Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [105]
War emergencies caused more women than ever to be hired at armaments factories and other plants that produced war materiels. One week before Pearl Harbor, 25.3 percent of women over the age of fourteen had public jobs (i.e., outside the home). During the war this figure climbed to 36.1 percent, for a wartime peak of 19.5 million female employees.1 As Genora personally learned on many occasions—and she was in the company of thousands of other women—even in wartime, women’s presence in factories created jealousies and resentments, not just among management but among union workers as well. A woman’s place was in the home, and that was all there was to it. For most male workers, “family wages,” or the “sum necessary to sustain family members” meant “reserved for men only.”2
These attitudes by both labor and management inspired Genora to work toward uniting the interests of workers and feminism. She never objected to a woman staying at home through choice; in fact, she lauded such a course. It was only if a woman were denied employment simply on the grounds of gender that became a major spur of Genora’s social commitments. Immediately after the war an “intensification of propaganda” sought to indoctrinate the American woman back into “her place” of “happy housewife.” This struggle between the “establishment” and women’s rights groups “had to be dealt with in some way.”3 And Genora took up her own role in these matters.
From 1929 onward, Genora was a Socialist, though for much of that time not formally affiliated with any particular party. After a stint in the SWP and the Social Union of America, she avoided political factions until near the time of her death in 1995, when she worked to establish an American Labor Party. Whatever causes she supported, her work was always within the framework of a Socialist philosophy—not particularly Trotskyist after she left the SWP in 1953, and never Stalinist. Too many factions developed in these persuasions, to the point that workers’ interests were buried beneath intellectual jargon. She became, in effect, a freelance Socialist, always maintaining that the philosophies of Karl Marx remained viable.
Genora was a high school dropout who at first did not comprehend theory, then tired of it quickly as she gained a clear understanding. (Theory is wonderful, but you can’t put it on your dinner table.) She wanted action and was impatient and frustrated that so many times she did not get it—at least as she wanted it.
She would have agreed with Elizabeth Faue’s observation that women workers had been ignored “by a labor movement that failed to acknowledge the . . . importance of women’s work to the family economy . . . and the connections between the community and the workplace.”4 Genora also liked Ann Gordon’s 1971 statement that “the new women’s history seeks to bring the lives of ordinary women to the foreground and to understand them in the largest context” and hoped such statements would encourage studies that included women in all stages of life and occupations.5 The workingwoman would surely be included in such a sweep.6
Genora helped propel the second wave of feminism that occurred primarily after World War II, but she came to reject the idea of many second wavers that they had “rekindled a struggle that had been dormant since the suffrage victory in 1920.”7 She held this thought to be absurd because