ABSTRACT
Southern women workers, black and white, have always had a special relationship to the US labor movement, by virtue of the region's distinctive economic and political characteristics. Historically, a relatively small proportion of women workers in the south were employed in manufacturing jobs, and industrial production was highly dispersed geographically, so that militancy was often localized in isolated 'company towns.' The biracial workforce and a highly repressive political system further add to the complexities of organizing in the region. Indeed, southern women workers, even more than their sisters elsewhere in the nation, have faced enormous obstacles when they attempted to unionize. In this chapter, Mary Frederickson analyzes the factors which have shaped women's labor history in the region, and documents the tradition of activism and militancy among southern women workers over the course of the twentieth century.
