Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [106]
Like many colleagues, Genora came to the point where she did not try to separate feminist activism from union activism and linked the two groups through their mutual interests.10 As historian Sherry Lee Linkon asserts, “Cultural Studies [which includes feminism] and labor history have not usually made a comfortable pair. They are distant cousins, with Marx as a common ancestry.”11 Genora’s life proposed to close that gap; she was a “new woman” who “experimented with new forms of public behavior and new gender roles.”12
Coming out of the mid to late 1980s was another feminist movement, generally referred to as the third wave. These women identified less with the political arena than their earlier counterparts and more with questions of abortion, eating disorders, and domestic abuse.13 Third wave proponents rejected the influence of past movements because they saw feminism not as a growing and changing movement but as a dialogue of the past that “conjures up images of militantly bell-bottomed women’s libbers.”14 While Genora was sympathetic in many ways to the third wave, she faulted them, as did other individuals, for neglecting, even ignoring, the past. As one author put it, “Having no sense of how we got here condemns women to reinvent the wheel and often blocks us from creating a political strategy.” The third wave must understand the “first two waves of feminism in America to continue and move forward” in allowing women to make their own choices between and among career, family, and education.15 The third wave was still in progress when Genora died in 1995.
Beyond giving her thoughts on the third wave, Genora also used letters, speeches, symposia, seminars, and, eventually, the movies to publicize her principles and philosophies. In the process, she became a heroine of the labor movement, as well as of feminism, social reform, and legal justice. She did not reach national prominence the way individuals such as Ralph Nader, Barry Commoner, Betty Friedan, and a few others did, but she greatly helped them on their way to the top. The most famous movie Genora had a part in was With Babies and Banners, which depicted Genora’s and other women’s roles in the 1937 sit-downs. In 1999 professor Lauren Coodley of Napa Valley College in California showed this movie to her history students. She asked them two questions: “What do you want to remember from the movie?” and “How can women be written into history?” Admittedly, these questions encouraged favorable student responses, but because they were hearing about Genora Dollinger for the first time in their lives, the reactions did contain some intellectual analyses. Here are some responses.
Roberta Morovic admired Genora’s “spunkiness.”16 Angelina Rodriquez believed that if “people get together and organize, things can be accomplished.”17 Laurie Thompson was impressed with Genora’s strength and power that “changed history” in the sit-downs and afterward and “set an example for other women.” Genora, Laurie said, was “tricky, cunning, and overall, very smart.”18 Genora had “the courage to speak up for what she believed in,” asserted Maria Villafuerte; she “struggled to break the old stereotypes” of women belonging “only in the kitchen.”19 Genora exemplified the thought, Peggy David wrote, that “if you feel passionate about something you will find the way to make it work.”20 When the sit-down strike started, Genora and the other women probably did not have any specific notions of what they were going to do, but “she found the voice she needed to get the victory she desired.”21 According to Karen Gratton, Genora “stepped up and voiced what many of the women felt. She organized them so they could