Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Lost Visions of Equality: The Labor Origins of the Next Women’s Movement”

In 1937, 23-year-old Myra Wolfgang strode to the middle of one of Detroit’s forty Woolworth’s five and dime stores and gave the signal for the planned sit-down strike of salesclerks and counter waitresses to begin. The main Woolworth’s store was already on strike, and the union was threatening to escalate the strike to all of the stores in Detroit. Wolfgang was an art school dropout from a Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant background who had already given her share of soapbox speeches for the Proletarian Party, a small Marxist group, before settling down to union organizing in the early 1930s.