ABSTRACT
Women's role in the organized labor movement has never been limited to their participation as workers in unions. As the preceding chapters by Hyman, Cameron and Long all attest, women's labor activism, much more than men's, extends outside of the workplace and into the larger community. One classic form of female community activity on behalf of the labor movement is that of the women's auxiliaries, which played a particularly important role in the massive organizational strikes of the 1930s. In this chapter, Marjorie Penn Lasky analyzes the history of the Ladies' Auxiliary in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters' strikes, drawing on previously unexplored sources and oral histories. Lasky uses this case study as a means to look at some of the broader issues relating to the auxiliary as an organizational form. Auxiliaries performed highly stereotypical'women's work' within the labor movement -preparing food, administering first aid and performing union office work during strikes, for example — all on behalf of auxiliary members' husbands. Sometimes, however, auxiliary activities spilled beyond the boundaries of conventional female roles, especially during strikes, when women often assumed quasi-military responsibilities. Under these circumstances, auxiliaries could transform the consciousness of their members in ways which threatened to undermine the existing structure of female subordination in the family and in society. Lasky suggests, however, that this potential for female radicalization within auxiliaries was severely constrained, both ideologically, in that women's militancy was explicitly defined as an extension of their domestic roles and responsibilities, and politically, in that male union leaders remained in authority over the activities of auxiliaries.
