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Sidney Fine, author of Sit-Down. After her speech, the assembled professors asked Fine more questions than they did Genora. Why had he not fully documented the role of women in the strike? Why had the “unique contributions” of women been “overlooked by one labor historian after another?” “Looking back,” Genora said, “it can be seen that most of the male historians seem to have found it incomprehensible that women could have played a most significant and valiant role” in winning the strike against GM. “Some writers who knew better slighted our role out of a callous and deliberate disregard for the truth because of deep-seated political differences. There were some who wrote out of ignorance and a slothful failure to do the necessary research.”17 Genora was increasingly pleased throughout the 1970s that history was catching up with her and her feminist colleagues; they were being transferred from a footnote to the main text.

Genora came to believe that Socialism could and perhaps would be the order of the day in the context of equal rights for all. “Not the worst people,” she claimed, “are now saying publicly that they are socialists.” For “millions” of their followers, “it should remove some of the fear of that word [Socialism] and stimulate . . . discussions on a large scale.”18 But the American public would not agree with her on this question, and neither did many of her closest friends and correspondents. Joe Rosenthal, from Canada, told her that the feminist movement was on a downward trend. The Women’s March in New York in 1970 contained, he claimed, more than 30,000 women. Just a scant two years later, it was down to 3,000. The influx of “radical lesbianism” harmed the movement, and the National Organization of Women did not, in the name of Socialism or any other “ism,” threaten capitalism. On the contrary, “This movement is to bring women into the system and so give them a stake in capitalism.” The declining influence of feminism, he argued, was one indication that its movement had been successful, with increasingly large numbers of women getting into the workforce, sometimes in high-managerial positions, and even becoming paragons of capitalism.19 Genora would have preferred a Socialist settlement in the matter of feminism, but she was pragmatic enough to realize that, given the history and nature of this country, reform movements were apt, ultimately, to benefit capitalism. Nevertheless, she told a friend, she was glad that women, the “first slaves,” had finally obtained some rights and recognition.20

There was still a ways to go, however, and much to be done. Genora became an ardent supporter of the ERA, which worked its way through Congress and then thirty-five states, three short of ratification, in the 1970s. Sent by Congress to the states in 1972, it was inexplicably “encumbered with an arbitrary seven-year deadline for ratification.”21 Genora told audiences and wrote in magazines that the best way to honor those valiant women of the sit-downs and remember their contributions and sacrifices was to stand “beside us still living—and all womanhood—as we now fight for the Equal Rights Amendment.” She beseeched her audiences and readers to “help us to end the world’s first and oldest form of exploitation—exploitation because of sex” and maintained that the ERA “will mean that every individual has the right to full participation in American life. This should be the spirit of ’76.”22

The ERA had first been introduced in 1923 by Alice Paul’s National Women’s Party. Its message, said Genora and her friends, was simple and fair: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied by the United States or any state on account of sex.” They believed the ERA to be “the culmination of long years of struggle by women who had come before them.”23

Phyllis Schlafly, an attorney with a master’s degree from Harvard, strongly opposed the ERA and founded an organization called “Stop ERA.” The ERA, she feared, would “destroy the right to be a woman” and “deprive the American woman of many of the fundamental privileges we now