Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [104]
From the heyday of union activity in the late 1930s to its virtual demise in the mid-1990s, Genora Dollinger was on the scene of labor and social reform. If it took physically risking her life, as in 1937, to gain rights for workers and women, so be it. In the ensuing years she never hesitated to give her thoughts and opinions, whether or not she was asked for them, of labor conditions in the United States and around the world. She was the constant questioner, the tireless worker for things she deemed right, just, and proper. Her legacy should not be forgotten, even by those who disdain the labor movement. She was at the heart of the labor and women’s rights movements in this country for much of the twentieth century, and her memory extends well into the twenty-first.
Nine An Assessment
Genora Albro Johnson Dollinger’s life can be considered revolutionary on many levels. Her early family life did not point the way later on for “radical” Trotskyism: she taught Sunday school in a Methodist church and availed herself of all the trappings of a middle-class family. Carl Johnson, her father-in-law, had more ideological influence on her life than her own father, Raymond Albro, and showed her the way of Socialism.
Nevertheless, there was nothing incremental in her life; she was either one thing or the other. This does not mean that Genora was impetuous—at least, always—though sometimes her statements appeared so. She studied the philosophical assortments proffered to her and, because of the 1937 sit-downs and the Oak Park demonstrations the next year, concluded that involvement from the federal government was essential to alleviate human suffering when state governments could not or would not do whatever was necessary.
Genora’s forming of the Women’s Emergency Brigade and her subsequent activities in it provided the next level of her developing revolutionary involvement. No one could have predicted, based on her earlier life, that she would become this militant. To be sure, she had a reputation among family and friends for stridency on several issues, but, until 1937, militarism was not one of them. Though connecting the sit-downs of 1937 with the beginnings of the modern women’s movement, she and her colleagues were more pragmatic than idealistic when they formed the EB to protect, defend, and fight—if necessary—for the men inside the plants. During the dramatic events of 1937 and her subsequent extensive speaking tours on the East Coast, Genora increasingly evoked a women’s rights agenda within the context of union—union all the way. “Organize” was her call, after which was “solidarity” and these calls included both men and women in the labor movement.
The sit-downs of 1937 and the union victory were the formative events in Genora’s life. In one way or another in the future, whatever she spoke about—political ideology, social justice, educational systems, racial bigotries, abortion, the right to die, and a host of other major issues of her day and time—was in the context of the conjoined union-feminist movement of 1937. Audiences always knew that if her subject was not the EBs of 1937, they were at least on her mind. This made her speeches popular with many listeners and tiresome to some. She inadvertently practiced the old speech-class adage that people come to orations not to learn anything new but to reconfirm what they already know.
Genora was also revolutionary in her avid