Dennis A. Deslippe, ‘Rights, Not Roses' Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xii + 259 pp. $49.95 cloth; $21.95 paper.

Extract

Through case studies of gender relations in two unions, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and the International Union of Electrical Workers (IEU), Dennis A. Deslippe argues that working-class feminists were at the vanguard of resurgent feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. In the book's opening chapters, Deslippe synthesizes scholarship in labor and women's history to reiterate that working-class feminists helped shape the policy oriented activism of the union movement and women's organizations between 1945 and the passage of the landmark Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Labor unions actively promoted equal pay legislation after passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 initiated a new phase of labor and management relations characterized by “social unionism”, seeking justice through legislative action, in addition to collective bargaining. Unions pursued equal pay legislation as another means to protect “men's” jobs and wages against competition from lower paid female workers, but rank-and-file women embraced its potential for gender equity. Deslippe adds depth to this fairly familiar story by suggesting that union women's “shifting consciousness” toward an equal rights perspective also occurred because automation exposed the capriciousness of categorizing jobs by sex and led to layoffs.