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Genora claimed later that the sit-downs had been an “educational process” for several workers up from the South. In one plant, they had shown disdain for the only black member present. His name was Roscoe Van Zandt, and as the strike continued, everyone emphasized their common cause rather than color of skin. When the strike ended, Van Zandt was chosen to carry the victory flag out of the plant and into a waiting public.112

As news of the GM recognition of the UAW spread, the “winds of freedom roared down Flint streets, filled with the mighty outpouring of its working people.” Chevrolet Avenue was packed with some 5,000 people singing “Solidarity Forever,” sending helium-filled balloons aloft, shooting fireworks, honking horns, and yelling, “Join the Union: We are Free!”113 The multiple repercussions of the union victory included a Chrysler-UAW contract in April 1937, an increase in UAW members from 88,000 to 400,000, the creation of Local 152, and the takeover of the Flint city government. Moreover, “in the first two weeks after the Flint victory there were eighty-seven sit-down strikes in Detroit alone.”114 Throughout the rest of the nation, in March 1937, there were 170 sit-down strikes “involving 167, 210 workers.”115 Organizers in the steel industry had refused to “stick out their necks” while the sit-downs in Flint were in progress. Once the UAW victory was accomplished, steel workers flocked to the unionist standard.

Non–auto unions were affected, too. At the Ferry-Morse seed factory in Detroit, 300 workers walked off their jobs, demanding wage increases and union recognition. At the Conant Factory Lunch, sixty high school boys who delivered food to local factories sat down and won a pay increase from $1.00 an hour to $1.25, and fifty-five charwomen who cleaned the Penobscot Building won a pay raise after a two hour sit-down. It was not long before Woolworth workers in Detroit and elsewhere began sit-downs as well. Clearly, sit-down fever was in the air.

Who won the strike for the UAW? The men? The women? It was a combination of the two. There is no doubt that the changed roles of women in Flint during that forty-four-day period helped ultimately to bring about a settlement between company and union. Even with the aid of its own security guards; city, county, and state police; and Pinkertons the company did not want the reputation of being “women killers.”

The members of the Women’s Auxiliary and the EB exulted when the strike ended, and they sensed that they had been an important part in bringing about a happy conclusion. One said, “A new type of women was born in the strike. . . . Women who only yesterday were horrified at unionism, who felt inferior to the task of organizing, speaking, leading, have, as if overnight, become the spearhead in the battle of unionism.”116 The role women played in the strike showed an elevated purpose in their lives. “They had the satisfaction and wholeness that people have when they are using all their powers instead of letting four-fifths of their talents rot unused.”117 Genora exclaimed that “just being a women isn’t enough for me anymore. I want to be a human being with the right to think for myself.”118 Once “freed,” the women of Flint did not return to their former roles as only homemakers. Even union men, who had disdained “their women” taking part in the labor strife, now recognized how valuable they had been in bringing about the ultimate victory. In a newsletter, Women Today, established by the Flint women, one of its contributors, Eva Stone, penned an article titled “Women in Auto Organize,” in which she wrote, “We must build our Auxiliary, carry on our educational and cultural functions. We must make our union our social center, and it is up to the Women’s Auxiliary to make all this possible.”119

Travis noted the transition of the women’s attitudes from the strike’s beginning to its ending. At the beginning, many wives had given ultimatums to their sit-down husbands to come home. During the strike, they