Women have contributed to the U.S. labor movement in a variety of ways. Like their male counterparts, they have participated in unions as members and leaders. But women have also engaged in many gender-specific labor-movement activities rooted in their distinctively female life experience. Among the organizational forms such efforts have produced are women's labor-union auxiliaries, which have played crucial roles in many key strikes; cross-class alliances like the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL); umbrella groups like the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW); and "pre-unions" like Nine to Five and other working women's associations that function outside of the formal collective bargaining system. In addition, the feminist movement has worked frequently in coalition with organized labor on mutual concerns.
The first factory workers in the United States were female, and women were also among the nation's earliest labor militants. But male workers' unions, especially in skilled craft occupations, often excluded women from membership. Most nineteenth-century unions stood for a "family wage," or pay sufficient to support a family, for male workers, and hoped that attaining this goal would allow working-class women to withdraw entirely from paid work. However, broader labor movement organizations like the Knights of Labor, which flourished in the 1880s, or the Industrial Workers of the World a few decades later, actively recruited women members. These organizations were short-lived. As long as craft unions dominated the labor movement, women remained a tiny minority of its members, despite ongoing efforts at self-organization. As more inclusive forms of unionism became the norm, beginning in the clothing industry in the 1910s, and growing more broad in the 1930s, women's involvement in unions increased dramatically. Today two out of every five union members are female.
Women's networks outside the workplace, rooted in family and community, have often helped galvanize women's labor activism. Native-born white women, women of color, and immigrant women have all participated in the labor movement, and indeed it has frequently brought together women workers from diverse ethnic and racial groups on the basis of shared employment conditions. Unions with strong grassroots community ties have generally had greater success in mobilizing women workers than more bureaucratic forms of labor organization. And women's union auxiliaries, comprised of the wives and other female kin of male workers, have recruited women into labor-movement struggles by appealing to their domestic roles as guardians of family welfare. The Women's Emergency Brigade, which was critical to the success of the United Auto Workers' 1936-37 strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, is the best-known case. Women's auxiliaries have played a major role in many other strikes as well, especially in communities dominated by a single industry, where the links between family welfare, community solidarity, and workers' rights tend to be most clear. Although women's auxiliaries have been less important in the post-World War II era, this organizational form persists to the present day—as illustrated by the 1983-85 Arizona copper miners' strike.
Women's community-based networks also have been central to another type of labor-movement organization predicated on alliances between elite and working-class women. In the early part of the twentieth century, the WTUL was the most important cross-class organization of this type, bringing upper-class maternalistic women into active support of poor immigrant factory women's struggles for improved wages and conditions and of union-building efforts among women workers. The WTUL's influence waned over the interwar period and then disappeared entirely in the aftermath of World War II. More recently, however, middle-class feminists and female professionals have allied with women clerical and service workers in the campaign for comparable worth. Here gender solidarity is as central as class solidarity in galvanizing labor-movement activity.
Starting in the 1970s, under the impetus of the second wave of feminism, a variety of women's organizations emerged that were devoted to advancing the specific interests of women workers within the labor movement. The most successful of such groups were CLUW and Nine to Five, each of which pursued a different strategy. CLUW took the existing structure of organized labor as a given and directed itself toward enhancing the power and status of women within that structure. Nine to Five sought instead to develop an alternative type of organization for women workers, implicitly challenging male-centered labor-movement traditions while working to expand the options for women within existing labor movement organizations.
Unlike CLUW, the working women's movement, of which Nine to Five is the best-known example, originated outside the established unions. In the 1970s young activists with roots in the women's liberation movement began to organize previously unorganized office workers into independent associations. At first, these groups deliberately avoided any formal links to established unions. Their founders believed that women clerical workers, unaccustomed to viewing themselves as powerful, would perceive unions as male-oriented and culturally alien. Instead the working women's movement concentrated on consciousness raising and other relatively unstructured, participatory organizational forms and on public dramatizations of specific issues affecting women clerical workers. To a degree, Nine to Five and similar groups functioned as "preunions," and over time they moved closer to the union model, devoting an increasing amount of their energy to unionization drives. Indeed, in the 1980s the highly democratic, bottom-up model of union organizing they developed was imitated by mainstream unions in efforts to recruit women clerical workers, most notably on university campuses.
Finally, the feminist movement itself has worked in coalition with organized labor on a variety of issues. Campaigns for pay equity, parental leave, child care, protection from sexual harassment, and other issues affecting working women have become a joint focus of lobbying, legal strategies, and grassroots organizing for both the feminist and labor movements, spilling over the traditional boundaries of union activity. More generally, feminist efforts to improve the pay, status, and working conditions of women have become an integral part of the contemporary labor movement.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, ed., Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1993); Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Nancy Seifer and Barbara Wertheimer, "New Approaches to Collective Power: Four Working Women's Organizations," Women Organizing: An Anthology, edited by Bernice Cummings and Victoria Schuck, 152-83. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Ruth Milkman
See also
Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW);
Protective Labor Legislation;
Labor Unions;
Women's Trade Union League.
