Sexism and the Unions

...Ideally, women should do their thing in comfortable homes, maintained by husbands with comfortable incomes...

...women came to feel at home in them, especially since they had virtually no alternative...

...These jobs pay less than capital-intensive manufacture (as in auto, steel, oil refining, or mining), so it is no wonder that the average wage of females in 1979, compared with males, is not better—indeed, is probably worse —than it was a couple of decades ago before we had laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work and equal access to employment...

...His books read like tracts...

...But beyond male macho, there have been many obstacles in the way of a woman reaching top union office...

...Karl Marx commented: "Great progress was evident in the last Congress of the National Labor Union in that among other things it treated working women with complete equality—while in this respect the English, and the still more gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness...

...The census of 1900, Foner records, shows women moving beyond household work and light manufacture into the service sector, with huge increases in female office workers and sales-clerks...

...Policy-making positions in a union are won in a tough political process, so a woman must be prepared to give time without intermissions to play the politicking game...

...Foner's approach, despite his avowed Marxism and his many decades of involvement in Communist activities, is incredibly non-Marxist...

...by 1886, there were almost 200 female assemblies, and in some areas there were mixed assemblies...

...The reasoning was purely pragmatic and pecuniary...

...Foner is not one of those historians who feigns neutrality...

...the good ladies were to be the fellow travellers...

...Then will you who are wives be able to devote your time to your families and your homes...

...As a result, it is a rare blue-collar woman who can devote herself to the tough test of capturing top union office: She is culturally handicapped...

...when they unionized (generally on their own), they had the sympathy, and sometimes the active support, of male unionists...

...Organized trades workers reacted to their competitors uniformly: They wanted them to stay the hell out...

...The women in these sweated sites were not competing with men for jobs...

...In 1836, the National Trades' Union proposed that men admit women to their unions and recommended "to the different unions, the propriety of assisting with their advice and influence, the female operatives throughout the United States, in ameliorating their present unhappy situation...

...The greater difficulty in organizing women is not due to their sex nor even to male sexism, but to their concentration in those sectors of the economy that are most difficult to organize...

...it is to those women who are wage earners, or wives of workers, that the IWW appeals...

...Most women lent themselves to this abuse because they could not otherwise secure employment...

...When she gives birth, she has to take time out to care for the infant...

...Vet, in Foner, there is far less interest in explaining the historical, especially economic, origins and evolution of institutions and ideologies than in carping at the makers of history for their sexist shortcomings...

...While both factors give rise to and are reinforced by "sexist" attitudes, both are economically rooted, for the upper-income woman can buy a liberation from householding that the working-class woman normally cannot afford...

...In textiles, apparel and millinery, this process was facilitated by a long era of home work done in the fashion of the cottage industry...

...Sex distinctions affect us insignificantly...

...The two greatest forces holding back the working woman's income and leadership role in unions have been "segregation" in female occupations and nonopted recurrent confinement to the home...

...98.8 per cent of secretaries-typists...

...Several chapters in Foner's information-packed book relating to the Women's Trade Union League quite unintentionally make the point about the inherent difficulties of the female worker of yesteryear in competing for leadership...

...Foner offers such a wealth of facts, vignettes, minidramas, engaging debates, and songs born of the struggle that anyone who wishes to know more about—or to engage in—the age-old battle of women for a place in the economic sun must read Women and the American Labor Movement...

...In appealing to women to "form a female trades' union" so that they could cut work hours in half, the President of the Philadelphia Trades' Assembly told them that "ultimately you will be what you ought to be, free from the performance of that kind of labor which was designed for man alone to perform...

...But such measures are bits of temporizing pending the time when women will be free from the worrisome and wearing world of work...

...The labor movement, expressing its collective presence in federations of local unions, reciprocated the interest of working women by repeated declarations on the need to include females...

...The practical-minded male unionists knew they could not play King Canute, so they insisted that women get equal pay...

...There were four women delegates at that convention, each of them a leading suffragette: Susan B. Anthony represented an organization of employees on her publication, Revolution, that was put together just a few days before the meeting...

...In effect, women moved into trades that were extensions of the kinds o'f things they did at home...

...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Assistant President, ILG WU...

...another million were involved in labor-intensive manufacture, revolving around looms and sewing machines...

...But since it was the employer and not the employee who did the hiring, women did filter into the trades...

...But that is not the way it turned out...

...At its opening national assembly in 1878, the Knights of Labor set out to win "for both sexes equal pay for equal work...

...Significantly, between 1950-79, the percentage of females in clerical jobs rose from 62 to 80, and in service from 45 to 60...

...author, "The Labor Revolution" For more than a century and a half women have been a vital, sometimes vitalizing, element in American unionism...

...If she wished to reach higher she became a librarian, elementary or high school teacher, or nurse—also a natural...

...He jumps into the narration and says what a proper-minded person —in this case a non-sexist—should have done at a given moment...

...From the beginning down to today, women—along with racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and youth...

...Men would shun them...

...There were exceptions to this rule, as in the case of Rose Schnei-derman, but they were rare...

...Men, on the other hand, encouraged their sons to follow their trades, or directed their male friends to jobs in "the shop...

...In sum, women's liberation would come with liberation from work outside the home...

...To Marx, morality was an outgrowth of economic systems and the classes within them: what is right at one time is wrong at another...

...In his excoriations of male macho, Foner spares no one, whether they be business unionists, Socialists or even the female firebrand of the IWW, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...

...We see no basis in fact for feminist mutual interest, no evidence of natural sex conflict, nor any possibility—nor present desirability—of solidarity between women alone...

...Foner quotes Margery Davies: "The expansion of enterprises in the 1880s and 1890s created a large demand for clerical labor...

...Foner's rich least of facts leaves the annoying aftertaste that he is a scholarly scold...

...From the earliest days, employers brought in women to replace men on strike and to beat down male wages...

...Here some of Foner's facts are helpful...

...The great value of Foner's account is its treasure-chest character: an industrious massing of materials, neatly martialed logically and chronologically, infused with a combative and creative spirit, effusing compassion and empathy for all who work in the shadows...

...Nevertheless, he concludes that the men who ran the labor movement were self-contradictory to the point of hypocrisy because they were "sexists...

...History becomes a handmaiden to personal preachment...

...At the 1880convention, a resolution to accept women to membership won a two-thirds approval, but was tabled for later action...

...what is right for one class is wrong for another...

...If women have to work because the ideal is not realized, then they should get equal pay and should be unionized...

...Thus a new dynamic reinforced the trend toward dividing the economy into male and female sectors...

...For example, Foner notes, quite accurately, that very few women have held top posts in unions...

...Again, the female circumstance was not unlike that of any other "newcomer," whether black, Hispanic or recent immigrant: They were all sources of cheap labor available for jobs not already occupied by white adult males...

...they are easily removed from one locale to another and are often fly-by-night operations...

...the large pool of educated female labor constituted the supply...

...In subsequent years women repeatedly proved their desire and ability to organize, producing a long string of leaders such as the well-known Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the lesser known Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman, and virtual unknowns like Sarah G. Bagley, Kate Mullaney and the ingenious Jane Street, who organized the Denver Domestic Workers' Industrial Union, Industrial Workers of the World (1WW), Local No...

...In the early '80s, there was a significant debate over whether what would later become the AFL should be called the Federation of Organized Trades Unions, or the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States of America and Canada...

...At present, between 80-90 per cent of the women in the labor force are employed as clericals, in sales, in services outside and inside the home, in labor-intensive manufacture, as teachers, nurses or librarians—all of which are relatively low-paying...

...then will you be able to appreciate the value and realize the blessings of the connubial state...

...Visually, though, the writer accumulates facts and arranges them so they will speak for themselves, or insinuates interpretations and motives...

...Because Foner has the compulsion to make constant value judgments about the motives of the actors in his drama, his history is highly moralistic, smacking of self-righteousness...

...Textile unions were the first to appear in factories in America, yet in 1979 the industry still remains resistant to organization—witness J. P. Stevens...

...It is a source book on a most timely subject written by a man who does care, and who conveys his concern with clarity and conviction...

...The constitution of the League provided that "The majority (of the Executive Board) shall be women who are, or have been, trade unionists in good standing, the minority of those well known to be earnest sympathizers...

...While a high percentage of "professional and technical" employees are female (42.9 per cent in 1978), they are bunched into the lower end of the category: they make up 71 per cent of the teachers in the lower grades, but only 33 per cent of college and university faculties...

...Whatever leadership abilities such an escapee had were far less likely to be applied to the push and pull of internal union politicking than to entering a more prosperous portion of the economy, where necessary interruptions in employment would not be as punishing as they are in the drawn out contest for union office...

...they recruit marginal populations who are grateful for the worst...

...then will you be able to attend to the cultivation of your mind, and impart virtuous instruction to your children...

...The great weakness of the book is its highly personalized, ex-cathedra judgments of men and women in the labor and women's movements prior to World War I. (A second volume is promised to update the story...

...Elizabeth Cady Stanton came as the representative of the Woman Suffrage Association of America...

...Once certain areas in the economy were occupied predominantly by females, those jobs became stereotyped as "woman's work...

...The ladies of leisure came to dominate, not because they wished to, but because—in the long haul—the working women were unable to give to the League, as they were unable to give to their unions, the incessant, intensive dedication demanded by the political exercise...

...Although there was objection to admitting Stanton on the grounds that the suffragettes were not a union, she was finally seated by a vote of 45-180...

...Females were preferred to males because they came cheaper...

...As early as 1845 women in Lowell, Massachusetts, established the Female Labor Reform Association, "the first organization of working women outside a local area...

...Yet at the same time they did whatever they could to limit or eliminate females from their trade...

...Women looking for work understandably pointed themselves toward the female trades—not simply because they were welcome there and unwelcome elsewhere, but because they had internalized the external configuration...

...He attributes this to the sexist prejudices of male unionists, and in part he is right there, too: Many men—if not most—whether union or nonunion, rank-and-file or bureaucrats, do believe that they are superior, at least in el mundo money...

...In short, women workers were to be the leaders...

...The word that comes to mind to describe the female circumstance in our economy is "segregated...

...But the woman who escaped the traditional female jobs was generally upward mobile, ready to turn her back on the occupational ghetto peopled by her sisters...

...Men working in the trades (the more skilled) saw the entry of women onto their turf as a threat to their jobs and earnings...

...The typical family of the era was based on a male breadwinner...

...Although the feelings of male unionists about women in the work force were fundamentally economically motivated, their sentiments were reinforced by the prevailing cultural concepts, generally derived from middle-class models rather than working-class realities...

...Nearly as long, organized labor has been an advocate of working women's rights, especially—although not exclusively—in regard to equal pay for equal work...

...96.7 per cent of the nurses...

...There is a 10-15 per cent element that operates in the preferred economy dominated by the "first sex...

...they employ transients and have a big turnover...

...In the late 1860s, the National Labor Union, precursor of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), urged "the extension of eight-hour demands to women workers, equal pay for equal work, and trade unions for working women...

...Foner's recurrent appearances on the scene as a self-invited adviser, agitator and advocate lends this book—as it has all of his other works—a quaint quality, a mix of history and hortation...

...The need for office and sales people developed at a moment when America was leaving the farm and a large number of women liberated from rural chores were available for city work...

...Mary Kellog Putnam and Mary McDonald represented two other organizations, contrived into speedy existence for the occasion...

...When the men in an Indiana assembly blackballed women applicants for membership, Terence V. Powderly, Master Workman of the Knights, overrode the blackball, admitting "eight good and true women...

...For the working class woman—not the upper-middle-income career lady—it is hard to find the time for dedicated gamesmanship...

...In this enterprise, too, they were culturally handicapped by their family roles...

...When she gets home after work, her second job starts with hubby, cooking and kids...

...A man was supposed to earn enough to make it unnecessary for his wife to work, or for his daughter or mother to hire out their talents...

...Moreover, these females, frequently girls, were obscenely oppressed...

...Foner notes that "the National Labor Union became the first labor federation in world history to vote for equal pay for equal work...

...To enforce that, they also opened their union doors to women...

...The argument for the latter name, finally adopted, was that the federation should appeal "to the whole labor element of this country," not just to males in skilled "trades...

...Essential to the entire Marxist concept of economic determinism is the relativity of ethics...

...The typically female trades are seasonal and subject to easy bankruptcy...

...Fundamentally, the split is between the highly capitalized oligopolistic giants and the labor-intensive competitive pygmies...

...Seen this way, the seeming ambiguities of organized labor's attitude toward women workers, especially among the upwardly aspiring "tradesmen," dissolve into a consistent concept...

...Yet over the years the relationship between organized labor and laboring women has been uneasy, for economic and cultural reasons...

...The reasons are money and mores...

...This becomes an ahistoric practice when he applies the norms of today to the deeds of yesterday, and when he attributes to moral delinquency what is born out of cultural conditioning, economic compulsion or institutional imperatives...

...This has been true for many years: In the 1900 Census, women were present in 296 of the 303 occupations...

...Susan B. Anthony recruited female scabs to take the jobs of strikers in a printing plant, arguing that this was the only way women could enter the trade...

...the female, if she worked at all, was considered a supplementary earner...

...Women are further disadvantaged by a structural fault in the American economy, a profound split between our affluent and nonaffluent business sectors...

...Foner goes further: He quarrels with men and women who cannot answer him...

...The belief was especially strong in the earlier part of this century for, as I have suggested, our mores were based on family roles in that time without the pill, washing-machines, diaper service, or frozen foods...

...As rivals for employment in the trades, women were in the same position as blacks or immigrants or even native males brought in from nearby towns to compete for jobs...

...Yet, for the moment, that is factually not what occurs...

...After Foner records these class-conscious?as opposed to sex-conscious—declarations, he makes his personal entry into the debate: "Flynn failed to realize that unless class solidarity was accompanied by the eradication of male-supremacist tendencies in every aspect of the movement, the women workers might find that the IWW, despite its proclamations and resolutions, was not much different from the traditional labor organizations as far as they were concerned...

...If women were driven to work, often for starvation wages in dirty, dismal, diseased shops, they were the victims of a system that did not pay their husbands or fathers enough to keep them in their God-appointed roles as the sex to care for the home—with all its physical and emotional amenities...

...Despite the natural affinity between organized labor and working women, however, the amity has been ambiguous...

...In 1881, a local of female shoe workers was admitted...

...have been concentrated in the "slums" of the economy, in the "other economy...

...Nol all women workers, of course, are trapped in "the other economy...

...For a woman to become a sewing machine operator, waitress, laundress, or typist was "natural...

...The League was founded by a man, William English Walling, a sophisticated Socialist who called upon good-hearted upper-class women to turn to the needs of lower-class women...

...Ideally, of course, household chores should be divided as equally as possible betwen husband and wife...

...The country's first factories of any consequence, the textile mills, were—to indulge a linguistic irony—manned mostly by women...

...Regrettably...

...91.5 per cent of the bank tellers...

...The attitude of the trade unions was radically different when applied to women in predominantly female occupations, such as textiles, apparel, millinery, laundries, tobacco, paper boxes and containers...

...The inclusion of the "labor unions" would open the door to women, who constituted a large portion of the unskilled and semiskilled...

...As early as 1890, the process of sex-typed employment was well under way: of 4 million women in the labor market, 1 million were involved in housekeeping jobs...

...So long as most women are restricted to the "second economy" and sporadically to that part of it called the home, so long will they remain a "second sex" in the world of work...

...In some cases, contracts calling for equal pay for equal work reduced female employment...

...For a fuller discussion of the duality, see the May 8,1978 special issue of The New Leader on "The Other Economy...

...Besides lower wages, this boxing of the "second sex" into the "second economy" has meant less unionization among females...

...That women have been an active force in American labor from the beginning is only natural...

...In 1915, for instance, in the "IWW Call to Women," Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote: "To us, society moves in grooves of classes, not sex...

...All the evidence that this was the view of male unionists is contained in Foner's history...

...indeed, no historian worth his salt lacks a prior position...

...Foner is not, of course, the first to write from a passionate viewpoint...

...His story becomes a brief, recalling the movies of D. W. Griffith with their editorializing through the printed titles...

...That word is misleading, however, not only because it is unprovably pejorative but also because "segregation" misrepresents the maddening mechanism responsible for occupational apartheid...

...Between 1824-37, they participated in 12 textile strikes, with the initial all-female walkout coming in December 1928 in Dover, New Hampshire...

...The conflict and cooperation, collision and coalition, confrontation and compromise are detailed in this diligent, argumentative, passionate work by Philip S. Foner, a historian of labor, blacks and other minorities with some 40 books to his credit...