ABSTRACT
During World War II, when women were drawn into industrial employment in massive numbers to fulfill wartime production demands, their involvement in the labor movement, and especially the young industrial unions formed in the years immediately preceding the war, also grew dramatically. Both during the war and in the period leading up to it, female union membership increased sharply, and many secondary leadership posts were assumed by women. Much attention has been given by feminist labor historians to the immediate postwar demobilization period, when the sexual division of labor in industry reverted to its pre-war form, and women's union membership also dropped sharply. The general presumption has been that women's wartime gains in the labor movement were liquidated in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, as the 'feminine mystique' took hold in the larger society. In this chapter, however, Nancy Gabin suggests that the situation was considerably more complex. Focusing, like Meyerowitz, on the case of the United Automobile Workers, one of the best-studied unions in the literature on the 1930s and 1940s, Gabin shows that while women did not overcome the longstanding obstacles to sexual equality either in industry or in the union during the 1950s, the gains made in the war years were not entirely lost. On the contrary, the institutionalization of women's concerns within the UAW's structure and official policies during the war years insured the survival of women's union activism into the postwar period, providing an important bridge to the late 1960s and 1970s, when the resurgence of feminism sparked a renewal of women's activism within the unions. The 1950s are usually characterized as a decade of quiescence and consensus, a period in which conservative values and attitudes were vigorously and unanimously asserted. The popularity of the 'feminine mystique,' which prescribed marriage and motherhood as the source of female fulfillment, and the absence in these years of a feminist movement suggest a pervasive reaction against the changes in women's role brought about by World War II. The erosion after 1945 of the wartime gains made by women in the male-dominated basic industries and unions, and the expansion of the unorganized tertiary sector, where most of the women who entered the labor force after the war found jobs, are often taken as evidence of working women's presumed disaffection from unionism and their lack of interest in collective action in the 1950s. 1
