Dorothy Cobble - The Other Womens Movement

The Other Womens Movement

WILLIAM CHAFE, GARY GERSTLE, LINDA GORDON, AND JULIAN ZELIZER

A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book.

WORKPLACE JUSTICE AND SOCIAL
RIGHTS IN MODERN AMERICA

Copyright 2004 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock,

Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2005

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12368-4

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-691-12368-3

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Caledonia

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

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IN THE EARLY 1950s, my grandmother and I would ride the bus downtown for the monthly meeting of the Atlanta division of the Grand International Womens Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. My grandmother was in her mid-sixties (the exact year of her birth was always in dispute), and would soon resign the union office she had held since before 1930. My mother, also married to a railroad man, would step in as her replacement. Although I was only four, I was not allowed to observe the auxiliarys proceedings. Rather, month after month, I sat outside the meeting hall, next to the tightly closed door, trying in vain to make out the words being spoken. Despite my complaints, there I remained, because as my grandmother explained to me, since I had not taken the oath of loyalty to the sisters and to the union, I could not be trusted with the secrets of the order.

I now have the little black book in which all the secret rituals, passwords, and processional drills of the auxiliary are revealed. My mother gave it to me when she moved to a small apartment after my fathers death. Its gratifying to think I have finally parted those closed doors, at least partially, and glimpsed inside. Yet the little black book of rituals did not, in the end, tell me much of what I really wanted to know about the auxiliary to which my mother and grandmother belonged. Nor did it help me in re-creating the larger world of labor politics of which they were a part. For that, I had to turn to other documents, other lives. For what mattered to me then as now was grasping what they and their union sisters believed in, what ideals inspired them, what kind of world they thought their auxiliary could help create. I wanted to understand my mothers generation of labor women, the generation who came of age in the depression, kept the factories humming during the war years, and then pioneered the now commonplace status of working wife and mother.

Its still possible I would never have undertaken this larger history had not an old friend from graduate school called and asked me for an essay on labor women for an anthology she was editing on women in postwar America. That was some ten years ago now, and Ive been trying to finish the story begun in that essay ever since. Many of the ideas I tried out in that piece have weathered the archival test. Others fell by the wayside. In particular, my desires in regard to the women of my family and others like them were not to be met. Many working-class women who joined unions and labor auxiliarieswomen like my mother and grandmotherare not named in the pages that follow. They did not rise to union office nor did they fashion national legislation or meet with U.S. Presidents and corporate CEOs. Yet without them, the movement that I chronicle in this book would never have happened.

My mother no longer attends auxiliary meetings. The Atlanta division of the Grand International Auxiliary disbanded on September 23, 1987. She and my grandmother were two of the four remaining members who signed the last page of the carefully kept minute book. Yet to this day, when I visit my mother, now in her nineties, she sits me down on the couch and reads me the letters from her national auxiliary officers. She is especially attentive to letters alerting her to adverse political developments in Washington affecting working people and asking her to contact her Georgia congressional representatives, a request she almost always fulfills. This book is dedicated to her and to all the women like her.