Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [84]
Genora realized that the ERA was too controversial for any consensus among varied interest groups in America and that it was not going to pass. Although the UAW was the first major union to endorse the ERA, the labor movement was not entirely behind it.26 Historian Dorothy Sue Cobble notes that waitress unions argued that the ERA would weaken sex-based laws, “in particular those mandating limits on overtime and those requiring maternity benefits, rest breaks . . . and other amenities.” There were age and class differences as well when considering the ERA. Betty Friedan, a leading feminist activist of the day and strong supporter of the ERA, was viewed as a “middle class college intellectual who knew nothing about working women’s real problems.”27 Though Genora was not a college intellectual, many younger union members placed her into the same category as Betty Friedan. Still others, both in and out of the labor movement, called the ERA a “lesbian plot” and postulated the “destruction of the patriotic, godfearing, male-dominated nuclear family.”28 The hostility toward the ERA gathered strength as the Congress of American Women (formed in 1946 to represent the rights of women throughout the nation) came down against it. The Congress “supported a more ambitious approach [than the ERA] embodied in its Women’s Status Bill, which combined protective legislation and the elimination of discrimination.”29
Genora and friends believed these objections to the ERA represented the opinions of younger union members, both men and women, who knew little or nothing of the travails of 1937. In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, much of organized labor fell on hard times. Genora warned that “women would remember labor’s stance [on the ERA] when the anti-labor sentiment . . . caused labor to cast around for friends.”30 While speaking and writing for ERA and other causes, Genora kept up a steady stream of correspondence with public officials and editors of news magazines on issues of concern to her. She complimented Senator Edward W. Brooke, of Massachusetts, for his resolution for a joint U.S.–USSR suspension of the Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV), from which nuclear warheads could be sent in different directions and at different speeds. “The consequences of MIRV,” she wrote to Brooke, “must be understood by the government as by individual citizens.”31 To Senator Edward Kennedy, also of Massachusetts, she said that the tide seemed to be turning away from the Nixon administration on the matter of the “illegal war” in Vietnam.32
Amid her crusades, Genora found an opportunity to discover Europe for the first time. Sol’s job with Technion took him to numerous parts of that continent, and in the summer of 1971, Genora accompanied him. Landing in London in the middle of June, and quickly picking up a few English swearwords, she found the city to be “bloody chilly” but “quaint.”33 In Italy, she was the perfect tourist: the Italians loved her. She wrote to Ron from Florence, “You must see this most beautiful city in the world.”34 Sol said, rather wistfully, that Genora had to stop at every church to study its art, sometimes spending hours or even whole days in every museum she could find. Her intense interest in painting and sculpture (her own artistic activities were on hold because of arthritic hands) inspired her to take half-days and sometimes all day in numerous museums.35 She was entranced by her first trip to Europe, which took her from England to Italy, with Austria in between. In Rome, she reported, half the city was on one strike or another, and though she