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circumstances, but coming into this situation I was terrorized.”11 Her terror soon mixed with anger. For the past several months she had worked with Kermit, trying to gain a rule against “speedups”—that is, running the assembly lines so fast that some workers could not keep up; they wanted better pay (more than their $1,296 annual wage), safer and less strenuous working conditions, and recognition of the UAW as their bargaining agent.12 She deemed these demands reasonable: nothing to warrant getting shot at or possibly killed. With some bravado, she said, “I am going to walk right up to that firing line and let them shoot a woman and then maybe Flint will wake up and they will find out just what is happening here.”13 Many men, including Kermit, sought to dissuade her. “There is no point in a woman becoming a martyr to the labor movement,” one person told her. She was both pleased and piqued at this assertion: pleased that someone cared about her safety and a bit angry because she thought it “sexually insulting.” Why couldn’t a woman be a martyr if she felt the need? Was this why, sometimes later, actually to her displeasure, many writers and commentators began to call her the Joan of Arc of the labor movement?

When the strike started on December 31, 1936, the usual “auxiliaries” were called forth. Women went to work cooking meals in the strike kitchens on Saginaw Avenue for the workers on strike and in the picket lines. Coffee and sandwiches came from the Pengelly Building, which housed UAW headquarters. Genora’s idea, however, right from the beginning, was that skinny men can peel potatoes just as well as skinny women. To hell with expected household duties; women this time were going to join the strikers. This thought produced an odd agreement between the company and the strikers. GM did not want to risk women being hurt or even killed in the violence that seemed increasingly predictable. The strikers considered “their” women to be domesticated, ready and willing to do the housework. Genora said later that even the best men in 1937 “had no concept of what a woman could contribute, either in ideas or in action.”14 Even those in society who “spouted rhetoric” of family values and wifely devotion looked askance at domestic jobs, dismissing them as woman’s work.15 The work women did was “naturally” biological. They bore the children and had the primary responsibility of nurturing them. Women activists were restricted, generally, to the outside of the plants. Neither labor nor management would permit groups of women, even if they worked there, inside a plant. Sit-down organizers feared that the presence of large numbers of female workers would cause employers to exploit the situation “to their own advantage, sensationalizing the sharing of living quarters and discrediting the union in the eyes of the public.”16 GM agencies broadcast throughout the city that the sit-downers played cards, listened to music and programs on the radio, and were, it was actually reported, visited more than once by senoritas de la noche. Some women still at home were so distraught by these reports that a few actually threatened to divorce their husbands if they did not return to their households. Genora’s group of the Women’s Auxiliary spent much time convincing the wives of Flint to discount such corporate propaganda and support their husbands and sons.

Genora spent most of the late afternoon and early evening of January 11 shouting encouragement to the strikers and urging them to maintain resistance to the combined law enforcement agencies. At one point she needed to use the bathroom to wash the wisps of tear gas from her body. She walked from the picket line while some of the picketers accompanied her inside the plant and to the women’s restroom. They found it locked; this was strange because during the strike there weren’t supposed to be any women in Fisher Two. All eight of the company guards, part of the so-called plant protective force, had locked themselves into the women’s toilet—apparently to escape the violence they feared would erupt