“They all sort of disappeared”: The Early Cohort of UAW Women Leaders

Abstract

MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 37:1 (Spring 2011): 5-39©2011 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 2010 Student Essay Prize Winner “They all sort of disappeared”: The Early Cohort of UAW Women Leaders by Amy Bromsen For a brief period during World War II, women were allowed to join the predominantly male workforce in the automobile factories. Although women had already been instrumental in organizing largely female plants into the United Automobile Workers-Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW-CIO), the war created new space and opportunities for members of a cohort of women to be elected leaders of UAW locals. As veterans returned after the war, however, there was enormous pressure to push women out of their union positions and, indeed, out of the workforce entirely. Some of the women previously elected to shop-floor bargaining and grievance-handling positions withstood the flood of returning servicemen and the postwar recession layoffs. They remained local union leaders even after the composition of the workforce in the automobile factories again became predominantly male. A small group of these women received appointments to positions with the International Union between 1944 and 1952, where even those staunchly aligned with Walter Reuther faced discrimination and were denied positions they merited and probably would have received had they been men. These women were assigned to administer programs and work in departments that did not perform contract bargaining and representational functions, despite the fact that they had developed skills in those areas while holding elected positions in their local unions. Several factors account for the failure of the UAW to recognize and develop these women‘s leadership abilities: the beliefs and behaviors of union men; caucus loyalty; the personal relationships that played an important, albeit veiled, role at the higher levels of union administration; A previous version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in 2010. The author would like to thank Professor Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State University Department of History, for her helpful comments as a discussant on the panel following the paper‘s presentation and for her advice throughout the preparation of this article. 6 Michigan Historical Review and union structures that created and reinforced barriers to women‘s leadership. These historical and institutional obstacles denied promotions in the International Union to women with representational and bargaining experience (the early cohort) while increasingly offering advancement (in administrative offices divorced from bargaining) to a later cohort of women with administrative rather than bargaining experience in their local unions. Although the early cohort‘s assignments at the UAW International were administrative in nature, this group of women had had powerful negotiating and contract-enforcement positions in their respective local unions. The later group, women appointed to the UAW International from the mid-1950s to the end of the twentieth century, form a different cohort with different backgrounds and different expectations. For the most part, these women had held elected or appointed administrative positions within their local unions, had not experienced the greater power exercised by the first cohort, and would not expect their assignments at the International level to vary greatly from their local union jobs. This difference in roles is an important distinction, because unions typically have had two separate ―branches‖ of government, with different sets of rules, institutional goals, and levels of power. Historically, the branch that controls the labor-management relationship through negotiation and enforcement of the collectivebargaining agreement has had more power in the UAW than the branch that administers the union‘s structures, programs, and funds.1 It is this bifurcated arrangement that permitted the union to appoint women to UAW International positions and yet still prevent them from holding powerful negotiation and representational assignments. Women could have careers and be successful in the UAW, but they have remained largely excluded from positions with the power to make important decisions. In order for a system designed to subordinate women to be stable, it must create structures that reinforce that subordination and maintain it over time. In addition, such a system must develop an ideology to reinforce the concept that men‘s interests represent the interests of the group as a...