Heroines and Homemakers: Views from Across the Disciplines

Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers' Union by Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, 214 pp., $48.00 hardcover, $18.00 paper.

"Bending the Future to Their Will": Civic Women, Social Education, and Democracy by Margaret Crocco and O.L. Davis, Jr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999, 291 pp., $57.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Women's Work and Public Policy: A History of the Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, 1945-1970 by Kathleen A. Laughlin. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000, 172 pp., $40.00 hardcover.

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Nan Enstad. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 266 pp., $57.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper.

Inside the Household: From Labour to Care edited by Susan Himmelweit. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, 205 pp., $69.00 hardcover.

I recently told students in my Women in U.S. History class about how I was drawn into women's history and Women's Studies as a college student in the late 1970s. I was hooked by my very first women's history class, which riveted me both because of the new women-centered look at daily life and because of the role models and heroines that I gained while studying the history of women. Collectively, the works under review balance these two mutually reinforcing and interdependent approaches to studying women: one that highlights the achievements and contributions of individual women, and another that establishes the overall social, political, and economic frameworks within which ordinary women live their lives. Moreover, as feminist teachers and activists, we need heroines and role models while we also seek to understand the everyday realities that shape women's experiences. This collection of monographs, anthologies, and one autobiographical work provides us with both kinds of intellectual and political sustenance.

Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers' Union reminds us of the heroism of women and men who risked their lives for workers' rights. Among those women was Genora Johnson Dollinger, leader and organizer of the Women's Emergency Brigades that provided essential support to the male sit-down strikers in the 1936-1937 autoworkers' strike in Flint, Michigan. The volume, authored by Dollinger's widower, Sol Dollinger, includes an oral history interview conducted with Dollinger in 1995, in which she recounts the violence that she experienced as a union activist, the activities of the Women's Emergency Brigade, some of her experiences organizing the unemployed and the autoworkers, and the ambivalence of the newly-formed United Auto Workers (UAW) union toward female autoworkers and union members.

Not Automatic is a curious hybrid of a volume. Subtitled Women and the Left in the Forging of the Autoworkers' Union, two thirds of the book focuses far more on left-wing politics specifically on the battles among male politicos--than on women. Two of the fourteen chapters focus on Dollinger herself. One devoted to her oral history, the other is an account of her re-discovery in the 1970s by feminist historians and activists. Genora herself died in 1995, and above all, Not Automatic seems to be a loving, engaged partner's reclaiming of his comrade's and his own legacy to the labor movement. Dollinger acknowledges that the events that the book covers have already been well addressed. His purpose is to demonstrate the central role played by "class-conscious militants" in the Socialist Party, including his wife of fifty-four years, who played an "inspiring, complex and intrepid role" in the labor movement (xiv).

Dollinger galvanized her peers and, four decades later, her story helps to recover their history for a new generation of activists. Thanks to Not Automatic, we learn about the actions and achievements of the woman herself, and about the ways...