Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [50]
Postwar realities included management arguments that hiring women entailed increased costs. Additional facilities had to be installed, such as toilets separate from men (although bathrooms during the war had been shared by men and women). Also, absenteeism of women workers was greater than that of men, especially if there were children at home. Even the postwar president of the UAW, R. J. Thomas, seemed to be against women activism when he said, “I think it is pretty well recognized that it is an additional expense to a management to have women.”49 Employers argued that it was not cost-effective to train women for work (especially in skilled jobs) because women workers were only temporary. And, of course, there was always the fear that “women would displace male workers at lower rates of pay.”50 Women, however, were already in the workplace and had been for years. Most of the arguments against adding women turned out to be more contrived than legitimate. “The attitudes toward working wives reflected firmly entrenched ideas about woman’s proper place, not the reality of the job market.” In 1936, for example, 82 percent of the American population “felt wives should not work” if husbands had jobs.51 Sherna Gluck writes that “eventually, half of the women defense workers were drawn from the ranks of women who were already in the work force before the war.”52 It is clear, then, that postwar opposition to women employment was more socially than economically motivated.
The “woman of the house” could either continue her present employment or seek public work, that is, a job outside the home. Historian William H. Chafe notes that “at just the moment when husbands and wives were planning to build new homes, buy new cars, and purchase improved appliances, a series of arbitrary price hikes stood in the way. Many couples found it impossible to fulfill their quest for a higher standard of living on one income.”53 Genora and Sol barely had a single income in the immediate postwar period. She helped to print and distribute nearly a thousand pamphlets to protest the postwar industrial actions in Detroit in general and at Briggs specifically. In numerous speeches she tried to bolster union morale and worked with several committees to plan upcoming Labor Day parades in September. She found it necessary, however, to register for unemployment benefits from the federal government (as did Sol in Flint). Genora said that the unemployment lines were so long that the jobless had to stand in them all day; some applicants, she said, lined up at midnight and slept on the sidewalk. She took Denny with her to hold her place in line while she went for food and restroom breaks.
Genora’s health grew tenuous again. She wrote to Sol on August 20, “Couldn’t sleep for the pain . . . in . . . my chest. And I always get a bit jittery when that happens.” She had to come home from a rally because of an attack. “I can’t figure out the ‘waves’ of these pains,” she said, “unless it’s related to my physical strength giving out.”54 Sol mentioned her attacks of pleurisy, related to her previous bouts with TB, and urged her to take three or four weeks off somewhere in the country before the Detroit winter set in. She promised to get some X-rays taken.
Her work with the investigative committee to look into increased violence against labor union members at Briggs since the war led to personal grief.55 UAW president Walter Reuther was especially vulnerable to attacks by various