Elizabeth Faue traces the transformation of the American labor
movement from community forms of solidarity to bureaucratic
unionism. Arguing that gender is central to understanding this
shift, Faue explores women's involvement in labor and political
organizations and the role of gender and family ideology in shaping
unionism in the twentieth century. Her study of Minneapolis, the
site of the important 1934 trucking strike, has broad implications
for labor history as a whole.
Initially the labor movement rooted itself in community
organizations and networks in which women were active, both as
members and as leaders. This community orientation reclaimed
family, relief, and education as political ground for a labor
movement seeking to re-establish itself after the losses of the
1920s. But as the depression deepened, women -- perceived as
threats to men seeking work -- lost their places in union
leadership, in working-class culture, and on labor's political
agenda. When unions exchanged a community orientation for a focus
on the workplace and on national politics, they lost the power to
recruit and involve women members, even after World War II prompted
large numbers of women to enter the work force.
In a pathbreaking analysis, Faue explores how the iconography and
language of labor reflected ideas about gender. The depiction of
work and the worker as male; the reliance on sport, military, and
familial metaphors for solidarity; and the ideas of women's place
-- these all reinforced the representation of labor solidarity as
masculine during a time of increasing female participation in the
labor force. Although the language of labor as male was not new in
the depression, the crisis of wage-earning -- as a crisis of
masculinity -- helped to give psychological power to male dominance
in the labor culture. By the end of the war, women no longer
occupied a central position in organized labor but a peripheral
one.