer manufacturing. The reconversion process promoted mass layoffs
among female workers. Private industries and the government feared that thousands of soldiers
returning from war unemployed would create political unrest. They also believed that women
had done their patriotic duty by participating in wartime production, but should return to “their
72
Riley, 658.
“Ruth Young” Federal Bureau of Investigations.
74
Foner, 391.
73
33
place” in the home. Therefore, women were not given seniority rights. In some cases, female
workers did not have the support of the government, their unions, or their fellow male workers
when petitioning their lay-offs. As Dayo Gore argues, this process of reconversion ensured “that
both the jobs and the women were available to returning soldiers”.75 On a national level, female
employment dropped from 25 percent in 1944 to 13 percent by 1947. The 1947 statistics were
only four percent higher than female employment in 1939, before U.S. involvement in the war.
The 13 percent that continued to work after the war, were segregated into “traditional” female
positions. By the wartime peak in production in 1944, women held 380,000 positions in the
electrical industry. After the war, the number of female workers dropped to 181,600. However,
women continued to represent one-third of the positions in the electrical industry. This put the
UE in a unique position, where the core of its female membership and union leadership remained
in the union. 76
Although female employment dropped quickly, the myth that women returned to the
homes en masse was the reality for very few working-class women. Lola Wiexel, a UE worker
from Brooklyn, NY was forced to move from a skilled manufacturing job to “pink collar” office
work. “I just took my next step because I was a working person, not only a welder; I was a
working person, someone who had to keep working.” 77After being laid-off from industrial jobs,
many women returned to lower-paying service sector jobs. Other working-class women returned
to their homes when adequate daycare centers and domestic services were reduced.78 Childcare
provisions and nurseries provided by the government and private companies were closed when
the war ended. Although these domestic services were tied to wartime production, childcare
75
Gore, 104.
Kannenberg, 314.
77
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Directed by Connie Field. 1980.Clarity Educational Productions, Inc.
78
Gerda Lerner, interviewed by Nancy MacLean, September 12, 2003. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Mass. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project.2.
76
34
services were not demands that women only needed during World War II. Rather childcare
services were central to women’s abilities to participate in the workforce. Childcare and
domestic services were essential labor rights for women workers to truly be liberated from the
“double” burden.
The war economy pushed women into a political moment where they were able to
demand from the government and employers important gender reforms. Although World War II
marked the beginning of the labor movement’s move towards conservative business unionism,
rank-and-file women in the UE continued to create struggles for gender reforms that would be
built upon in the postwar years and deep into the Cold War. During the war, many working class
women pushed their unions to take up issues of gender and racial equality within the workplace.
Women joined the labor movement in unprecedented numbers, took union leadership positions,
and worked for progressive demands including government childcare and desegregated
industries. Although the reconversion process threatened the important gains women had made,
many working-class women believed they were fighting for a better world during WWII. This
sentiment was summarized in an op-ed written by Ruth Young for the UE News in 1942, when
the war began. She wrote; “I feel that with labor in the lead, and with the people of our Nation
and all the Allied Nations unified, not defeat, but victory; not a black world, but a bright one will
be the future of our children…”79 This mood was carried over by working-class women in the
postwar years and would lay the foundation for an emerging women’s movement.
79
Ruth Young, “Work and Play,” UE News, June 13, 1942, Ruth Young Papers, Tamiment Library & Robert F.
Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York.
35
Chapter Two
The “Woman Question”: The UE’s “Civil War” and Gender
Politics in the Postwar Left, 1946-1949
“Lots of the women, who went to training with me and worked with me, believed that we
were the new woman. We believed it…” Lola Weixel worked as a welder during World War II
and fought for equal pay for equal work at her factory in Brooklyn, New York. After Weixel and
her co-workers won representation from the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of
America (UE), their pay was increased by eighty percent and wage discrimination against
women of color was removed.1 For Weixel and the hundreds of women she worked alongside,
World War II was a “watershed” moment that opened new opportunities in employment and
leadership roles in the labor movement. By the end of World War II, six million women had
entered the workforce, many hoping the breakthrough in defense industries would become a
permanent feature of society. Women in the UE fought against gender discrimination, brought
cases to the National War Labor Board and won government and employer childcare. Working-
1
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. Directed by Connie Field. 1980.Clarity Educational Productions, Inc.
36
class women were emboldened by their experienced during World War II to continue to fight for
the demands they had won through trade unions.
Seizing the political moment immediately following World War II, women joined and
participated in a number of overlapping political organizations during the post-war years.
Although the Left was shrinking and provided fewer options, women created cross-class and
interracial organizations, like the Congress of American Women (CAW), to fight for gender
reforms. Women also pushed established political organizations, including the Communist Party
and the UE, to develop a more nuanced understanding of women’s oppression while fighting
against exploitation in the workplace and discrimination within larger society. These
organizations were threatened by growing political repression through anti-communist witch
hunts. The government and employers challenged these gains through anti-labor legislation,
including the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the expulsion of left-wing trade unions from the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1949. Throughout the postwar period, the UE was
forced to defend its left-wing leadership and social unionism against a rising conservative
minority. This “civil war” shifted the priorities of the union from explicit gender reform to a
defense against anti-communism. However, the UE’s social unionism emphasized participation
in progressive community organizations. The UE in New York worked closely with the Congress
of American Women and the Communist Party to defend the gains women had made during
WWII. Through these networks, working-class women made important theoretical contributions
to gender politics, most importantly the theory of “interlocking” oppression created by black,
working-class women in the Communist-Left. These contributions laid the foundations for
feminists in the 1970s and informed the UE’s own orientation towards gender inequality in the
37
1950s. Far from being “doldrum years”, a study of the UE’s relationship to the larger Cold War
Left illuminates a vibrant, hidden history of women’s activism during the post-war years.
“Catch-up” Strike Waves of 1946
Under the reconversion process, from war time production back to consumer
manufacturing, all workers in the electrical industry faced a loss of overtime work and the risk of
unemployment. However, many female workers and workers of color lost the higher paying,
skilled positions that were finally accessible during the wartime labor shortages. These workers
also faced unemployment at a higher rate, facing layoffs when white, male veterans returned to
work. At the same time, electrical companies began to produce new consumer appliances,
including television sets, washing machines, and refrigerators. These products required “light
assembly work” hiring women to fill low wages, unskilled positions. Although female industrial
workers lost their wartime positions, women continued to represent forty percent of the electrical
industry workforce. 2
The reconversion process also brought about the largest strike wave in American history.
Although defense industry jobs were lost, inflation remained at war-time levels. Across
manufacturing industries, employers refused to raise wages and threatened a dramatic decrease
in workers living standards. Over the course of 1946, 4,630 workplace actions occurred,
including strikes, walk-offs, and community protests.3 Beginning in January 1946, UE members
participated in strike waves across 16 states and 78 individual shops. Women were at the
2
Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin. Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions. Cambridge University
Press, 2003.203. In contrast, female membership in the United Automobile Workers had fallen from 28 percent
during WWII to 9 percent. The UAW and the United Steel Workers of American were seen as the CIO’s “big”
three.
3
Ronald L Filippelli and Mark McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United
Electrical Workers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).86; Philip S. Foner, Women and the
American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present, vol. Vol. II (New York: The Free Press, 1980). 399.
38
forefront of the strike efforts, demanding equal pay for equal work be a central components of
the UE strikes. Throughout the UE Locals, 60,000 women participated in workplace actions.
After five weeks, the UE settled for a fifteen percent wage increase from General Motors.4 The
contract covered 25,000 workers and included an important equal pay provision that ended wage
discrimination. After ten weeks, the UE was able to win an agreement from General Electric for
the same wage increase as well as a provision for equal pay for equal work. Westinghouse was
the last major company UE settled with on May 9th, agreeing to a similar contract. 5
Shortly before leaving The Federated Press to become a labor journalist for the UE
News, Betty Friedan wrote an article on one of the “catch-up” strikes in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
She wrote: “the whole town was with the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers (CIO)
strikes Jan. 15 as they marched 5,000 strong from the Westinghouse and General Electrical
picket lines to the old Town Green, where townsmen of Bloomfield have drilled in every war
since the American Revolution.”6 Friedan was impressed by the many women strikers, most of
whom had never been on the picket lines before. Friedan watched “old women with shawls over
their heads” picketing alongside “bobby soxers wearing slacks under their coats against the
cold”. 7 Other women, including Ruth Young, had brought their children to the picket line.8
Friedan viewed the Bloomfield strike with optimism, believing “women were a central part of
the progressive coalition determined to prevent corporations from reversing wartime gains.” 9
4
Filippelli and McColloch, 85-87.
Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present, vol. Vol. II (New
York: The Free Press, 1980).399.
6
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 113.
7
Ibid.
8
Jandreau, Ruth Young. Interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax, August 29, 1985, Ruth Young Papers,
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York. 38.
9
Jandreau, Ruth Young. Interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax, 38.
5
39
The strike wave successfully challenged wage discrimination and raised the political
consciousness of women, hoping to build off of the victories of World War II.
The strike wave of 1946 provided workers with significant victories, but it also set into
action a chain of events that would limit the rank-and-file militancy of the labor movement
during the Cold War. In 1947, the government passed the Labor-Management Relations Act,
also known as the Taft- Hartley Act. Historians Ronald Fillipelli and Mark McColloch believed
the legislation was “the culmination of an anti-labor drive which had begun during World War II
and was fueled by the spectacle of the steel, auto, and electrical unions simultaneously on strike
in 1946”.10 The act effectively replaced the gains won under the Wagner Act in 1935. The antilabor legislation banned secondary boycotts, prohibited “wildcat” strikes and required national
officers of every union to sign an affidavit swearing they were not members of the Communist
Party. 11 The Taft-Hartley Act confronted the labor movements rising power and directly
challenged important labor rights won during the 1930s.
The Taft-Hartley Act was part of a larger anti-communist crusade against progressive
political organizations waged by the government and employers. Anti-communism blazed across
American politics during the 1940s and 1950s, targeting a wide range of Americans, and leaving
in its trail many destroyed lives, political careers and progressive organizations that raised
critiques of American society. 12 Various politicians, business leaders, and government officials,
including Senator Joseph McCarthy, claimed the anti-communist witch hunts were measures to
protect democracy and American freedom. Under McCarthyism, Communist-affiliated
10
Filippelli and McColloch, 105.
George Lipsitz,. A Rainbow at Midnight: Class and Culture in Cold War America. Second Edition. (Amherst,
Massachusetts: A.J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982), 169; Steve Babson, The Unfinished Struggle: Turning Points in
American Labor, 1877-Present (United States of America: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1999);
12
Ellen Schrecker,. Introduction to Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. (New York: Bedford Books,
1994) X.
11
40
organizers were accused of Russian espionage, subversive activities, and treason. As Ellen
Schrecker argued, McCarthyism “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty
and, in the process, dramatically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable debate.”13 By equating
radical political struggles with threats to American democracy, ruling class politicians and
employers were able to suppress progressive organizations and contain efforts to challenge social
oppression and economic inequality. As a result blossoming civil rights, feminist, and workingclass struggles were stifled under the repressive political climate of the postwar years.
Initially all unions under the CIO refused to comply with the Taft-Hartley Act, viewing
the legislation as a dangerous infringement on the labor movement’s political autonomy.
However, the United Automobile Workers (UAW), under Walter Reuther’s leadership, broke the
CIO’s “united front” against the act. Shortly after the legislation was passed, smaller trade unions
under the CIO quickly followed suit. 14 In contrast, the General Executive Board of the UE
refused to comply with the act, specifically condemning the requirement that union leaders sign
affidavits swearing they were not members of the Communist Party. In April of 1947, the UE in
New York City sponsored a protest rally against the anti-labor bill at Madison Square Garden.
Ruth Young was one of the speakers at the rally, calling for the defeat of the Taft-Hartley Act.15
The UE refused to follow the CIO and support anti-labor legislation that would challenge the
labor movement’s independence and rank-and-file militancy.
These different responses highlighted larger political tensions within the labor movement.
During World War II, the CIO aligned itself with the Democratic Party, created a bureaucratic
structure, and stifled rank-and-file militancy. During the postwar period, the CIO pandered to the
13
Ibid.
Filippelli and McColloch, 104-105.
15
“Ruth Young” Federal Bureau of Investigations (Newark, New Jersey: 1944) Ruth Young Papers. Tamiment
Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York.
14
41
anti-communist “red-baiting”, moving industrial trade unions in a conservative direction. In
contrast, the UE resisted the conservative current by emphasizing rank-and-file union
participation, remaining political independent from the two-party system, and continuing to
reject red-baiting labor measures. The general president, Albert Fitzgerald denounced such
strategies by declaring: “I don’t care how sincere a person is who red-baits, nothing can be
accomplished by red-baiting that won’t injure the entire labor movement. This union will not
open its doors, not even a little crack, for red baiting.” 16 The leadership of the UE, including
Ruth Young, James Matles and Julius Emspak, condemned McCarthyism as an explicit attack on
their union and the labor movement as a whole.
While left-wing trade unions confronted anti-labor attacks from the government and
employers, the UE also faced a “civil war” from a conservative faction that used anti-communist
rhetoric to win control over the political direction of the union. Throughout World War II,
battles were waged between the left-wing leaders, led by Albert Fitzgerald, Julius Emspak, and
James Matles, and conservative forces, lead by James Carey and Harry Block. Under the
wartime banner of sacrifice and unity, the UE was able to suppress vital disagreements. Once the
veil of unity was lifted, however, conservative forces intensified their agenda. In August 1946,
ten UE locals sent representatives to a meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they formed
the UE Members for Democratic Action (UEMDA). The newly formed faction challenged the
left-wing leadership and attempted to gain control over the political direction of the union. The
faction was lead by Harry Block and supported by “labor priests” in the Catholic Church, antiCommunist Socialists, and outside organizations. Although the faction failed to unseat the leftwing leadership at the national level, the UEMDA was successful at wrestling free leadership
16
“What Is McCarthyism?” UE Steward, n.d.. Jessie Lloyd O'Connor Papers Box 131 Folder 2, Sophia Smith
Collection, Northampton, Mass.
42
positions in individual Locals. 17 The conservative faction disrupted the UE’s unity and disrupted
the momentum gained from the strike wave of 1946.
Most of the historical scholarship that studies the UE during the post-war years focuses
significant attention on the UE’s “civil war”, from 1946 to the UE’s expulsion from the CIO in
1949. Historians Lisa Kannenberg and Denis Deslippe have argued that the conservative
challenge to the UE’s leadership shifted the union’s agenda away from the campaigns for gender
reform. During this period, women continued to organize, but “their struggles were defensive”.18
In 1949, female union members from New York City gathered for a meeting to discuss the
postwar status of women, headed by Communist Party member and UE organizer, Ruth Young.
The union activists created a report that acknowledged the gains the UE had made during World
War II, but argued that the union had “not been equally alert to the problems of UE women”
after the war. 19 The “civil war” diverted union organizers attention from workplace struggles on
a local level, as well. Elaine Perry, an African-American female UE organizer, remembered,
“we had our hands full in the shop in New Jersey with things pertaining to our shop…and our
own fight” against the faction.20 Internal debates overshadowed the UE’s campaigns, slowing
down their battles with employers in their workplaces and struggles against social oppression.
However, women in the UE did continue to fight for women’s liberation through political
organizations on the Left. One of the main characteristic that separated left-wing, social unions
from their more conservative opponents, was an emphasis on community organizing. Elaine
17
Filippelli,91-93. Filipelli and McColloch argue that members of the Socialist Party, which fought with the
Communist Party throughout the twentieth century, provided invaluable political support to the right-wing faction.
During this period of the 1940s when the UE was still under the CIO, the union faced raids from the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) under the American Federation of Labor (AFL). See Fillipelli 90-94.
18
Lisa Kannenberg, “The Impacts of the Cold War on Women’s Trade Union Activism: The UE Experience.”
Labor History 34, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 1993): 309–23, 314-316.
19
“Women in the UE” issued by UERMWA District 4, Dec. 14, 1949. UE publication/leaflets. UE Archives,
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. As quoted in Kannenberg, 317.
20
Elaine Perry, interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left: Radical Histories Collection, March 26, 1979.
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York.
43
Perry remembered that the UE encouraged workers to become involved in progressive
community organizations. “We went to quite a few things, you know, through the union…” 21
The UE connected struggles in the workplace to social inequality that workers faced outside of
shop floors. Therefore, it will be useful to expand the focus of this chapter to look at other
political organizations on the Left that worked with women in the UE, during the postwar years.
This chapter will zoom out to look at the theoretical debates and reform campaigns waged by
working-class women in the Congress of American Women (CAW) and the Communist Party
(CP) that worked closely with the UE in New York. Historian Kate Weigand has shown that
mainstream feminist organizations “lost ground after 1945, but progressive women, who were
accustomed to defining themselves in opposition to dominant political and cultural ideologies,
continued to see the postwar period as an opportunity for new beginnings."22 The post-war years
were a political moment, encompassing both immense potential and increasing limitations.
Ultimately, this broader study will argue that the organizing of working class women, especially
working class women of color, made important theoretical contributions to women’s liberation
and organized significant campaigns that laid the foundation for the later feminist movement.
Congress of American Women
Immediately following World War II, women from various political backgrounds joined
together to safeguard the achievements won and advance a percolating women’s movement. The
Congress of American Women (CAW), though numerically small, was one of the most
significant coalitions formed under this climate. The Congress was established as an American
affiliate to the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). Founded in Paris in 1945,
21
Elaine Perry, interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002.47
22
44
the WIDF was an anti-fascist, pro-soviet, peace organization representing women in forty-one
countries. The American branch of the WIDF was formed on International Women’s Day, March
8, 1946. The Congress established three committees that would become the focal point of their
work: the Commission for Action on Peace and Democracy, the Commission on Child Care and
Education, and the Commission on the Status of Women. The Congress also established
community campaigns for consumer price controls, housing rights, national health insurance,
anti-lynching legislation, and equal pay for equal work. The Congress was sponsored by nineteen
affiliated organizations; including the UE, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the
Communist Party. Through the Congress, activists continued to demand wartime services that
helped to elevate the “double burden” for working women; including hot lunch programs in
public schools, communal kitchens, dining halls in public housing projects, and communal
laundry centers.23 These campaigns challenged politicians, the government, and media pressures
to return quietly to the home after World War II.
Under the banner of women’s liberation, the Congress created a broad political
organization that brought together women from different class, racial, and political backgrounds.
The founding convention in 1946, held in New York City, brought together six hundred
delegates. The Congress was lead by Susan Anthony II, Mary van Kleeck, and Dr. Gene
Weltfish. Betty Friedan reported on the founding convention through her position at The
Federated Press. Although middle and upper-class white women played a key role in
establishing the Congress, Friedan believed “the real cause of women [would] be taken up by the
working class rather than the middle and upper classes that have always had a monopoly on
women’s clubs”. The CAW advocated for a raise to the minimum wage, equal pay for equal
23
Amy Swerdlow. “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War.” In U.S.
History as Women’s History, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, 296–312.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 297.
45
work, federal job trainings for women, and access to higher education. The Congress’s pro-labor
political demands attracted a number of progressive trade union organizers, including Ruth
Young, who was elected vice-president to the CAW at the founding convention.24
The organization also had a militant stance against racism which attracted a large number
of African American women to the organization. A number of prominent black activists lead the
Harlem branch of the Congress, including Claudia Jones, Dr. Charlotte Hawkins, Thelma Dale
Perkins, Vivian Carter Mason, and Ada B. Jackson.25 Thelma Dale Perkins and Thyra Edwards
were also elected vice-president at the founding convention. While acknowledging that woman’s
organizations have historically excluded women of color and inadequately addressed the issue of
racism, Jones, Dale Perkins, and a number of women of color pushed the CAW to encourage
black leadership and establish campaigns that addressed the intersections of race and class on
women’s oppression.26 The CAW provided working-class women of color a political vehicle for
racial and gender liberation. The Congress of American Women also united activists from a
number of racial, political, and socio-economic backgrounds to nurture a growing political
consciousness through the postwar period.
Gender Politics of the Left
The close ties between the Congress of American Women and the Communist Party were
well-known. Betty Millard, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, Ruth Young, Claudia Jones, and Thelma
Dale Perkins were active members in the Communist Party during this period. The Party also had
close political relationships with left-wing trade unions in the CIO. The UE worked within the
24
Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism, 126-127.
25
Weigand, 60.
26
Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York and
London: New York University Press, 2011. 56-61.
46
postwar Communist-Left, where important theoretical debates were advancing theories on
women’s liberation. In 1948, Betty Millard published a booklet for the Congress of American
Women, challenging the narrow scope of feminism. However, her booklet failed to address the
intersections of race, gender, and class. In response, Claudia Jones criticized woman’s
organizations, trade unions, and left-wing organizations for neglecting racial discrimination in
their campaigns against gender inequality. 27 Jones and a network of working-class women of
color advanced a theory of “interlocking” oppression through political debates in Communistaffiliated organizations. This theory would be built upon by black feminists in the 1970s
developing the theory of “intersectionality”.
The Communist Party played a unique and complicated role within the postwar Left. By
1945, the Communist Party was a bureaucratic political organization that aligned itself with the
Soviet Union. Members were expected to adhere to strict political platforms or Party “lines”.28
Although the Communist Party applied a Marxist-Leninist framework to their work, Party
“lines” arbitrarily shifted to meet the needs of the Soviet Union.29 And yet, the Communist Party
worked with trade unions to push the labor movement in a more progressive direction, initiated
anti-racist struggles, and challenged inequality in the workplace and broader society. The CP
27
Weigand, 59-63.
The Hitler-Stalin Pact is one of the clearest examples of this shifting “line”. Throughout the 1930s, the CP had
lead a campaigned against fascism. The Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1941, flipped the CP’s positions on fascism when the
Soviet Union’s foreign alliances switched. Mark Naison Communist In Harlem During the Depression (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press,1983). 287-289.
29
Gore, 41. The CP was dissolved in 1944 under the leadership of National Chairman Earl Browder. Extending the
Popular Front strategy to an extreme, the CP abandoned its mission as an alternative third party that advocated for
working-class revolution. Desiring a more mainstream role in US politics, the CP was replaced with the Communist
Political Association (CPA). During World War II, the Popular Front strategy was successful. The CP sacrificed its
radical agenda to support the US war effort and supported the political alliance between the US and the Soviet
Union. However, the shaky alliance between the US and the Soviet Union dissolved after the war. As the Soviet
Union became an enemy of the US, the CP’s mainstream position within American politics was destroyed. Anticommunism struck Left organizations as the Iron Curtain between the US and the Soviet Union was being built.
Abandoning the “popular front”, the Party re-centralized Marxist-Leninist politics that critiqued the US government.
This re-evaluation of politics ushered in harder political “lines” under the leadership of William Z. Foster. Gore, 49;
Weigand, 26
28
47
also advocated for free and legal birth control, defended abortion rights, and fought against
“male chauvinism”.30 The Communist-Left also provided an important political space for women
of color to participate in the intersecting struggles for black liberation, gender equality, and labor
rights.31 Surprisingly, the most important theoretical and organizational work around the
“women’s question” occurred not at the height of the Party’s mass activities in the 1930s, but in
the years between 1946 and 1956.32
The Communist Party’s support for the Congress of American Women, an explicitly
cross-class feminist organization, was a shift in the CP’s strategic orientation to the “women
question”. During the early twentieth century, the Communist Party would have rejected the
CAW as a separatist, feminist organization. The Party argued that "bourgeois strategies" diverted
political efforts away the class struggle. Not only did the Party publicly endorse the CAW in its
national newspaper The Daily Worker in 1946, the CP also encouraged members to take an
active role in the organization.33 The Party also created a Women’s Commission and circulated a
women’s magazine to address specific problems working-class women faced. Although the anticommunist political climate limited the activities of the CP, female members were able to use the
contradictory political moment to advance the “woman question” to encompass a more fuller and
nuanced understanding of gender oppression.
Although the Communist Party had an anti-racist tradition, women of color were often
marginalized within the organization and its community campaigns. Black radical women
challenged the CP’s strategies that failed to adequately address problems that women of color
30
Weigand, 23.
Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left
Feminism. Duke University Press, 2011. 5.
32
Weigand, 5. This periodization begins in 1946 with the CP’s support for the Congress of American Women which
marks a sharp shift in the CP’s theoretical and strategies towards the “woman’s question”. The period ends in 1956
with Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes, leading to a mass exodus from the Party and signified the CP’s
loss of mainstream political influence.
33
Weigand, 62.
31
48
faced. These interventions not only pushed the Party to have a fuller concept of racial and gender
oppression, but it also established black women as theoretical leaders on the Left. Providing
theoretical contributions through Communist Party literature encompassed one strategy black
women employed to create political space within left-wing organizations.34 In 1945, Thelma
Dale Perkins published an article “Reconversion and the Negro People” advocating for
community campaigns that continued the wartime achievements. She also challenged left-wing
organizations that did not adequately address the “woman question in general and the lack of
Negro women particularly.”35 Her article also advocated for the advancement of black leaders
within all areas of CP work, not campaigns “restricted to work amongst Negroes only.”
Theoretical contributions to the Party’s “line” on gender oppression carved out important
political space for women within the Party and the larger Left.
Women in the Communist Party also engaged in debates through their work with the
Congress of American Women. In 1948, Betty Millard published a booklet “Woman Against
Myth” to commiserate the hundredth year anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention and the
publication of the Communist Manifesto. The booklet highlighted the important success that
women have made through the Suffrage movement and trade unions, while acknowledging the
continued “economic, legal and political barriers against women”. The booklet connected the
early feminist movement with the history of working-class emancipation. For Millard and
women in the CP, gender equality could not be separated from a struggle against economic
exploitation and class inequality.36 This was an important distinction between radical women and
liberal feminists. Liberal feminists saw women's oppression solely through gender inequality
34
Gore, 41.
Thelma Dale, “Reconversion and the Negro People” Political Affairs (October 1945): 894-901; Quoted in Gore,
41.
36
Betty Millard, Woman Against Myth. (New York: International Publishers, 1948). 2.
35
49
between men and women. The path for woman's liberation rested in dismantling patriarchy, a
system where men held power and women were subordinated through legal and political
inequality. For radical women implanted in trade unions and progressive organizations,
liberation also required campaigns to alleviate the problems working-class women faced both at
home and in the workplace. Women in the Communist-Left saw their gender oppression linked
to their economic relationship to capitalism. For working women a broader fight was necessary
when they faced discrimination as women and exploitation as workers. This required more than a
challenge to tradition gender roles or legal rights.37 They saw their oppression rooted in
economic inequality and inextricably tied to a broader fight against capitalism.
However, Millard's piece illustrates the failings of white feminists and more disturbingly,
the failings of white female radicals, to incorporate racial discrimination into their understanding
of women's oppression. In “Woman Against Myth”, Millard wrote “women are not lynched—as
women…For women there is generally reserved a quieter, more veiled kind of lynching.”
Comparing gender discrimination to lynching equalizes these systems of oppression by removing
the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. Under this framework, racial oppression is
simplified to the experiences of African American men and gender oppression is limited to the
experiences of white women. This oversimplification denies the experiences of both racial
violence and gender discrimination faced by working-class women of color. 38 Arguing that
women faced a “quieter” lynching, denies the centrality of race to women’s experience with
gender discrimination.
Throughout the postwar period, women of color within the Communist-Left advanced the
CP’s theoretical void on women’s oppression by developing an intersectional framework to
37
38
Weigand 90-91, 128
Gore, 57-59
50
account for racial, gender, and class discrimination. In 1949, CP National Committee member,
Claudia Jones, published a powerful piece in the Communist Party’s journal, Political Affairs.
The article entitled “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” was partially
a response to Betty Millard’s “Woman against Myth” and a larger response to the Left’s
theoretical void. Jones criticized white progressive women for inadequately addressing racism
and failing to “realize that this fight for equality…is in their own self-interest, inasmuch as the
superexploitation and oppression of Negro women tends to depress the standards of all
women.”39 Only challenging women’s roles in the home or discrimination in the workplace, did
not fully address the “women question.” Jones also argued that African American women faced
triple oppression “as workers, as Negroes, and as women—are the most oppressed stratum of the
whole population.”40 As part of a larger political framework developed within the “Communist postwar Left”, the “triple oppression” theory placed black working-class women at the forefront of
intersecting political struggles. This view directly challenged black women’s secondary status in
Black Nationalist movements and exclusion from predominantly white, feminist organizations.
Believing that liberation from one form of oppression required the dismantling of all oppression,
black working-class women proved their centrality to a number of intersecting struggles. 41 This
theoretical contribution forced left-wing organizations to view women of color as the “vanguard”
rather than secondary actors in separate struggles.
This political framework laid the foundation for a major intervention into social theory
through the concept of “intersectionality founded by black feminists in the late 1970s. Thelma Dale
Perkins, Claudia Jones, and a number “protofeminists” advanced an “interlocking” theory of
39
Mcduffie, 167.
McDuffie,167. See also: Carole Boyce Davies. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia
Jones (Duke University Press, 2008.)
41
Ibid.
40
51
women’s oppression that would “preshadowing contemporary black feminist radicalism”.42 Black
feminists in the late 1970s and 1980s built upon the theory advanced by women in the Communist
Party to incorporate the issues of sexuality, identity politics and the personal as political. In 1978, the
Combahee River Collective, a network of black feminists, issued a statement addressing the
failures of second wave feminism to adequately integrate campaigns against race and sexual
discrimination. Using similar language to Jones and Dale Perkins, the Collective developed an
“integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are
interlocking.” They encouraged political movements to “combat the manifold and simultaneous
oppressions that all women of color face.” They also wrote “if black women were free, it would
mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the
destruction of all the systems of oppression”. 43 In 1989, legal scholar, Kimberle Crenshaw
developed the term “intersectionality” to expand upon this theory and acknowledged that “the
violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities,
such as race and class.” 44 Black feminists at the end of the twentieth century expanded the
theories developed by working-class women of color in the postwar period to make
groundbreaking contributions to gender politics.
The Communist Party also advanced its postwar gender politics through its “Workers’
Schools”. In New York City, the Communist Party connected to women’s organizations, trade
unions, and the broader Left through the Jefferson School of Social Science. Created in 1944, the
Jefferson School was part of a network of educational institutions called "Workers' Schools"
42
Gore, 13.
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” , 1978 http://www.sfu.ca/iirp/
documents/Combahee%201979.pdf . See also: Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage,
1983); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981);
44
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of
Color” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43 No. 6 (1991). 1241. See also: Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and
Antiracist Politics “The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989).
43
52
built by the Communist Party. The Jefferson School of Social Science described itself as “antifascist, pro-labor, a real people’s university”. In 1949, the Jefferson School sponsored an all day
conference on “Marxism and the Woman Question”. 45 The conference featured lectures from
Claudia Jones, Betty Milliard, Eve Merriam, and Elizabeth Gurly Flynn. The conference was
held to discuss “the family, women in industry and the professions, attitudes of male superiority,
and the special problems of Negro women.”46 The Jefferson School offered female Communist
Party members another political space to present their theoretical contributions, prove their
political leadership, and debate strategies for women’s liberation. It is likely that many of the six
hundred attendees at the conference were activists from the Congress of American Women and
trade unionists from the UE. Although the postwar Left was shrinking, the Jefferson School
provided a political institution that brought together a network of left-wing activist.
The Jefferson School hosted classes for “student- workers” within the Communist Party
but also accepted trade unionists, professionals, and non-communists workers. At the school’s
height of popularity during World War II, it attracted over 10,000 students per year.47 According
to Howard Selsam, director of the Jefferson School during the 1940s, women represented
seventy-five percent of the ‘worker-students’ attending classes. 48 The school gave scholarships
to veterans, African American workers, female students, and trade unionists. Rather than seeing
education as individualized self-fulfillment, the Jefferson school encouraged a “people’s
45
In 1953, Eleanor Flexner taught a course at the Jefferson School on “The Women Question” Flexner was a CP
activist, member of the Congress of American Women and pioneer in women’s history publishing the seminal book
Century of Struggle in 1959. For this course, Flexner drew heavily on a pamphlet published by the UE in 1952 titled
UE Fights For Women Workers, written by Betty Friedan. See: Horowitz “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The
Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America.” 2
46
Weigand, 90.
47
Gettleman, Marvin. “No Varsity Teams: New York’s Jefferson School of Social Science, 1943-1956. Science &
Society, Fall 2002, Vol. 66 No. 3. 343.
48
“Women Students Show Increase” New York Times April 29, 1944.
53
education” that taught students important history and theory as well as important strategies and
lessons for change.
Under the Trade Union department, Communist Party members and left-wing academics
presented a social union framework for the labor movement. Classes trained workers for
leadership positions, offering classes on contract negotiations, public speaking, and editing shop
papers. Many of these courses were taught by labor organizers from the UE and were attended
by trade union members from the UE and other progressive unions in the greater New York area.
The School also sponsored lectures at individual union halls and lunchtime workshops in
factories.49 Throughout the postwar period, the Jefferson School offered classes on women’s
labor history and the “woman question”, bringing into conversation the UE’s social union model
with the theoretical contributions to women’s liberation.50 Given Ruth Young’s central position
as a vice-president for the Congress of American Women, member of the Communist Party in
New York City, and leading female member for the UE; she and other UE women were
interacting with these important achievements on the postwar Left.
Conclusion
As McCarthyism blazed across American politics, institutions and political organizations
with ties to the Communist Party were severely limited by anti-communist attacks.
The Congress of American Women connected a number of overlapping campaigns and brought
together a network of progressive women determined to continue the fight for gender liberation.
Within a year, the Congress had recruited over 250,000 women, clearly tapping into a political
49
Gettleman, 350. Ruth Young was a trustee for the Jefferson School during the 1940s. See Ruth Young Papers,
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. The Jefferson School was forced to close in 1956 after it
was forced to register as a “Communist front” through the Subversive Activities Control Board.
50
“Women Subject of New Course” New York Times; September 12, 1944. According the New York Times article,
classes on “The History of Women in America” were taught by Philip Foner; Weigand, 91.
54
consciousness that many women shared. However, the Congress’s success was severely limited
by McCarthyism in the late 1940s. In 1948, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the CAW to
register as a “foreign agent” and its name was added to the growing list of “subversive
organizations”. The Congress experienced extreme government repression for its close ties with
members of the Communist Party in the US and the WIDF, which were pro-Soviet Union
organizations. Many of the liberal elite women distanced themselves from “left feminism” and
progressive organization as the Cold War anti-communist witch hunt intensified. The Congress
disbanded in 1950 after losing thousands of members to the anti-communist witch hunts 51
Claudia Jones was arrested in 1948 for her relationship to the Communist Party and was held at
Ellis Island to await deportation.52 Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and ten other Communist
Party members were placed on trail in 1951 for “un-American activities.” Jones and many other
prominent progressive black leaders in New York City also experienced extreme political
repression for their political ties.53
The UE also faced political repression from the government and employers while
battling an internal “civil war”. The UE was the third largest union under the CIO and was
leading struggles in the community for workers rights. As a result, the UE was at the forefront of
the CIO’s battle with left-wing unions. In 1949, the CIO expelled the UE from the labor
federation, rejecting the left-wing union as an arm of the Soviet Union. 54 This purge of radicals
from the electrical industry was part of a larger Cold War crusade to eradicate Communists from
the labor movement. The UE was one of eleven progressive CIO unions that were expelled from
the federation in the postwar period. These unions were the “pace-setters” for the CIO in regards
51
Swerdlow, 299.
McDuffie 167.
53
Davies, 140. Jones was deported to Great Britain in 1955.
54
Schrecker. 199.
52
55
to struggles against racial and gender discrimination.55 Therefore, the expulsion of left-wing
threatened the labor movement’s role as an agent for social change and working-class struggle.
The CIO replaced its social unionism of the 1930s and early 1940s with a narrow business union
model that would carry through the twentieth century.
As the 1940s came to a close, the gains that women had made throughout the decade
seemed to diminish. The Taft-Hartley Act moved the labor movement in a more conservative
direction, eliminate trade union’s power as an effective agent for working-class emancipation.
The anti-communist witch hunts also limited the possibility of progressive feminist
organizations. However, these limitations were combated by a group of working-class women
committed to extending the gains won during World War II, challenging discrimination in the
workplace, and fighting against gender inequality within society. These women used the postwar
political period to update and expand theories on women’s oppression. These theoretical
contributions were employed by the UE during the 1950s and expanding upon by feminists in the
1970s and 1980s. The women participating in the Congress of American Women, the UE, and
the Communist Party hardly viewed themselves as part of the “doldrum years”, rather they saw
their work as part of a continual effort to improve their own personal lives as well as contribute
to a larger goal of women’s liberation.
55
Foner, 411.
56
Chapter Three
“Men’s Business Too--”: The UE’s Cold War Fight
Against Gender Inequality
In advertisements across the land, industry glorifies the American woman—in her
gleaming GE kitchen, at her Westinghouse Laundromat, before her Sylvania
television set. Nothing is too good for her—unless she works for GE, or
Westinghouse, or Sylvania or thousands of other corporations throughout the U.S.A.
-UE Fights For Women Workers! (1952)1
In 1952, labor journalist Betty Friedan was commissioned by the UE News to work on a
booklet describing the historical problems facing working women and to present a framework for
fighting back. The booklet, UE Fights For Women Workers was the first of its kind, published by
the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE). The booklet begins with the
above quote, highlighting the contradiction of gender relationships during the 1950s. Although
many historians have challenged the media’s depiction of women in the 1950s through
advertisements and consumer culture, much less scholarly attentions have been given to the
experiences of women working in General Electric, Westinghouse or Sylvania factories.
During the Cold War, women worked within the UE to organize struggles against
workplace exploitation and gender inequality. Through its official publications during the 1950s,
the UE articulated a social framework that rooted women’s oppression in their economic
1
UE Fights For Women Workers. Vol. No. 232. New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of
America, 1952. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Employment Collection Box 44
Folder 18. 5.
57
exploitation, simultaneously connected to their social oppression as women within larger society.
The UE’s publications emphasized that the union would only be able to survive the Cold War if
it created a united front that placed the fights against gender and racial inequality at the forefront
of its work. To implement this theory into practice, the union created the National Fair Practice
Committee (NFPC). The NFPC worked on campaigns with community organizations to fight
racist hiring practices and supported measures to promote female leadership alongside better
working conditions, including equal pay for equal work and affordable childcare. This chapter
will examine how the UE’s political response to the Cold War created institutional space for
women to challenge the problems they faced in their workplace and continue their fight for
broader gender reform.
Foreign policy between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s
intensified domestic anti-communism. The Korean War (1950-1953) placed the United States in
direct conflict the Soviet Union. Claiming the need to defend the US against Russian espionage,
the government created Congressional committees to investigate a number of American political
institutions that had Communist influence or were affiliated in some way with the Communist
Party. The government targeted the labor movement, government employees, academics, and
even Hollywood. 2 In 1950, the U.S. government passed the Internal Security Act, also known as
the McCarran Act. This legislation required political organizations suspected of Communist
influence to register under the Attorney General’s office and testify before the Subversive
Activities Control Board.3 Under this backdrop, the history of the labor movement is viewed as
another obstacle for workers, rather than a vehicle for working-class struggle. The partnership
2
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, “The Historiography of American Communism: An Unsettled Field,”
Labour History Review 68, no. 1 (April 2003): 61–78.62.
3
Lisa Kannenberg, “The Impacts of the Cold War on Women’s Trade Union Activism: The UE Experience.” Labor
History 34, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 1993): 309–23 314.
58
between union officials and employers, which began during World War II, moved leaders away
from the rank-and-file workers to another form of management. The labor movement, in general,
lost its “central place as a focal point of working-class identity”.4
Although the bureaucratic structure of the CIO has been viewed by some scholars as the
natural evolution of the radicalism of the 1930s that established the CIO, the “business”
unionism of the labor movement was created through the specific political decisions of labor
leaders, beginning with the tri-partite National War Labor Board during World War II. The labor
movement’s support of anti-labor legislation, including Taft-Hartley and McCarran Acts, carried
this into the postwar period. 5 The wildcat strikes during World War II and the postwar strike
waves were part of a rank-and-file challenge to this process. As Kim Moody argued “far from
evolving gradually and peacefully, bureaucracy in the CIO had to be fought for and imposed
against enormous resistance”.6 However, the anti-labor legislation, government trials, and the
campaigns against left-wing unions, had successfully barred progressive trade unionists from the
increasingly conservative and isolated labor movement by the late 1950s. This trend not only
threatened the labor movement’s centrality as an institution for working-class activism but it
challenged trade unions role as vehicles for gender reform.
Throughout the late 1940s, the left-wing leadership of the UE battled with a conservative
minority of workers for influence over the direction of the union. The union’s ability to meet
demands against gender inequality was severely limited during faction fights. The conservative
faction under the UEMDA resigned from the UE after the UE was expelled from the CIO in
1949. The UEMDA created the International Union of Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers
4
George Lipsitz. A Rainbow at Midnight: Class and Culture in Cold War America. Second Edition. (Amherst,
Massachusetts: A.J.F. Bergin Publishers, 1982).150.
5
Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. (Verso, 1988). 29.
6
Moody, 29. See also Stephanie Ross “Varieties of Social Unionism: Towards a Framework for Comparison” Just
Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 11. (Autumn 2007)
59
(IUE) to compete with the UE for representation of the electrical industry.7 IUE joined the CIO
and called upon the National Labor Review Board to run elections in three major companies,
General Motors, Westinghouse, and General Electric. The IUE was given substantial political
and monetary support from the CIO, local politicians, employers and the Catholic Church. In
contrast, the UE faced isolation and enormous opposition during union drives.8
Union elections occurred throughout the electrical industry in the early 1950s and were
called to determine whether the UE or the IUE would represent individual shop floors.
Throughout this period, both unions fought for the loyalty of female workers, which represented
one-third of the electrical workers. The IUE raids and the larger Cold War climate required the
UE leadership to prioritize the demands of female members to maintain an important minority
within the union.9 Historian Lisa Kannenberg and Denis Deslippee have argued that the UE’s
commitment to gender rights “ebbed and flowed” according to its own needs and “defense
against political enemies.”10 The union elections were so contentious that both unions needed the
support of every possible worker. Therefore, the UE could not ignore the issues of sexism and
racism facing their female workers which constituted 40 percent of its membership. Dante
DeCesare, a UE organizer from Schenectady, remembers that up until the Cold War “it was only
unionism-not so much black rights, women’s lib, and all this stuff.” During the early 1950s “That
became the focal point ‘cause now they had to broaden their base because the unions were
7
Ronald L Filippelli and Mark McColloch, Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United
Electrical Workers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). An example of such support can be found
in the CIO contacting companies that had contracts with the UE, urging them to remove all union recognition in
favor of supporting the IUE. The CIO also donated over $ 800,000 in monetary support to the IUE. See Kannenberg,
314-316.
8
Fillippelli,141
9
Kannenber 314- 316. In general, women participation in the formal economy during the Cold War rose above the
peak of women’s employment in World War II. In 1956, three and a half million women were represented by trade
unions, representing close to 20% of the unionized workers.
10
Dennis A. Deslippe, “Rights Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-1980. (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 90.
60
turning right wing”.11 The UE’s ability to survive Cold War attacks, rested on the union’s
dedication to fighting against the social oppression its workers faced.
The political needs of the leadership, specifically the support of female members,
provided an opening for women to raise demands. However, both historians underplay the
significance of the UE’s own politics and theory in creating a space for women to mobilize
against gender oppression. Without idealizing the leadership of the UE or ignoring the history of
trade unions hostility towards women and workers of color, the official UE publications and the
experiences of individual Locals highlight left-wing trade unions’ potential as a vehicle to
challenge both economic exploitation in the workforce and social oppression within society.
Fight against Discrimination in UE Locals
In 1951, Local 301 in Schenectady, New York, submitted a resolution to the UE’s
national convention stating: “All workers are awakening to the fact that discrimination against
the Negro and the woman worker is a company device to foster dissension and disunity…Negro
and women workers are militantly demanding equal rights and equal opportunity to jobs,
apprentice training, etc.” 12 That same year, Betty Friedan described a union meeting in one of
her UE News articles, where women talked and men had to listen. Friedan recalled that UE
women were “fighters—that they refused any longer to be paid or treated as some inferior
species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have swallowed the bosses’ thinking.”13 On
11
Dante"Danny "DeCesare interview by Gerald Zahavi, Oct.23,1992 ,Schenectady General Electric in the 20th
Century Oral History Project (Department of History, State University of New York, Albany). Quoted in Gerald
Zahavi, “Passionate Commitments: Race, Sex, and Communism at Schenectady General Electric, 1932-1954,”
Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (September 1996): 514–548. 515.
12
Gerald Zahavi, “Passionate Commitments: Race, Sex, and Communism at Schenectady General Electric, 19321954,” 527.
13
Betty Goldstein, “UE Drive on Wage, Job Discrimination Wins Cheers from Women Members,” UE News, 16.
Apr. 1951, 6. Quoted in Horowitz Rethinking Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique.1.
61
a local level, it was clear to Friedan that women were taking leadership over the direction of the
union and that working-class women were at the forefront of a struggle against oppression.
The hostility the UE faced from employers during the Cold War, forced the union to
organize outside of formal negotiations with corporations, like General Electric. The UE began
to rely more on grassroots activities to pressure employers to meet these demands. This shift
towards community organizing to win reforms, like equal pay for equal work, provided new
leadership opportunities for women. Historically, women’s participation within the labor
movement has been located in community organizing rather than formal leadership roles. This
new tactic made the activities of female union members much more prominent and influential
within the union as a whole.14
In 1952, for example, Schenectady Local 301 was finally able to win wage equality
reforms in their General Electric plant. For years, Local 301 had frustratingly unsuccessful
negotiations with General Electric around the issue of wage discrimination. Ultimately, the
victory for Local 301 came when UE women took matters into their own hands. The Local
established a Women’s committee to investigate discrimination in General Electric. The
committee surveyed 3,000 jobs in the Schenectady plant that were considered “women’s jobs”
with significantly lower pay than similar jobs performed by men.15 The Women’s Committee
also organized educational conferences on “the problems facing working women” and urged the
UE to fund surveys that explicitly investigated the working conditions of women of color. Local
301 also organized leadership training programs for women and advocated for leadership
promotions by holding a position on the local’s Executive Board for a female representative.16
14
Kannenberg, 316.
Kannenberg, 317.
16
Kannenberg, 313.
15
62
To pressure General Electric in Schenectady, the union mobilized UE members for a
number of actions, including a walk-out of eight hundred women to demand an end to wage
discrimination. As women walked the picket line, they held up signs reading “jobs paid on
content-not based on sex” and “a single rate structure”. After a month of protest, Local 301 was
able to win job reclassifications for almost 400 jobs, raising wages for over 1,300 women at the
General Electric plant. 17 This victory for Local 301 set a precedent for the entire union and
influenced the national union’s approach towards campaigns for equal pay for equal work.
In response to important campaigns initiated on the local level, the UE’s leadership
commissioned the UE News to publish a number of booklets and pamphlets that articulated the
UE’s position on the issues facing women workers and the role of the union could play in
facilitating change. In pamphlets titled “Men’s Business Too--”, “Together We Win”, and
“Women Fight For A Better Life!”, the UE confronted the myths that women were temporary,
unskilled workers looking for “pin money”. The union believed that such propaganda was used
to justify wage discrimination and the exploitation of female workers. The literature also
emphasized that gender discrimination was used to exploit both female and male workers;
therefore a fight against gender discrimination must be the work of the whole union.
The literature repeatedly argued this point by citing a 1950 census that claimed female
workers earned on average $1,285 less than men a year. Multiplied by the millions of female
workers, the pamphlet argued that employers could make more than five billion dollars in extra
profits each year from the exploitation of women.18 This example was used to argue that gender
discrimination within the workplace is rooted in employers’ drive to generate profit. The union
also argued that “double standards”, paying women less than men in equal positions, was a tool
17
Kannenberg, 319.
UE Fights For Women Workers, vol. No. 232 (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of
America, 1952).5. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18, Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass.
18
63
used by employers to drive down the wages of male workers. Therefore, it was in the interest of
all workers to fight against such exploitation.
Despite being charged with communist influence when it was expelled from the CIO and
having many of its leading members affiliated with the Communist Party, the UE did not
explicitly claim a political framework. However, the theoretical arguments the union made
around the issue of women’s oppression illustrate a social union model that articulated a MarxistLeninist understanding of women’s oppression. The theoretical framework used by the UE
rooted women’s oppression in their exploitation as workers. However, this exploitation was
connected to women’s oppression within larger society, including their role within the family
and the sexual objectification of women in mass media.
In the UE pamphlet, “What Price Double-Standard?” the union stated “commercialization
and exploitation of sex by the millionaire press, radio, movies and advertising is well known.
Less well known, but no less profitable, is the ruthless exploitation of women in factories and
fields throughout our land.” 19 The UE connected women’s oppression within larger society to
their economic exploitation and social relationships to capitalism. This framework provided
women the space to connect the exploitation they faced as workers to the social oppression they
faced as women. The union’s left-wing view of oppression allowed women to simultaneously
raise critiques of consumer culture, sexual objectification and economic exploitation.
The UE literature also emphasized that although sexism allowed employers to pay
women on average half the wages that men made, the experiences of women of color were
significantly impacted by racism within the workplace and larger society. In a section titled
“Special Situation of Negro Women”, the booklet UE Fights For Women Workers! claimed that
19
“What Price Double-Standard” UE Steward. n.d., Employment Collection, Sophia Smith Archive, Smith College,
Northampton, Mass. 3.
64
white men on average made $2,709 a year, white women made $1,062, while black women made
only $474 a year because of job segregation and discrimination.20 The section ended by arguing
that black women workers “have a real stake in the UE’s fight to end rate exploitation of women
in the industry, but their problems also require a special fight to lift the double bars against hiring
of Negro women”.21 This understanding of the intersections of race, gender, and class were
articulated by black radical women during the 1950s. Claudia Jones, a prominent Communist
Party member, theorized extensively on the “women question” within the Party and used her
Marxist-Leninist framework to argue that black women held a “triply-oppressed status” within
society.22 In the article, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”,
published in 1949, Jones wrote “The superexploitation of Negro woman worker is thus revealed not
only in that she received, as women less than half the pay of white men, but in that the majority of
Negro women get less than half the pay of white women.”23 Jones also argued that it was the
responsibility of left-wing activists to “demonstrate that the economic, political and social
demands of Negro women are not just ordinary demands, but special demands flowing from
special discrimination facing Negro women as women, as worker, and as Negroes…”24 The
UE’s literature reflected this challenge, emphasizing the interlocking oppression of women of
color along lines of race and class.
The demand for equal pay for equal work articulated by the UE stood in stark contrast to
the views of conservative unions and liberal feminist organizations during the 1950s. Many
20
UE Fights For Women Workers,27.
UE Fights For Women Workers, 27.
22
Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2011), 68-70. The theoretical contributions Claudia Jones and other black
radical women made during the Cold War, around the question of interlocking oppression would lay the foundation
for later black feminists who created the concept of intersectionality.
23
Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left
Feminism. Duke University Press, 2011.166
24
Carole Boyce Davies. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University
Press, 2008). 29.
21
65
unions within the CIO saw their role in the labor movement as upholding traditional American
values. Labor leader George Meany believed that “workers wives and families have greater
comforts and opportunities for social and culture development than families of workers in other
lands”.25 Through the rhetoric of American exceptionalism, Meany argued that trade unions
should provide benefits to male workers so that they could continue to support their families.
Throughout the early twentieth century, labor reformers, liberal organization, and
politicians advocated for a “family wage”. This campaign was predicated on the notion that male
workers were the primary “breadwinners” that financially supported the family. Reforms
advocated for a raise in the “family wage” so that women and children would not have to work
outside the home. This protectionist view of women’s roles in the workforce saw their wages as
secondary and supplementary to male wages. If men’s wages were raised, women could return to
their “rightful” place in the home.
The concept of “family wage” justified wage discrepancy between men and women and
made it nearly impossible for women to function without the financial support of men. This
consequence of wage discrimination was not accidental, but rather women’s lower wages were
intended to keep women from independent lives outside of the traditional family structure.26
Although wages were often discussed in contemporary politics in terms value produced by
workers, feminist scholars have pointed to the social construction of wages. Wages were an
indicator of women’s social expectations and their assumed roles within society. 27 Ultimately,
family wage and wage inequality were economic and social tools used to maintaining a
patriarchal social order.
25
Deslippe, 44.
Alice Kessler-Harris, A Women’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences, (The University Press of
Kentucky, 1991) 9.
27
Kessler-Harris, 7.
26
66
During the 1950s, the concept of “family wage” was infused with middle-class feminist
notions of individual rights for women. The issue of equal pay was framed as a moral obligation
that would allow women economic mobility. Government agencies, like the Women’s Bureau,
worked closely with labor unions but often discussed wages through consumerism and the need
to increasing women’s individual buying power. UE organizer, Mary Callahan, believed middleclass feminists viewed the debate for equal pay for equal work through their own economic
mobility. The issues was about “ ‘How can I become the manager. Not, ‘How can we get along
and improve our lot in life?’ It’s ‘How do I get up there.’”28 By the late 1950s, conservative
labor unions and liberal middle-class feminists articulated a view of equal pay for equal work
that updated the “family wage” to include individual rights that would eventually be articulated
in the Equal Pay Act (EPA) in 1963.
Therefore, the UE’s demand for equal pay for equal work was a challenge to the myths
that undermined women’s roles within the labor movement and larger society. The unapologetic
politics validated women’s economic and social independence, while legitimizing women’s
participation in the labor movement. The UE’s demand for equal pay for equal work should be
read as a progressive demand that articulated economic equality and social independence outside
of traditional family roles.
Establishing the Fair Practice Committee
The leadership of the UE understood the only way the union would survive McCarthyism
was through an increased emphasis on unity. Believing that sexism and racism divided workers
28
Interview with Mary Callahan, conducted by Alice M. Hoffman and Karen Budd, 1976, Twentieth Century Trade
Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change, Oral History Project, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations,
University of Michigan. Quoted in Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Recapturing Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in
the Postwar Era,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne J
Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 72.
67
and pinned them against one another, the UE emphasized that unity within the union would only
be achieved if locals put fights against discrimination at the forefront of its organizing. In
contrast to the UE’s vision of unity and “an injury to one is an injury to all”, many radical
organizations at the time used the rhetoric of unity to ignore racial and gender oppression that
impacted the lives of workers. The UE urged each Local to put the fights against racism and
sexism at the forefront of its organizing, believing it was necessary that the whole membership
recognized “that this is a total fight” in which every member is dedicated to “equal treatment for
all including women, Negroes and other minority groups.”29 Although McCarthyism had strained
the union’s ability to fight discrimination in individual workplaces, the UE believed the survival
of the entire labor movement rested on an increased fight against discrimination.
The union responded to growing Cold War attacks by implementing a National Fair
Practice Committee (NFPC) in 1951. The committee, which focuses specifically advocating for
gender and racial equality, was the first of its kind to be implemented into a trade union. The
NFPC sought to promote workers of color and women into leadership positions within the UE
and in individual workplaces. The committee also advocated for issues facing marginalized
workers, including equal pay for equal work, affordable childcare, fair housing practices, and
desegregating schools and industries. The union also recognized that the fight against
discrimination was uneven across individual Local. They maintained that Locals with successful
campaigns against discrimination had Fair Practice Committees that were active and integrated
29
UE Advances the Democratic Fight Vol. 4. UE National Fair Practice Committee, 1953. Employment Collection
Box 44 Folder 18. Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass. 2.
68
into the everyday activities of the union. 30 By the end of 1952, the UE had implemented fair
practice employment clauses into forty-seven separate contracts.31
For 1951 to 1956, the UE’s National Fair Practice Committee was directed by Ernest
Thompson. Thompson worked as a core maker at the American Radiator company in New
Jersey, organizing union drives at his plant. For ten years, Thompson served as the president of
his Local. After his union joined with the UE in 1943, Thompson was appointed the UE’s first
African American field organizer.32 Under Thompson’s leadership, the UE’s National Fair
Practice Committee worked to engage rank-and-file members in local campaigns that would
challenge discrimination in individual workplaces. The NFPC engage workers through union
literature that was sent to various Locals. One such pamphlet, UE Advances the Democratic
Fight! (1953), provided members with a list of questions for each local to seriously answer, in
order to gage how successful it had been at fighting discrimination. Within individual
workplaces, the NFPC asked members if “minority workers” including African American and
Puerto Rican men and women were employed in their shops. They asked if there were “lily
white” and “jimcrow” departments. When layoffs occur, were women and workers of color the
first to lose their jobs? Were job opportunities being denied to workers based on race and
gender? 33 These questions challenged workers to seriously assess discriminatory hiring practices
within their individual shops and locals.
In addition, the union argued that the survival of the UE hinged on the ability of
individual Locals to commit to a fight against gender oppression that extended far beyond higher
30
UE Advances the Democratic Fight! 3.
Ellen Perry interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left. “Women Fight For A Better Life!: UE Picture
Story of Women’s Role in American History.” United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, n.d.
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18.
32
“Ernest Thompson” Rutgers University Library http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/libs/scua/e_thompson/
e_thompson.shtml
33
UE Advances the Democratic Fight! 3.
31
69
wages for women. “The life and militancy” of the union depended on the promotion and election
of women to all levels of leadership.34 The union argues that “only by first working unitedly [sic]
to solve the problems of women in the shop can the basis be laid for encouraging greater
participation of women in the life of the Union and its leadership.”35 The UE understood
women’s role in the union as vital and had the potential to be a “decisive force” in the fight
against McCarthyism.36
However, active participation in the UE forced women to negotiate the masculine world
of “organizer” with their feminine obligations as wife and mother. The pamphlets produced by
the UE News and the National Fair Practice Committee recognized that women could not fully
participate in the union without providing support, so that women could balance their obligations
as wives and mothers outside of the workplace. This was used by some male union members to
justify denying women space in the union. In the pamphlet UE Advances the Democratic Fight!,
NFPC criticized workers who made arguments such as “women won’t come to our union
meetings they run home right after work, so how can we make them leaders?” The committee
argued that such statements illustrated that member did not fully understand the scope of
women’s oppression.
While some union members were unsympathetic to the “double burden” of women, other
union members advocate for larger gender reforms so that women could be lifted from the
double burdens of wage and house work. The UE advocated for tax deductions for child care
services. Because so few women had access to affordable childcare centers, they relied heavily
on private services. The UE believed that working women should be able to receive tax
34
“Women’s Rights: Substitute Resolution.” United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, 1953.
Mary Van Kleeck Papers, Box 108 Folder 9. Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass.
35
Women’s Rights: Substitute Resolution.” 2.
36
Women’s Rights: Substitute Resolution.” 2.
70
deductions for private childcare. The UE challenged the double standard between the wealthy
and the working class when it came to issues of tax deductions. The union argued that “it is well
known that business and wealthy individuals have great opportunities to deduct their
expenditures from their income for tax purposes.”37 They highlighted that the same opportunities
was not given to working-class families who would need tax deductions much more than the
wealthy. Childcare was often seen as a private responsibility of the family. The UE argued
however, that the responsibility of childcare should not come at the private, personal expense of
working women. This view of childcare aligned itself with a Marxist view that argued childcare
and other domestic responsibilities should be the responsibility of the government and collective
society rather than the individual responsibility of women.38
The NFPC also asked workers to honestly answer questions about the union’s work
within the community. They asked if union locals have been involved in campaigns to end racial
discrimination in other industrial industries, as well as in schools, department stores, and
hospitals. The NFPC advocated for fights against discrimination in the workplace as well as
larger campaigns for affordable and fair housing policies, affordable childcare services for
working mothers, and active participation with other organizations within the community. 39
Runaway Shops
Elaine Perry worked alongside hundred of African American women during World War
II in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Similar to many women working in defense industries, Perry lost
her job when World War II ended. She was able to find employment at a Manhattan branch of
37
Fact Sheet on Federal and State Laws Directly Affecting Women Workers (UE National Conference on Problems
of Working Women, May 2, 1953), Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18, Sophia Smith Collection,
Northampton, Mass.
38
Sharon Smith, “Domestic Labor and Women’s Oppression,” International Socialist Review no. 88 (April 2013):
28–36. 32
39
UE Advances the Democratic Fight! 3.
71
Teletone, a company which produced television sets and other electronic consumer goods. Most
of Perry’s fellow workers were women of color organized under the UE during the post-war
years. Perry was soon elected to the UE’s leadership, becoming the union’s first black female
district organizer.40 During this period, Teletone announced that it would be moving to a plant to
New Jersey, where there was no union representation. This move was not an isolated decision by
Teletone, but a tactic used by employers to break union representation in their shops. Perry and
her fellow workers understood the game that Teletone was trying to play with the UE. Rather
than give in to anti-union busting, Perry “fooled them” by organized buses to transport union
workers from Manhattan to the new location in New Jersey.41 During the Cold War, Locals in
New York City also pressured the Board of Education to create training classes for women of
color to gain industrial skills so that they could move into higher paying jobs.42
Historically, employers have challenged union representation by moving plants to areas
without strong labor representation. During the 1950s, many employers began to move
manufacturing plants from industrial cities in the North to Southern States, which had a long
history of weak labor unions intertwined with severe racial violence. The UE responded to these
racist anti-labor strategies, not through agreeing to weak concessions or alliances with General
Electric. Instead, the UE worked with other community organizations to provide factory workers
in the South with knowledge and skills that they could use to directly confront racist hiring
practices. The UE created programs that challenged “runaway shops” and the racist, union
busting tactics of employers. In one example, the union asked UE members from General
Electric plants across the country to send information on job requirements and necessary training
40
To Stand and Fight, 31.
Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle For Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Harvard University
Press, 2006.31.
42
Kannenberg, 319.
41
72
for all job positions in their individual shops. The UE’s Fair Practice Committee and the
Louisville Negro Labor Council reached out to other groups in Kentucky, including the NAACP,
the Urban League, and numerous black churches to develop a campaign to pressure the Board of
Education to establish training programs for African American workers. The campaign was so
successful that the Board of Education agreed to offer educational classes to African American
workers in segregated white schools if particular courses were not offered in black high
schools.43 These classes taught workers specific skills necessary for work in GE factories and
ensured that GE could not hide their racist hiring practices behind educational or training
requirements when it moved to Southern cities. These courses ensured that black workers,
usually excluded from skilled work, were more qualified for GE positions than white factory
workers. 44 The UE provided workers with resources that strengthened rank-and-file agency and
fights against employers.
The UE retained a strong relationship with the National Negro Labor Council throughout
the 1950s. Alongside his work in the UE, Ernest Thompson also helped to organize the National
Negro Labor Council (NNLC). Thompson was one of the founding members of the NNLC in
1951. He played a prominent role in shaping the politics of the organization, drafting the keynote
address for its first convention, which outlined the theoretical framework and its demands. The
founding convention brought together more than one thousand delegates, across the country.
More than one third of the delegates were women of color from various trade unions. The
convention established political goals for the NNLC including “100,000 new jobs” for African
American workers, the demand for a Federal Fair Employment Committee, and the “Economic
43
44
Foner, 413.
Foner, 413
73
Equality for Negro Women”. 45 The NNLC placed a particular emphasis on organizing black
women workers into industrial trade unions and “emerged as a crucial hub for black women
labor activists.”46
Elaine Perry was both a district organizer for UE in New Jersey and a member of the
newly founded National Negro Labor Council. Perry worked with a number of other African
American trade unionists, including NNLC treasure, Octavia Hawkins, who was also a member
of the Chicago local of the United Automobile Workers-CIO. Vicki Garvin was elected a vicepresident-at-large, alongside Viola Brown, organizer with the Food, Tobacco, and Allied
Workers Union and Maurice Travis, an organizer with the Independent Union of Mine, Mill, and
Smelter Workers (IUMMSW). 47 Perry was “very impressed” by the NNLC, recalling that it was
“the first time I had been exposed to something like that.”48 Perry believed that working with the
NNLC had significantly impacted her union work with the UE and her own “political outlook as
a black person”.49
National Conference on the Problems of Working Women
In January of 1952, the UE’s Fair Practice Committee in Chicago co-sponsored the first
post-war conference on the special problems facing women workers. The UE delegates discussed
the need for daycare centers, strategies to lower absenteeism, and ending discrimination against
married women. Private daycares were often too expensive for working-class mothers and the
government offered few public options for day care. Therefore, when children were ill or needed
attention, it fell on mothers to take-off from work to look after their children. The union also
45
Gore, 119.
Gore, 101
47
Gore, 119
48
Biondi, 266.
49
Gore, 118
46
74
urged locals to fight against unfair penalties place on women who were absent from work to take
care of their children. For example, when a company in Phoenix tried to fire a group of women
because of absenteeism the UE fought against their termination and was able to win their jobs
back. 50
Following the lead of its local branches, the UE held the first national conference
organized specifically around the issues facing working women the following year. On May 2,
1953, over three hundred delegates from locals across the U.S. attended the UE’s conference.
Most of the attendees were women convened to collectively discuss the discrimination they
faced in the workplace and strategies for winning necessary demands. Many of the discussions
included the UE’s position on seniority rights for married women and improved maternity
benefits. The conference also addressed the need to incorporate a struggle against racism when
discussing issues of gender oppression. The conference emphasized the need to challenge
discriminatory hiring practices against women of color.51
The entire May addition of the UE News focused on various aspects of the conference.
The front cover article called the conference a tremendous success with an “enthusiastic
response” by female union members. The event showed “the readiness of women workers to
fight for solutions to their problems”.52 A main comment that ran throughout the newspaper was
an acknowledgement that women had been at the forefront of successful campaigns to end
gender inequality. Women in the UE have “shown themselves to be among the most courageous
50
Foner 411.
“UE Leading in Fight For Women Workers,” UE News, October 5, 1953, Employment Collection Box 44 Folder
18, Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass.
52
“UE Women’s Conference Sets Equality Goals for 1953.” UE News “People Are Fighting Back, Message of the
Convention.” UE News. October 5, 1953. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18. Sophia Smith Collection,
Northampton, Mass.Lapin, Eva. “Mothers in Overalls,” October 1943. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Mass. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18.
51
75
fighters for their own needs as well as for the betterment of the working people as a whole.”53
However, the union also argued that the “full backing of our entire membership” was necessary
to carry out the “fight for the rights of our women membership”.54 While women were leading
the union to fight against gender inequality, it was the project of the entire union to carry out
these campaigns.
The union also emphasized these campaigns at its national convention that year. The UE
News interviewed female attendees impressed with the convention’s emphasis on fighting for
gender equality. The convention and UE sponsored conferences were important spaces for
women to gain important skills, learn from other locals, and bring back important knowledge to
their individual shops. Sally Sulik, an African American UE organizer from New Britain,
Connecticut, believed the convention had not only given her more knowledge on the UE, but
gave her confidence to continue organizing in her local union. “Sometimes you think you’re
stupid when you’re working alone but talking around about your problems helps you.”55Another
woman, Juanita Biggs, was interviewed by the UE News at the convention saying “being here
gives us encouragement, because we know that we’re not alone in our fight”. Similarly, Rose
Sullivan, an African American UE worker from Newark, New Jersey believed the convention
was:
The most wonderful experience that I have ever had because I feel that I am a part
of something that I actually wanted and needed. I am most impressed by the
amount of unity among the people, in other words, all for one and one for all,
regardless of race, creed or color. Deep down in my heart I feel that with this kind
of unity there is nothing so small or large that we can’t do toward building a better
world not only for ourselves but also for our children.56
53
“Women’s Rights: Substitute Resolution.” United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, 1953.
Mary Van Kleeck Papers, Box 108 Folder 9. Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass.
54
“Women’s Rights: Substitute Resolution.”
55
Horowitz, 139;“First-Time Delegates Admire Convention.” UE News. October 5, 1953. Employment Collection
Box 44 Folder 18. Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass. 10.
56
“First-Time Delegates Admire Convention.” 10; “People Are Fighting Back, Message of the Convention.” UE
News. October 5, 1953. Employment Collection Box 44 Folder 18. Sophia Smith Collection, Northampton, Mass.
76
The conference provided women with a physical space where they could come together to speak
about their work in individual locals and to discuss their own ideas with other women. Most
importantly, through the conference and national convention women were given the support and
solidarity to return to their locals energized and confident to fight on the shop floor and in their
communities. These events also initiated campaigns in locals across the country. Local 735 in
Ohio, for example, had sent two female delegates to the 1953 conference. After returning, they
were inspired to create their own campaign to eliminate wage discrimination. At the end of a
four week strike, female workers won a 26 cent raise. 57
Conclusion: Losing Schenectady
It is significant that the first conference ever held on the problems that faced women
workers was held not by a middle-class feminist organization in the 1970s, but a radical trade
union during the 1950s. The conference was organized by working-class women for workingclass women to fight for their economic rights and social independence. The ability of the union
to orchestrate such an event during a period of extreme political repression, points to the
necessity of an unapologetically militant political agenda that did not pander to the Cold War
witch hunt, like many other trade unions at the time.
Labor unions under the CIO during the Cold War moved towards “business” unionism
that conveyed a narrow focus on securing contracts and higher wages. Beginning in World War
II, trade unions aligned with the Democratic Party, pandered to the government, and suppressed
rank-and-file activities. In contrast, the UE continued to emphasize an independent, rank-and-file
union that fought for the “bread and butter” issues while simultaneously advocating against
57
Kannenberg, 319.
77
racism and sexism in society. Throughout the 1950s, the UE continued to express a “social”
union model that forged a confrontation against workplace discrimination and wage inequality
alongside campaigns for gender and racial reform.
The political consequences of these different models can be illustrated by comparing the
achievements of the UE to its more conservative competitor union, the IUE. Through the
conservative leadership under James Carey and the larger CIO, the IUE projected “liberal” social
unionism that projected the need to fight for workers individual rights “irrespective of race,
ethnicity, sex, skill, or creed.” This emphasis on individual rights de-emphasized the need for
every union member to prioritize struggle against inequality. As a result, female leadership
within the IUE remained primarily in positions as union secretary or secretary-treasurer. The UE
had elected women like Ruth Young, Elaine Perry, and Helen Quirini to important political
positions within the union. In contrast, the IUE did not have female representatives at the district
or international level throughout the Cold War. It was not until 1959 that Mary Callahan was
elected the first women to sit on the IUE’s international executive board. Similarly, the IUE did
not sponsor its first national “women’s conference” until 1957. 58
This political difference also impacted the union’s ability to challenge discriminatory
policies within the workplace. For example, the IUE Local 202 in Springfield, Massachusetts,
had a contract during the 1950s that stated “married women will not be considered for
employment if their husbands are able to work.” Other IUE locals upheld separate seniority lists
for men and women.59 In comparison the UE fought for a single seniority list and a single wage
rate structure.60
58
Deslippe, 99.
Deslippe 101.
60
Deslippe, 99
59
78
Until the mid-1950s, the UE was able to survive the IUE raids and hold on to important
locals, including Schenectady Local 301. By 1952, the IUE had acquired 231,000 members,
while the UE still retained 215,000 members.61 Although both unions attempted to win workers
by appealing to issues of gender, race, and religion, historians Filippelli and McColloch argued
the IUE’s ability to win UE strongholds came down to union leadership. If the IUE could win the
loyalty of union officials, they could win union elections more efficiently than any amount of
propaganda or red-baiting.62 As Denis Deslippe argued the IUE not easily defeat the UE because
the union could still “claim thousands of fiercely loyal workers who were not willing to abandon
the rank-and-file-run union.”63 IUE raids were most successful in Locals where rank-and-file
members were not self-organized and had little control over the direction of the union. For union
Locals that had developed strong campaigns within the community, competitor unions had
difficulty winning workers away from the UE.64 It is no surprise then that the Schenectady local,
once a union stronghold, fell to the IUE in 1954 after union leaders Leo Jandreau, William
Mastriani and Ruth Young abandoned the UE.
Because of it size and its significant to the UE and General Electric, the Schenectady
Local experienced the brunt of the Cold War attacks. Although the UE had won union elections
at Schenectady in both 1950 and 1951, years of internal battles and government assaults
weakened the UE’s hold on the Schenectady Local. In November 1953, Senator Joseph
McCarthy visited the GE plant in Schenectady to attend closed-door hearings with a number of
UE workers. McCarthy had promised to return to hold public hearings on March 9, 1954. 65 Two
weeks before McCarthy’s second visit, the Local executive board decided to accept IUE
61
Deslippe, 95.
Filippelli and McColloch 157.
63
Deslippe, 95.
64
Lipsitz, 169.
65
Kannenberg, 321.
62
79
representation, under Leo Jandreau’s leadership. Helen Quirini organized for years as a shop
steward for the UE and became the only women to sit on the executive board of Local 301
during the Cold War.66 Although Jandreau urged workers to switch to the IUE, Quirini was
skeptical of the move. She believed that the majority of women in Schenectady wanted to remain
in the UE. “I know this, that as long as we are in UE, women will not only have the right and
freedom to fight for full equality, but we will have all the UE National Offices and UE staff
fighting for us.”67 She believed the IUE was the wrong choice because “they weren’t going to
fight for everyone”. Even looking back later in life, Quirini refused to believe the move to the
IUE was the right choice or done for the right reasons. “Because after this, our union did not
have the strength it used to have.” 68
The Cold War assault destroyed the UE’s strength in the labor movement and its
representation in the electrical industry. In 1953, the UE could still claim over 200,000 members,
but UE membership fell below 60,000 members by the end of the decade. In 1960, General
Electric was able to secure contracts with over 60 different unions. As Lisa Kannenberg
illustrates, the weak and divided representation of workers in the electrical industry allowed
employers to push through anti-union measures including speed-ups, lay-offs through
automation, and moving jobs through deindustrialization. Breaking the UE and dividing union
representation created in a weak labor movement that could not adequately protect workers from
these measures. These larger trends disproportionately affected women workers and workers of
color. The defeat of the UE disintegrated the important networks women had built throughout
66
Nancy. B Palmer, “Gender, Sexuality, and Work: Women and Men in the Electrical Industry, 1940-1955”
(Boston College, 1995). 123.
67
Kannenberg, 321.
68
Gerald Zahavi, “Uncivil War: An Oral History of Labor, Communism, and Community in Schenectady, New
York, 1944-1954,” in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, ed.
Robert W Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
80
World War II and the post-war period. When women joined newer, more conservative unions,
they lost political institutions that had both the political framework to fight for women’s
liberation and a long tradition of victories.69
Betty Friedan would leave the UE in 1953 to work as a freelance journalist for women’s
magazines. In her later work, Friedan would help popularize the myth of the dormant 1950s.
However, examining the union Friedan wrote for during the 1950s complicates our view of this
period. Far from simply being victims of the Cold War, working-class women in the UE
challenge this culture and used their trade unions to fight for gender reforms. Demands for
childcare and equal pay for equal work are linked to the organizing of middle-class feminist
organization in the second wave feminist movement. However, working-class women won and
defended important gender reforms decades before Betty Friedan penned The Feminine
Mystique. In 1976, Friedan hinted to this radical past in comment about the “the dangerous politics
of world revolution whose vanguard we used to fancy ourselves”.70 Although Friedan was mocking
the view she held earlier in life, the women Friedan’s work with in the UE, the NNLC, the Congress
of American Women and the Communist Party were, in fact, the vanguard of women’s history.
69
Kannenberg, 323.
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism, 213
70
81
Conclusion
“She Had To Give Up Everything She Ever Was”: The
Historical Importance of the UE’s Legacy
As the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique sits on bookshelves across
the world, the re-examining of its author’s life is part of an emerging field of scholarship that
attempts to re-think the “waves of feminism” and our view of women’s history in the late 1940s
and 1950s. In an earlier draft of the Feminine Mystique, Friedan chose to include a section
condemning the Left’s ability to challenge sexism and advocate for the concerns of women.
More surprising, an earlier draft also included her personal musings on the relationship between
the anti-communism of the Cold War and the emergence of the feminine mystique.1 And yet,
Friedan wiped all explicit references to a radical history of the late 1940s and 1950s from the
published edition of her book. Later in life, Friedan refused to acknowledge this past as part of
her personal history. In part, this omission was the result of the anti-communist crusades itself.
Friedan pandered to the political content that middle-class, conservative, white Americans would
want to read. Distancing herself from a radical analysis of women’s oppression, Friedan
guaranteed credibility and a wide readership.
1
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 213.
82
The legacy of anti-communism also lays heavy on the history presented above. Ruth
Young severed all ties with the Communist Party and resigned from her position with the UE by
1950, when she married Leo Jandreau of Schenectady Local 301. They were both executive
board members for the UE in the late 1940s, but when they married Young resigned from her
position as the District Four Secretary and executive board member to move to Schenectady,
New York. “I knew when I married Leo that I was not going to work in the union. But I also
knew he wanted me to stay home. And he also told me, he wanted a home.”2 Young responded
to her friends and families concerns and disapproval by saying, “I want someone to put their arm
around me. I want one man to love me. I don’t want thirty thousand to applaud me.” Young’s
personal narrative of her life emphasized her desire for a stable suburban life with a loving
husband. This was the turning point for her activism in the post-war years. Ruth Young’s
daughter, Karen Clark, remembers “my mother really was trying to stay home and sort of bake
cookies and she really did—it’s funny, it took her years to learn how to bake a pie. My mother
worked very hard at being a housewife and I cherished that…”3 Young may have wanted to
leave the UE so that she could spend more time with her children, after spending ten years
balancing her personal life with her union work. Both Ruth Young and Betty Friedan would
chose to end their careers in the labor movement and their organizing with progressive
organizations for life in the suburbs in the early 1950s. However, this decision is connected to
the larger political climate that both women organized through. Their decisions to leave the UE
may have more to do with the failings of a larger left and the escalating Cold War than a
maternalistic yearning for domesticity and suburban life.
2
Gerald Zahavi, in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, ed.
Robert W Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
3
Zahavi, “Uncivil War: An Oral History of Labor, Communism, and Community in Schenectady, New York, 19441954,” 49.
83
Daniel Horowitz argues that male centered histories of disillusionment with the Cold War
Left are often expressed through major turning points, whether they cite the Nazi-Soviet Pact or
Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s war crimes.4 In contrast, many radical women expressed
their disillusionment through their personal experiences with employment discrimination or male
chauvinism from comrades. For Betty Friedan, her disillusionment with the Left intersects with
the end of her labor career at the UE News. Unable to manage her writing career with her
growing domestic responsibilities, Friedan was forced to leave the UE when she became
pregnant with her second child in 1952.5 Friedan believed the UE’s maternity benefits did not
provide her with enough support. However, her official departure occurred in 1953. The union
was forced to cut its staff after shop floor raids drastically reduced its membership. The union
fired Friedan and another female staffer, who had less seniority than their male co-workers.
Although Friedan allegedly “offered to quit”, a case was brought to the UE’s Fair Practice
Committee, charging the union with sexual discrimination. When Friedan’s case was brought in
front of her own union, the Newspaper Guild, she was told, “It’s your fault for getting
pregnant.”6 Friedan believed she had been discriminated against by the union that represented
her and the left-wing union she worked for.
Similarly, Ruth Young’s deradicalization may have occurred during moments of
disillusionment with male trade unionists. Although the strike wave in 1946 had positive impacts
for women in the UE, for Ruth Young the strike was the beginning of the end of her labor career.
During World War II, Young had worked as a top union organizer for the UE in District Four,
overseeing New York and New Jersey. By 1946, Young had become the first women elected to
4
Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism, 213.
5
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax., August 29, 1985. Ruth Young Papers.
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York
6
Horowtiz, 141.
84
the National Executive Board and was overseeing the Bloomfield strike. Young remembers that
she was “scared and awed by the responsibility thrust upon me. These people believed in me…I
had wanted the position and now I had to deliver!”7 At the time of the strike, Young and her
husband lived in New York City and she was forced to take the train to New Jersey at three
o’clock in the morning, with a young child in toe.
The Bloomfield strike initially started with peaceful protests outside the Westinghouse
plant, but the police soon escalated events by using excessive force and arresting a number of UE
members. Young worked with other workers to free their fellow union members, even
organizing a march of 5,000 people to advocate for their release. While the UE members were on
trial, Young tireless worked with lawyers, visiting the court room every day until the union
members won their case and were freed. However, Young never forgave the other union officials
in New Jersey, all of whom were men, for their lack of support. While Young walked the picket
line and supported fellow members in the courtroom, the other UE officials remained in Newark,
New Jersey. Young recalls that this strike was where she lost respect for union leaders who “all
sat on their asses in the Newark office and left me, a woman, out there alone.”8
A retreat into the feminine mystique might have been a shield from the escalating Cold
War. While battling the conservative faction and later the IUE, Jandreau came under attack for
his alleged ties to the Communist Party. By 1950, he had officially left the Communist Party and
denied any ties. However, Ruth Young could not so easily distance herself from the Party. In
fact, her close relationship with the CP was used to attack Leo Jandreau and the Schenectady
7
Gerald Zahavi, “Ruth Young Jandreau,” Department of History, University at Albany-SUNY, History and Media
M.A. Program & Digital Multimedia Initiatives, June 2, 2000<http://www.albany.edu/history/histmedia/
ryjandreau.html>
8
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax, 38.
85
Local.9 Like many other prominent left-wing trade unionists, Young had been labeled a “key
figure” in the FBI’s anti-communist investigation and had been spied on since 1943. Newspapers
speculated that Young would be called in front of McCarthy during the Schenectady trials. Her
daughter also recalled repeated visits from the FBI at Young’s home. Young’s flight into the
suburbs might have been her attempts to go underground.
In comparison, Betty Friedan had the option to abandon her organizing and live
peacefully in the suburbs. Betty Friedan’s actual class position was much different than the
women she was writing about. Friedan was educated at an elite women’s college and had a
wealthy husband. While she wrote on the exploitation of factory workers, Friedan was buying
“clothes at Bergdorf’s, replacing our college Braemar sweaters with black cashmere and Gucci
gloves, on sale.”10 Similarly, Ruth Young’s daughter believed she was “really a privileged
child”. Although Young began as a factory worker during the Great Depression, she had become
a leading woman of the left. When she was home, Karen remembered expensive clothing stores
and trips to Radio City Music Hall. She believed those were things that only wealthy and uppermiddle class women did.11 Spoiling her daughter with expensive clothes and luxury trips might
have been Young’s way of making up for the time that she spent working. It is also an indicator
of her class mobility that most UE members were not afforded.
For working-class women, a retreat into the feminine mystique was not possible. Women
in the UE worked to support their families and continued to work in factories owned by General
Electric and Westinghouse when the UE was pushed out of their Locals. However, this choice
for Friedan and Young did not come without personal costs. For Friedan, the price of entrance
into the domestic world required her to deny decades of journalistic work and abandon the
9
Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax, 39
Horowitz, 136.
11
Zahavi 131
10
86
relationships she had created through the Federated Press and the UE News. Similarly, Ruth
Young abandoned one of the most vibrant and significant labor careers during the 1940s and
1950s. Looking back on the Cold War, Clark believed her mother “lost everything in many
ways…she had to give up everything she ever was.” 12
The gains that women had won under the UE and the political consciousness that was
fostered in their trade union left an impact on the lives of women who participated in the
struggles for workplace justice and an end to discrimination.13 Elaine Perry worked with the UE
until she became ill in 1954 and was forced to leave her job and her work with the union.
Although Perry returned to work later in life, she was represented by more conservative unions.
When asked if she was active in the labor movement after her time with the UE, she responded
“No…this sounds a little silly, but no union is like the UE to me…”14 Perry looked back fondly
at her work with the union, believing it had given her an important sense of confidence and selfworth. More importantly, Perry passed on a spirit of resistance to her daughter and her
granddaughters. “I am not sorry [I was active in a union], I got to meet wonder people, people I
still retain friendships with, and I taught my daughter how to be black conscious…they are very
proud of our heritage…I am not sorry”.15
With radical coalitions like the Congress of American Women or trade unions like the
UE no longer an option for activism, Helen Quirini moved to liberal community organizations.
By 1970, Quirini was appointed the president of Schenectady’s chapter of the Young Women’s
12
Zahavi , 135 Ruth Young had a second child Roseanne in the early 1950s. After she raised her two children,
Young went back to work. She held administrative positions at local colleges in upstate New York, before going
back to school herself. In 1973, she earned a B.A. in Higher Education Administration from the College of St. Rose
and earned a M.A. in Liberal Studies in 1980. During this time, Young gave public lectures on women’s labor
history. See: Ruth Young Jandreau, interviewed by Ruth Milkman and Meredith Tax
13
Kannenberg, 323.
14
Elaine Perry, interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left: Radical Histories Collection, March 26, 1979.
Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York.
15
Elaine Perry, interviewed by the Oral History of the American Left
87
Christian Association (YWCA). Through her work with the YWCA, Quirini helped to organize
shelters for domestic violence survivors. Quirini also participated in the civil rights movement,
struggles for affordable housing, and accessible healthcare.16 She believed her work with the UE
gave her a political consciousness that shaped her work in the 1970s. Quirini also believed that
her work with the UE paved the way for the future generation of women. “When I meet younger
women in higher jobs, I say ‘You’re welcome’ because many of them are in their jobs because
my generation laid the foundation for them”.17
The Cold War forced workers to defend these gains from the conservative backlash both
on a local level and a broader backlash from the government and employers. This political
climate challenged labor unions’ ability to remain an important political vehicle for women’s
liberation. However, this is only one side of the story. World War II opened the union structure
to women and workers of color, creating new opportunities for leadership in the UE and
provided women with the opportunity to use trade unions as a way to challenge working
conditions and fight for important social services. Building on the momentum of these victories,
women viewed the postwar years as a political moment filled with immense possibilities to gain
equality. Women in the UE worked with organizations on the Left, including the Congress of
American Women and the Communist Party to advanced important theories on women’s
liberation. While defending their union from right-wing attacks, women continued to advocate
for childcare and equal pay for equal work. The theoretical advancement made by working-class
women on the Left coupled with the important campaigns initiated by female UE members
would lay the foundation for the later feminist movement.
16
17
Kannenberg, 323.
Kannenberg, 323.
88
Viewing themselves as the inheritors of the suffrage movement, feminists in the 1960s named
the political work of NOW and affiliated organizations the “second waves” of feminism. This
metaphor was created out of the feminist movement of the 1960s to connect to a similar example
within women’s history. However, this metaphor has been employed by historians as the primary
way to understand women’s history in the United States throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth
century. Students are taught that women’s history begins at Seneca Fall in 1848 and closely follows
the organizing of elite, white women working in national women’s organization. Women of color do
not appear in the timeline until the “third” wave of feminism in the 1980s, as a reaction to the white
feminist movement. Similarly, the organizing of working-class women, radicals, and LGBT activists
rarely enters the timeline. This completely hides the organizing of women of color and working class
women throughout history. It removes the centrality of their organizing to a longer, richer history of
resistance.
From its inception, women’s history has been used to “provide a revolutionary blueprint
for the movement”. 18 It was created as an analytical organizing tool to understand how women
in the past have created change so that we can learn important lessons for today. Viewing the
postwar period as the “doldrum years” obscures a vibrant political moment in women’s history.
Placing Betty Friedan into women’s labor history during the 1940s and 1950s, not only
highlights an important group of women active during this time, but it challenges our view of
where change comes from. This study is part of a larger project to rethink the roots of second
wave feminism, re-evaluate the role of trade unions as a vehicle for fighting inequality, and
ultimately provide important lessons for activists today.
18
bell hooks. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Second Edition. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000.xi
89
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