The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (review)

In this comprehensive history of union women's activism and struggle for economic and social justice from the 1930s through the 1980s, Dorothy Sue Cobble, an historian at Rutgers University, retrieves a little known story that makes an important contribution to understanding working women, feminism, and the labor movement in this country. Throughout the book, Cobble places the labor feminists' issues within the broader political, economic and social context of the time, paying attention to the issues of race and class as well as gender, and giving the reader a history of the U.S. during that period that goes well beyond labor.

Cobble locatesthe origins of women's activism and the feminization of unions in the post WWII era. As men returned to their jobs after the war, forcing women back into their old jobs, women took with them their experiences as "Rosie the Riveter," and the sense of what was possible and more importantly, what they deserved. Accepting that they were workers as well as mothers and homemakers, women saw the need for workplace reform—and they saw unions as a vehicle for that reform. Moving forward from that period, the book provides a rich, well-researched chronicle of women labor leaders, their personal histories, their struggles for equality in their unions and labor federations as well as in the workplace and in the domestic sphere. It provides fascinating stories and anecdotes of the women, often in their own voice. Readers meet Addie Wyatt, an African American meatpacker, who after being elected as Vice President of her predominantly white male union, wondered "How in the world would I tell my husband and family that not only am I a member of this union but I am a leader? It took me three months before I told them." Wyatt went on to become one of the founders of the AFL-CIO's Coalition of Labor Union Women.

Cobble recounts women's experiences organizing in women-dominated and women-only unions, as in the National Federation of Telephone Workers, where they engaged in militant strikes to achieve their demands. Women struggled within male-dominated unions, at times with success in getting male leaders to address women's concerns, as in the United Auto Workers' creation of a Women's Department. At other times they chose to leave their union or created women's entities outside the union to challenge the male leadership, as with the flight attendants fighting sexual exploitation in the 1960s and 1970s. Cobble shares with readers the seldom heard account of the women's auxiliaries, who broadened the boundaries of the labor movement and contributed to women's legislative reform agenda but also organized the power of women as consumers.

These women labor leaders had an ambitious reform agenda for equality and living wages in the workplace, but also for domestic issues such as paid maternity leave and child care. There were differences between them and the male leaders over how to achieve social change—by using the collective bargaining process versus through the policy and legislative arena. These differences in tactics and strategies as well as ideologies created divisions between women unionists and their allies. Recounting the history and analysis of the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment, Cobble describes trade union women's bitter opposition because they believed it would take away rights already won through sex-based legislation protecting women, especially working class women. "Most labor feminists in this book never resolved the tension between equalityand special treatment," though by the 1970s many had abandoned support for women-only protective laws.

This book can be read on many levels and by many constituencies. A fascinating and readable history of women's struggles in the workplace and the labor movement and much of the twentieth century, this book will appeal to a broad audience of women and men. It also provides very useful material for labor studies...