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feel they were . . . helping and partaking in the livelihood of their families.”22 Emily Palana was grateful that Genora and her followers “put their lives on the line” for future generations. They “walked the extra mile” and deserved the “respect and acknowledgment” of posterity.23 Genora and colleagues offered a “good example” of how effective and peaceful civil protest can be, wrote student E. Wolfe.24 And Bernadine Garcia, remarking on the importance of the past, asked, “How can we learn from it if we are only taught part of it?”25 These responses in Professor Coodley’s class urged an increased awareness of women’s roles in the past and a better understanding of how their activities contributed to the betterment of not only their status but men’s as well. Genora would have been thrilled with these observations and comments from such bright young people. To be sure, one might argue, showing this movie to young, impressionable minds might have elicited expected comments; it was nevertheless a film in which the unfamiliar Genora Dollinger spoke to them about very familiar contemporary matters.

The essays also touched on the cherished internationalism that Genora, James P. Cannon, and the SWP championed for so long. Interestingly, however, the internationalism they envisioned came not because of any workers’ uprisings but because of capitalistic manipulations, expressed in part through NAFTA. Genora lamented the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas markets and argued that this kind of internationalism was confrontational rather than cooperative. She was depressed by this situation and would not have agreed with Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelley that “the union movement has been re-infused with the fighting spirit that working class neighborhoods have nurtured for so long.”26 She would undoubtedly have said, “Bring back the jobs and then we’ll talk about working-class neighborhoods.” A major event of early 2006, however, might have given her a reason to be heartened by Zinn, Frank, and Kelley’s statement. Poll results emanating from the New York City transit strike of 2006 indicated that the public, despite the hardships imposed on them by the strike, favored the union. One poll, conducted by Survey USA on the first day of the strike, asked, “In the transit strike, whose side are you on?” and 52 percent of respondents said the union while only 40 percent said the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). A poll by a local radio station, WWRL, “found that 71 percent of respondents blamed the MTA for the strike and 14 percent blamed the union.”27 So it may well have been that union and management practiced tuxedo unionism, but the relationship between union and the general public appeared to be on a sounder and friendlier basis than was commonly thought.

Genora would have been pleased with celebrations in Flint on February 11, 2003, with UAW president Ron Gettelfinger as the featured speaker. A handful of the ever-dwindling number of sit-down survivors attended this White Shirt Day. The luncheon featured only bean soup and bread because this was the “simple fare that the sit-down strikers ate during their 44-day confrontation with General Motors.”28 White shirts and beans were reminders of the events of 1937 that caused Genora to agitate one labor, feminist, social, and economic question after another.

Genora’s revolutionary spirit can also be seen in the way she dealt with her physical condition. She exemplified the thought that if you want to live a long time, find yourself a “nice” disease—“nice” here meant “treatable”—and develop a lifestyle compatible with the degree and extent of your malady. Her illnesses accentuated her zest for life. She knew there was a timetable; therefore it was incumbent upon her to get as much out of life as she could. Would her revolutionary activities have been greater and more widespread if she had remained perfectly healthy? Probably not. In fact, they could very well have been less because of other activities and interests. Her illnesses focused her attention. She did not put off the