Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930–2000 by Michelle Haberland (review)

Michelle Haberland’s Striking Beauties offers an introduction to the apparel industry in the South since the 1930s and is an important contribution to southern women’s and labor history. As Haberland points out, historians have spent less time examining the history of the southern apparel industry than that of the textile industry, and many have subsumed the apparel industry under textiles. Although the two industries were in many ways similar—primarily in their reliance on low-wage white workers until the 1970s—they were also distinct in significant ways. Most important for Haberland’s study, the apparel industry overwhelmingly employed women, at rates as high as 80 percent, unlike the textile industry, which always included a large portion of male workers. Tracing the industry from the 1930s to the turn of the twenty-first century, Haberland argues that the large number of women shaped the industry, from the pay scale and the culture of the shop floor to union campaigns.

Haberland describes numerous apparel factories that dotted the South, but she begins with and frequently returns to the Vanity Fair factory in Clarke County, Alabama. Vanity Fair was prototypical, fleeing unionization and labor solidarity in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1947 for rural southern Alabama. Like the textile factory owners before them, northern clothing manufacturers were drawn to the South by boosters’ campaigns as well as “right-to-work” and “right-to-profit” policies. Vanity Fair also benefited from a municipal bond program as well as a population of women eager to leave the fields for the factory. All of these factors, along with company intimidation, proved to be barriers to unionization. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) arrived not long after Vanity Fair opened, but when the company threatened to close down if the workers joined a union, the women voted against unionization.

Nonetheless, the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) sought to make headway in the South. Haberland devotes several chapters to the various tactics of garment workers’ unions over the twentieth century. Unions identified runaway shops, negotiated new contracts, and facilitated the relocation of some factories, all with the intention of fighting low wages and antiunionism in the South. The union’s primary tactic, however, was to support strikes for better workplace conditions. In a chapter that outlines a number of strikes between the 1930s and the 1970s, Haberland shows how apparel manufacturers and their anti-union allies crafted intimidation tactics that played on fears of an overturned gender hierarchy, ultimately squashing nearly every attempt to unionize southern plants.

Segregation and white workers’ racism also hampered union efforts. Haberland devotes two chapters to racial politics in the garment industry and emphasizes how ideas about gender and race interacted on the shop floor. Until civil rights measures went into effect in the 1960s, garment factories were considered “the privilege of white women” (62). Black women made up only 7 percent of the garment workforce, and they were segregated into specific crafts and scrutinized by white supervisors. In plants that hired white and black workers, racial discrimination prevented biracial organizing or hampered union efforts. For instance, even when an interracial ILGWU local organized in Walterboro, South Carolina, informal racial segregation persisted, as workers self-segregated on picket lines and organized segregated union events. Moreover, no African Americans held leadership positions in the local, despite playing important roles in organizing the union. White leaders of the local reported that they understood the needs of African American workers, yet they did nothing to challenge racial segregation by craft, foreclosing the possibility of promotions for black garment workers. Using this example, among others, Haberland shows how the CIO’s Operation Dixie, which supported civil rights organizations, faltered when it came to addressing on-the-ground racial practices. As African American women gained more access to employment with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they began applying to formerly...