Advocacy Journalism, Labor Feminism, and the Timber Worker, 1936-1940

Abstract

ABSTRACT Julia Bertram worked as a journalist for the Timber Worker, the newspaper of the International Woodworkers of America, from 1936–1940. For three of those years, she also served as the president of the women’s auxiliary of her local union. This study examines Bertram’s work in both of these roles as crucial to the union’s success, and argues that Bertram’s combination of union activism and journalism embedded working-class feminism within the developing progressive labor agenda represented by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. Bertram’s work offers an example of how working-class White and immigrant women shaped the labor movement prior to World War II by expanding the scope of appropriate political activities in which women participated. As a journalist for the Timber Worker, Bertram frequently reminded her readers that women were unionists and equal members of the working-class struggle. This combination of activism and journalism has been overlooked in discussions about the rise of labor feminism, which tend to focus on female-dominated industries and unions rather than on the press. Female journalists in the labor press and in union auxiliaries deserve more attention if historians hope to understand the rise of labor feminism in the 1930s, as women carved out space in the fledgling CIO and its unions.