"This book addresses how a group of low-wage and primarily African American women workers found an industrial and interracial union in the 1930s and why their gender and race interests were subordinated within that union in the 1940s. Carson argues that race and gender explain, at every turn, the choices, challenges and opportunities for African American and White women laundry workers. The women's relationship to the work and to the union movement was at all times mediated by race and gender. Job assignments were based on race and gender, and laundry employers exploited existing gender and racial tensions to create divisions among their workers. Yet while race and gender limited African American and White women's occupational mobility, they were also the axis around which they organized. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, women laundry workers employed gender-conscious organizing strategies that included building alliances with the middle and upper-class leaders of the New York Women's Trade Union League (NY WTUL). In the 1920s, when large numbers of Black women entered the laundries, the workers and their allies employed race-conscious organizing strategies that included working with Black trade unionists in the short-lived Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers and with Black reform organizations. In the 1930s, Harlem communists who were inspired by the Third Period's directive to organize Black workers and who were genuinely concerned about conditions in the laundries launched a grassroots union campaign to secure racial justice for laundry workers. This study assesses the efficacy of these gender- and race-based organizational strategies and of the successes and limitations of the interracial and cross-class coalitions that they produced. The heart of this story is how race and gender shaped the forms of activism that women laundry workers pursued and the collaborations that they forged"--
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. "We Win a Place in Industry": Black Women and the Birth of the Power Laundry Industry
Chapter 2. A Miniature Hell: Working in a Power Laundry
Chapter 3. The 1912 Uprising of New York City's Laundry Workers
Chapter 4. The Rise and Fall of Local 284: Black Women Laundry Workers' Activism in the Era of the
Chapter 5. "It Was Up to All of Us to Fight": Communist Laundry Organizing during the Great Depress
Chapter 6. Aristocrats of the Movement: The Uprising of Brooklyn's Laundry Workers
Chapter 7. "It Was Like the Salvation": New York City's Laundry Workers Join the CIO
Chapter 8. The "Democratic Initiative": Fighting for Control of the Laundry Workers Joint Board
Chapter 9. "Putting Democracy into Action": The Laundry Workers' Double V Campaign
Chapter 10. "Everybody's Libber": The Laundry Workers' Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar Era
Chapter 11. "We're Just Not Ready Yet": The Ousting of Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson from
Epilogue: Building a Democratic Initiative in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Index
Back cover
About the author
Jenny Carson is an associate professor of history at Ryerson University.
