Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [68]
Six California Girl
In 1960 Genora Dollinger celebrated her forty-seventh birthday, still young enough to be vigorous despite continuing health problems but old enough to have gained some wisdom. National and international labor organizations called upon her for advice and counsel. She had become the grande dame of the labor and Socialist movements in the United States. Many organizations—labor, capital, and otherwise—asked her to speak for their special occasions. She spoke to UAW Local 659 each year on the anniversary (February 11) of the 1937 union contract with GM.
Genora considered the advent of the 1960s as a time of promise for American women and looked optimistically to future developments. She welcomed John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 (though she did not vote for him—or anyone else for that matter) because she sensed a liberal upsurge that would include rights for women. Kennedy’s presidency, together with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 under President Lyndon B. Johnson (prohibiting discrimination by employers and unions on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, or national origin) helped women in terms of hiring and promotion.1 Genora supported the equal rights amendment (ERA) and worked for its passage. She also joined the National Organization of Women (NOW) when it was formed in 1965 under the leadership of Betty Friedan and others. NOW quickly became known as an organization that sought equality in the public rather than the private sphere. Genora was of a mixed mind on this question. She always believed that the woman who chose to be a homemaker was as worthy of attention as the one who worked outside of her home. Another misgiving Genora had about NOW was that in its formative years it largely excluded women of color, presumably because at that time so few of them worked outside the home. Genora disagreed with this practice of exclusion but joined NOW anyway in the hope and expectation of changing the system from within.
Increasingly, she became strident in her opinion that labor historians had ignored the role of women in the 1936–37 sit-downs. These labor historians, she charged, were animated by male machismo and did not actually want to acknowledge the work of the Women’s Emergency Brigade of 1937 and its significant influences not only on the strike but also on its successful conclusion. One story making the rounds over the years that thoroughly infuriated Genora was that Mrs. Henry Ford had been responsible for the UAW victory in 1937. Henry Ford was supposed to have told his wife that “he would close every auto plant in the world before he would permit unions.” Mrs. Ford supposedly replied, “Well, if you do that, I shall have to leave you.”2 Mr. Ford wanted to keep his wife so he ameliorated his views on unionism. Thus the UAW victory in 1937. Such stories were typical, Genora argued, of the historical distortion that had accumulated in reference to the sit-downs of 1936–37. The truth of the matter, she and fellow pioneers kept hoping, would one day be realized. She continued to maintain that no male could ever possibly understand the female psyche. You have to be a woman to understand a woman was the message she projected. Women had special “vibrations” (unfortunately, she did not identify these “vibrations”) that no male could ever understand. She reluctantly acknowledged that some male historians (Sidney Fine, for example) had “hit the spot,” but most, such as Henry Kraus, writing about the labor movement were, in her judgment, far afield from reality.
These thoughts and progressions were interlaced with the Dollinger