One of the most inspiring social movements of the postWorld War II era was the historic struggle for the unionization of California farm workers that began in the early 1960s. Studies of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO (UFW), and the farm worker insurgency that developed during this period have focused on its leadership and provided a patriarchal interpretation of its origins.1 Perpetuating this view, a recent history textbook noted, [A] thirty-five-yearold community organizer named Cesar Estrada Chavez set out single-handedly to organize impoverished migrant farm laborers in the California grape fields.2 Such male-centered interpretations have distorted the history of the UFW and the role of women in its development. The following pages document the heretofore invisible participation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in the founding and management of the UFW and analyze the impact of gender on this union. Women's commitment to the union, however, was not uniform. To illustrate the wide range of women's contributions to the UFW, this investigation contrasts the experiences of the rare women, such as Dolores Huerta, whose style of leadership fit a male model of labor organizing with the more common but no less vital endeavors of women, such as Helen Chdvez, whose activism fit a more female model of collective action-that is, work performed, often behind the scenes, in an auxiliary or supportive fashion. During the past two decades scholarship in women's labor history has uncovered the diversity and distinctiveness of women's working-class heritage? Most of this work has concentrated on Anglo or ethnically European women, and more recently on black women in the South. The protests of Chicanas and Mexicanas in UFW campaigns demonstrate a continuity with women in other labor struggles in the United States. Thanks to a growing body of research that emerged during the 1980s, the experiences of women of Mexican heritage can also be considered in relationship to the past and contemporary struggles of their ethnic sisters-striking Mexicana laundresses in El Paso at the turn of the century, Mexican cannery operatives in California in the 1930s and 1940s, the wives of Mexican miners who formed women's auxiliaries