father and where she met her husband. Davis had a strong anti-authoritarian streak and a habit of standing
up for anyone she thought was being mistreated. Both these traits pushed her toward union activity. “The
worst thing about a job to me was authority,” Davis once disclosed matter-of-factly. “I loved people,” she
continued, and “I believed in people. I never saw the difference between someone who had a title and a
lot of money, and Joe Doe and Jane Doe who swept floors and dug ditches. Unions give the people a
voice for themselves—to help them not be robots that the boss can boss around.” ^3
Thirty-year-old Davis helped organize her plant in 1941 and was elected vice president of Auto
Workers Local 764 in 1943. When the union president was drafted soon after, she “moved upstairs” into
the top slot and stayed there, prompting a 1947 feature story in Life magazine, with a four-page photo
spread, on the new “strikingly attractive lady labor leader.” In one photo, Davis lounges at home reading
Freud, a thinker whose ideas, she told the interviewer, proved indispensable to running her local union.
“If I hadn’t been a union leader,” Davis added, “I would have been a psychiatrist.”^4
In 1948, UAW president Walter Reuther tapped her to head the union’s Women’s Department. The
department, formed in 1944 by a large, energetic group of wartime women workers, pushed hard for the
needs of women and minorities to be more fully integrated into the union’s reform agenda. Lillian Hatcher,
the first black woman on the UAW’s national staff, became Davis’s close ally and friend. An Alabama-
born mother of three, Hatcher had been a wartime aircraft riveter before taking the UAW job in 1944.
Assigned to the UAW’s Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department, established in 1946, as well
as to the Women’s Department, she worked at the UAW until her retirement in 1980. Davis and Hatcher
went everywhere together, responding to complaints of discrimination from women and minority men
across the country and speaking to local after local about race and gender equity. These experiences,
Davis later recalled, made her realize the pervasiveness of sex discrimination faced by women. In
addition, she learned from Hatcher and other African American women about the interconnectedness of
sex and race discrimination.
Addie Wyatt, an African American, found a receptive home in the left-led United Packinghouse
Workers of America (UPWA), an industrial union in which multi-racial social justice feminism
flourished. A Mississippi-born daughter of a tailor and a teacher, seventeen-year-old Wyatt took her first
job at Chicago’s Armour meatpacking plant in 1941 after a frustrating search for a typist position. The
first union meeting she attended left a deep impression. “I saw a picture that I have never been able to
forget,” she later explained. “It was a room full of black and white workers, Hispanic workers, young and
old, middle-aged workers, male and female. They were all talking about the problems of decent wages
and working conditions. And they were talking about the struggle of black people, Hispanic people, and
women. I wanted to be a part of it.”