Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [4]
To describe unionism and women’s work during World War II and how these two movements supported one another.
To examine the postwar attacks on unionism and the growth of governmental strictures because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
To explore the decline of the Socialist groups throughout the country and why they declined.
To explain the growth of a generation gap between older and younger unionists and discuss why Genora Dollinger and her followers believed there was a need to revitalize radical unionism. This theme is most apparent in Genora’s railings against tuxedo unionism.
To offer some explanations of why mainline historians tended to bypass union and feminist participants like Genora Dollinger and of how things began to turn around in this respect by the 1970s.
To illustrate some of the disagreements between and among women’s groups, particularly second-wave and third-wave feminists.
I would like my biography of Genora Dollinger to be read across a wide spectrum of the American public. I want intellectuals to read it and possibly learn something from it. I hope old-time union members of the United Automobile Workers locals in Flint, Detroit, and Los Angeles will read this book because in large part it is about them. Students, like those in professor Lauren Coodley’s classes who are quoted at length in the last chapter, can learn much from the life and career of Genora Dollinger. I hope my biography of Genora will encourage high school and college students to learn as much as they possibly can about the connections between unionism and feminism and the fights for social justice everywhere.
I never met Genora Dollinger, but her husband, Sol, and I became good friends. When he visited me in western Kentucky and the idea was proposed of writing a biography of Genora, I asked him what I should call her: Genora Johnson? Genora Johnson Dollinger? Genora Dollinger? He said she would have been most pleased with simply “Genora.” This is how I have addressed her throughout the manuscript. Far from showing any disrespect for her, the simple title of her first name is, as the person who knew her the longest and loved her the most told me, what she preferred.
An Introduction
Genora Johnson Dollinger gained fame in 1937 when she formed the Women’s Emergency Brigade (WEB) to fight the police, Pinkertons, and other authorities in the sit-down strike against General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan. The WEB, or EB as it came to be called, was not intended to be another auxiliary responsible for making sandwiches and coffee for the strikers. Armed with clubs, stove pokers, crowbars, lead pipes, baseball bats, and auto-door springs, it became an integral part of the strike itself. Its activities contributed extensively to the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) exertions and ultimate victory against GM in 1937.
Genora and colleagues dated the beginnings of the modern feminist movement to the role women played in the sit-downs against GM in the late 1930s and the coming of war in the early 1940s. This “emerging portrait of unionism as a vehicle for feminist aspirations”1 in the 1940s “may have spurred feminism among wage earning women much as civil rights and New Left organizations did . . . in the 1960s.”2
By 1930 one in nine women in the United States had cast off her role as the “mainstay of family life” to become a wage earner.3 By the end of the 1930s, encouraged by increased automobile production, 15.5 percent of all married women were employed. There is no way that this percentage of women in the workforce (although, according to polls, public opinion was “lined up against them”)4 would not ultimately find its way into feminist movements. The two went together and go together. This was the message that Genora Johnson Dollinger tried to get across to both unions and corporations in her long years as a labor-feminist activist. It was only after several years of struggling that she felt any kind of success.
Historian John W. Jeffries asserts that “long term historical perspective suggests that many of the changes