Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [102]
Her feelings were assuaged in late 1994, when she was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Studies Association, headquartered in Lansing. She could not attend either event because of illnesses. She sent greetings to the Hall of Fame dinner audience on October 20, 1994. One attendant wrote to Genora that “we are so pleased you are being honored and recognized for the wonderful work you have done for working people over the years, and continue to do so.”56 Victor Reuther’s wife, Sophie, sent a letter to the Hall of Fame, saying that it “honors itself” as well as the honoree by Genora’s induction, which “advances and elevates the continuing struggle of women for equal rights, equal recognition . . . and equal remuneration for their contributions.” Genora, Sophie asserted, was of the “great tradition of Mother Jones.” Genora was to the auto workers what Mother Jones had been to the mine workers. The 1937 settlement with GM was “more than a Union victory.” It was a “small revolution in the continuing struggle of women for equality and justice.” All who had fought in that long-ago struggle “owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Genora.”57 Sue Ann Connolly said that Genora devoted herself to helping others realize their rightful life of dignity and security and had “a knack for teaching people they have rights.” She inspired them to use their unrealized powers to protect and preserve those rights.58 The Hall of Fame sent a huge bouquet of roses to Genora in Los Angeles. She received letters of congratulations from all over the country, along with tapes and other memorabilia from the celebration. “This whole experience,” she happily exclaimed, “has been quite overwhelming.”59
Despite ill health, Genora remained ambulatory and managed to be present at one very important event in Los Angeles. She wrote to a friend that “in 1994 the disgust with the two-party system has skyrocketed across the nation.”60 She was therefore a charter member of a new attempt to build a bona fide national labor party. The group making this effort was the Labor Party Advocates (LPA). “We need to form our own political party,” she told an interviewer. “What have we got today? We won a great number of economic gains [in the Socialist and Socialist Workers Party] but politically we never did anything to secure them,” making them vulnerable to legislative destruction. “I have always been in favor of a Labor Party for working people.”61
In December 1994, Genora attended the organizational meeting of the LPA. Receiving two standing ovations, she told the crowd that this gathering reminded her of an old-time revival meeting. In the beginning was the Word, and that Word was “Organize!”62 The workingman would not receive any protection—from either government or management—“until we get back into our original mold” of solidarity. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), she argued, was bad news for the laboring classes in the United States. Jobs were exported overseas, primarily to Mexico, where the wages were 10 percent of those found in this country.63 Corroborating her opinions here, another factory laborer lamented that “corporations want the American worker to tread water or sink so other workers around the world can catch up with us.”64
Nonetheless, Genora objected to an anti-Japanese “Made in Japan” advertisement issued by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Since moving to California, Genora had made many new friends of Japanese ancestry and knew of the “genuine horror they went through