A Woman's Place Is in Her Union: The UAW's 1944 National Women's Conference and Women's Labor Activism

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 40:1 (Spring 2014): 73-95©2014 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 2013 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner A Woman’s Place Is in Her Union: The UAW’s 1944 National Women’s Conference and Women’s Labor Activism By Tiffany Baugh-Helton In December 1944, one hundred fifty female delegates, representing 30,000 women members, attended the United Automobile Worker’s (UAW’s) first national Women’s Conference at the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. Organized by the UAW’s newly established Women’s Bureau, Director Mildred Jeffrey designed the 1944 Conference to “pay tribute to the great services of women in all aspects of our war effort in war and civilian production” and to “reaffirm the democratic principle that all [UAW] members shall be guaranteed the fullest protection of their union membership without discrimination based on sex or marital status” even during the reconversion period.1 The 1944 conference demonstrates that UAW women war workers’ postwar future was still being debated—by male UAW leaders, by the federal Women’s Bureau director Frieda Miller, by the nine members of the national planning committee, and by the female delegates who attended the conference— less than a year before the war ended. It thus stands as a moment of potential for deciding the place of women in the postwar UAW rather than as the first step in a process that inevitably led to the union’s exclusion of women from protection following the war. The story of the 1944 conference engages several bodies of literature—women’s history, labor history, African American history, and civil rights history. It not only challenges many assumptions that appear in these historiographies but also helps tie them together. The 1 “Women – Declaration from Committee,” Women’s Conference – National Committee, UAW Community Relations Department, Mildred Jeffrey Papers, Series I, Box 5, Folder 13, Archive of Labor and Urban Affairs (ALUA), Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit; “UAW Women in Session Here,” The Detroit Times, December 8, 1944. 74 The Michigan Historical Review women’s historians who addressed the roles of women during World War II have produced a canon that utilizes new social history approaches to apply the classic question of women’s history—where are the women?—to histories of American involvement in World War II. They have found women in a variety of places, including as workers in the war industry’s factories.2 These histories have generally focused on the experience of such women “on the ground,” and the UAW’s failure to protect women union members’ gains in the reconversion period is one of many examples of women war workers’ postwar fate. Other historians have demonstrated that although women remained in the workforce after the war, they were often shunted back into “women’s” jobs.3 Later iterations of this “Rosie the Riveter” historiography focused on how race created disparate experiences for white and black women. African American women suffered most from discriminatory hiring practices that persisted in the wartime economy, where they occupied the bottom rung of an unofficial hiring hierarchy that placed them under white women, black men, and white men. Historians have also demonstrated that it was African American women who had the most to lose from labor market exclusion at war’s end and that they perceived their postwar economic struggles and demands in the broader context of civil rights.4 While some African American women sought the UAW’s help in these struggles, they were often more successful in gaining assistance from groups such as the NAACP.5 2 See Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (New York: Plume, 1988); Susan Hartmann, The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983); Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 3 See Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women in World War II...