“Beneath Our Dignity”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Theater Program ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Fair Wages ◽  
Working Class Women

Chapter 5 analyzes the initial rocky years of black working-class women’s entry into the needle trades, boot and shoe, and laundry factories and their unions during the early to mid-1940s. Black working-class women exposed the fault lines of the American racial liberalism espoused by civil rights and union progressives who worked to establish “interracial good-will” in unionism and the industrial workforce. Women’s resistance on the shop floor and in the union hall, demanding respect and fairness, challenged and altered community leaders’ programs. Black working-class women were less interested in breaking the color barrier than in earning fair wages, establishing fair standards, organizing work hours around other commitments, and working and organizing in a hospitable climate. Focusing on black women’s work with the ILGWU, this chapter examines their work and union experiences in the union’s worker theater program to consider why conflicts over historical memory; black women workers’ long demands for dignity, autonomy, and respect; and social reformers’ interracial experiments produced intense battles.

“We Strike and Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Wage Cuts

In the Funsten Nut Strike of 1933, nut shellers shut down production to protest poor working conditions and wage cuts. A group of black working-class women positioned themselves at the center of Depression-era politics through the highly publicized, Communist-organized strike against the Funsten Nut Company. Among the most influential labor battles of its era, the strike carved out a space for black women workers in the growing and increasingly powerful radical labor movement, marking the development of that movement in St. Louis.

Maneuvering for the Movement

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-36
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Organizations ◽  
National Council ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Black Sororities ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Women’S Organizations

This chapter explores the first three decades of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1935, educator, clubwoman, and politician Mary McLeod Bethune founded the NCNW as an organization of black women's organizations to create a united lobbying voice. By utilizing a strategy of broker politics, the NCNW opened up professional opportunities for black women and lobbied for civil rights legislation. NCNW women also enforced strict standards of respectability as they sought such power. While the NCNW claimed to speak on behalf of all black women, a majority of its membership came from black sororities. This college-based membership, as well as the council's focus on black professionalization, meant that many working class women viewed the organization as elitist and uninterested in their concerns. However, beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing through the 1960s, the NCNW became more significantly involved in civil rights and the needs of the poor.

Anthropology, Class and the ‘Big Heads’: An Ethnography of Distinctions between ‘Rough’ and ‘Posh’ amongst Women Workers in the UK Pottery Industry

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hart
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Pottery Industry ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Global Corporation ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
The Way

In the context of the take-over by a global corporation (Royal Doulton) of a family-owned and run pottery factory in Longton Stoke-on-Trent, known as ‘Beswick’, and the subsequent re-structuring of production, this paper explores the way in which women pottery workers make social distinctions between the ‘rough’ and ‘posh’, ‘proper paintresses’ and ‘big heads’ which cut into and across abstract sociological notions of class. Drawing on ethnographic data I show that for these working class women, class as lived is inherently ambiguous and contradictory and reveal the ways in which class is gendered. I build on historical and sociological studies of the pottery industry, and anthropological and related debates on class, as well as Frankenberg's study of a Welsh village, to develop my argument and draw analogies between factory and village at a number of levels. My findings support the view that class is best understood not as an abstract generalising category, but in the local and specific contexts of women's working lives. I was the first one in our family to go in decorating end and they thought I was a bit stuck-up. My sister was in clay end as a cup-handler and I had used to walk off factory without her, or wait for her to leave before I left, though she said, ‘If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have anything to paint!’ They were much freer in the clay end – had more to do with men – we thought we were one up. 1

Class, Gender and Cold War Politics: The Union of Australian Women and the Campaign for Equal Pay, 1950–66

2019 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Katherine Keirs
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The 1960S

The confluence of social and political forces during the Menzies era stalled the progress of wage justice for women workers until the end of the 1960s. Nevertheless, women’s organisations and the progressive trade union movement advocated equal pay for the sexes throughout this period. This article examines the contribution of the Union of Australian Women (UAW), which represented the interests of working-class women, to the campaign for equal pay from 1950 to 1966. It discusses the ways in which the mixture of women’s culturally accepted domestic roles and widespread anti-communism muted enthusiasm for the UAW’s message. The article argues, however, that the UAW made an effective contribution to keeping equal pay in the public consciousness, redressing the inattention to working-class women’s role in their economic emancipation.

Politics in Other Ways

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-287
Author(s):  
Maki Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

This article explores the ways that Seattle’s Asian American—and in particular Japanese American—community negotiated the shifting terrain of racial politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Seattle’s city leaders—and indeed many in the civil rights establishment—heralded the city for its racial liberalism, a young cadre of activists organized across racial and ethnic boundaries and challenged established leadership to articulate a robust, anti-racist, working-class multiracial politics. Significantly, the rise of Black and Asian anti-racist solidarities exploded the city’s narrative of exceptional racial harmony in an age of social crisis. Activists adopted a capacious definition of community that could acknowledge specific identities while simultaneously coalescing around a shared sense of injury. They also practiced a form of grassroots politics that was flexible and improvisational, that was enacted both within and outside established organizations and channels, and that ultimately blurred the distinction between moderation and radicalism.

scholarly journals “They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Eva Peron ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Key Resources

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in São Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers—frequented by large numbers of working-class women—reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Perón emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita—widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes—becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women.

scholarly journals A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidra Kamran
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Economic Capital ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Gender Performances ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Hegemonic Femininity ◽  
Class Distinction

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts or in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capitals at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Further, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, this article explains the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

The Legacies of Black Working-Class Women’s Political Leadership

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Mass Action ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Local Movement ◽  
Working Class Women

Jean King, a St. Louis transplant from Osceola, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, in the fall of 1968 spotted a young Andre Smallwood eating a piece of bread he found on the snow-covered ground outside of their Darst public-housing development located just south of downtown. King soon learned that Smallwood’s mother had a monthly welfare check that amounted to less than the newly stipulated rent increase. The contrast between King and Smallwood’s mother could not have been more striking, although both resided in the same housing project. King and her husband, employed and married with one child, had the means to avoid routine visits from caseworkers, fluctuating welfare payments, and rent schedules that continually increased. But negotiating these realities was typical for most other black women, many of whom functioned as their family’s breadwinners. Public-housing tenants had already been meeting regularly to discuss the possibility of conducting a rent strike when King attended a tenants’ meeting at the nearby Blumeyer Housing Project in midtown St. Louis. After King shared the story of her encounter with Smallwood’s mother, tenants elected her president of the Citywide Rent Strike Committee. Like many “organic intellectuals” who emerged as leaders of grassroots social movements, King came out of a local movement that was already organized when the time to strike arrived. King, along with other black women community organizers, went on to spearhead one of the nation’s largest and earliest rent strikes in the postwar era. Women’s militant mass action garnered national attention and later influenced public policy reform. Because of the long and distinguished activism of black working-class women, a groundswell of grassroots organizing on a national scale, and federal action in support of antipoverty ...

The Industrial Working Class

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela E. Swett
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
German Society ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Personal Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class Women

This chapter analyses industrial workers as an occupational category, i.e. in their patterns of work on the shop floor, in their social environment, i.e. in terms of wages, living costs and housing, and in the context of the social and cultural associations that structured their leisure time pursuits. The materials presented in this chapter demonstrate that ‘industrial workers’ never comprised a fully unified social class with identical needs or desires. Some workers were beginning to aspire to the middle class. Others held on to Christian values and associations. Rivalries existed between co-workers over skills and status. Working-class women and men lived very different lives. And rural workers had little in common with those in the tenements of the metropolises. On top of these long-standing differences, the coming of new forms of mass culture also challenged workers’ loyalties to any singular identity. In all its early manifestations mass culture began to tap into commonalities within German society across class divides; it also began to offer a language of personal consumption and pleasure that reached across national borders.

Breaking the “Harness of Household Slavery”: Domestic Workers, the Women's Division of the St. Louis Urban League, and the Politics of Labor Reform during the Great Depression

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Male ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Local Chapter ◽  
Household Workers ◽  
Contractual Agreements ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
Working Class Women

AbstractLargely denied membership in organized labor and access to basic labor protections, black domestic workers of St. Louis employed the local chapter of the Urban League's Women's Division to carve out a space for themselves in a growing, predominantly white, male labor movement and in the multiple coalitions that configured the New Deal. Domestics used household employment reform codes to lay the groundwork for dignity to manifest itself in their labor and contractual agreements. From the Household Workers Mass Meeting of 1933 to the close of the St. Louis Urban League's first phase in the late 1940s, black working-class women joined forces with progressive black women who led the Urban League's Women's Division to reform domestic employment through negotiation, enforcement, collective action, and everyday resistance. A border city with a large and settled black working class located within its core, St. Louis had acute class, gender, and racial divisions that shaped the terms of black women's economic activism. The Gateway City's mix of urban Midwestern-, northern-, and southern-style geopolitics propelled domestics’ mobilization, offering space for dissident women to call for changes to the social, political, and economic order.

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