| "Women, Work and Community in Minneapolis, 1929 to 1946," is a community study of women workers and their involvement in the expanding labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that the growth of women's labor union membership in the 1930s was predicated by the community base of the movement. Unionism in these decades had two separate phases--community-based and workplace-oriented. During the Great Depression, the labor movement was nourished by its roots in the community and by its attention to what can be described as the reproductive sphere, specifically community concerns, family and community networks, and education. But by the 1940s, the labor movement became more exclusively tied to the workplace. The development of the war economy and the growing pressures for centralization encouraged the labor movement to turn toward corporate unionism.;For women, this change in orientation was particularly crucial. The community orientation of the labor movement in its most dynamic period of growth fostered the participation and leadership of women workers. The response to women's presence in the labor force and as part of the labor movement, was not unambiguous. Unemployment remained at high levels throughout the decade of the 1930s; and as the crisis took its toll on working men and women, hostility toward working women, especially married women who worked, increased dramatically. The question of how labor should approach women's work and their membership in the union movement was raised throughout the 1930s, and the ambivalence of unionists both male and female encouraged the non-committal and even hostile attitudes of their leaders. Viewed as a threat to the ability of men to assume wage-earning roles, women were marginalized in the organization of the movement, in its public discourse, and in its symbolic system. Finally, as the labor movement shifted away from community and local concerns to workplace and national politics, it lost the power to recruit and involve women members. |
