Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [11]
One Genesis of a Revolutionary
Genora Johnson and colleagues could cite numerous precedents of women’s participation in the context of labor union activities in the 1937 sit-down strikes. In strikes of 1828 and 1834, women in a textile mill in Dover, New Hampshire, won higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to organize. Following the New Hampshire example, women textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, won important victories—including the reduction of the workday to ten hours—in the 1840s. In Lynn, Massachusetts, women in the shoe industry formed a union called the Daughters of St. Crispin. By the turn of the century, women workers had actually organized on several labor fronts.1
In 1909, twenty thousand shirtwaist workers walked off their jobs in New York City. Historian Nan Enstad explains the strike’s significance: “The shirtwaist strike is famous in labor both because it was the largest female-dominated strike to that date and because it inaugerated [sic] a string of large women strikes in the 1910s that dramatically asserted working women’s political participation and firmly established women’s unionism.” One major achievement of this strike was the formation of the International Lady’s Garment Worker’s Union (ILGWU) and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). During the early 1930s in the Great Depression, “Unions embraced a public agenda devoid of an overt gender rhetoric . . . but still with ‘gender hierarchies.’”2 Women workers were not considered equal partners in the labor movements of the 1930s, in part, because “labor propaganda described the movements as male, while women were portrayed either as victims of the industrial system or as loyal supporters of their worker husbands.”3
One unusual aspect of the Flint sit-downs was that some participants, both men and women, had previously taken worker-education classes from Roy Reuther (later head of the United Auto Workers [UAW]) that ranged from labor history to parliamentary procedures. These classes had been funded in part by the Mott Foundation, whose founder was one of the largest General Motors (GM) shareholders in the country. Genora, noting this irony, wryly remarked, “The people that first built the nucleus of the strike were primarily people who had gone through Roy’s classes.”4 By the time of the Flint uprisings in the late 1930s, then, there were numerous precedents for widespread feminist activity in labor events. The thing that set Flint apart from earlier labor experiences was that women’s activities of the nineteenth century were confined almost entirely to female unions. One of the first women to take part in an otherwise male endeavor was Mother Jones in the coal industry. Perhaps a successor to Mother Jones was Genora Johnson in the Flint sit-downs of 1936–37. All three elements—women of the nineteenth century, Mother Jones, and Genora Johnson—surprised a large number of people, mostly males, when they showed that they had the same organizational capabilities, not to mention bravery, as men. Women worked on GM assembly lines and in other industries that supported the giant automotive manufacturer. But, as with the coal industry, the overwhelming majority of workers in making autos were men.
The most militant labor mood in the entire country in the late 1930s was in Flint, Michigan. The incipient UAW wanted job safety practices, a fair wage, and, above all else, recognition as the bargaining agent for the GM assembly-line workers. They had been met with hostility not only from GM but also from the city itself. GM, the Chamber of Commerce announced, had brought jobs to Flint; why rock the boat? The Depression accentuated these differences between the workers and management. Why should some have so much and others so little?
The Flint where Genora grew up—she was born in Kalamazoo and brought to Flint in infancy—was an amalgam of