Feminism Unfinished

injustices, they insisted, could the problems of the majority, men as well as women, be solved.
Social justice feminists like Wolfgang looked to the largest social movements of their day, the labor
and the civil rights movements, as the best vehicles to achieve their vision of women’s rights in a more
inclusive and egalitarian society. By the end of the 1930s, most aligned themselves politically with the
Democratic Party, and their efforts rose and fell in tandem with the fortunes of New Deal reform and U.S.
social democratic politics. Although their dreams outpaced their achievements, by the 1960s they had
changed public opinion, workplace institutions, law, and public policy in profound and lasting ways.
Putting Myra Wolfgang and other labor women like her at the center of American feminism is not the
usual way the history of women’s movements in this era is recounted. All too often chroniclers of
women’s reform define feminist activism narrowly and assume that all-female organizations dedicated
only to sex equality are the prime bearers of the feminist impulse. From this perspective, the fifty years
following women’s suffrage in 1920 appear as a retreat for women’s rights, with a dwindling band of
white middle-class feminists making minimal headway in a society largely dismissive of women’s issues.
Expanding the definition of feminism and of women’s movements to include working-class and minority
feminists rewrites this standard story. Instead of decline, we see a robust and diverse group of feminists
in mixed-sex organizations making considerable progress. Feminism and feminist activism did not
diminish in the decades after suffrage: rather, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the struggle for the rights of
low-income women and women of color surged forward as the labor and civil rights movements gained
ground.
American women joined a dizzying array of social reform organizations in this era, and many of these
women brought a decidedly feminist perspective to their work. African American women in the NAACP,
the National Council of Negro Women, the National Urban League, or the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, to name just a few of the civil rights organizations of the day, sought black women’s full
rights as women and as citizens, repeatedly insisting that women’s rights to good schools, jobs, and
protection from physical and sexual assault were essential planks in the black freedom struggle. Mexican
American and other minority women created a parallel yet overlapping civil rights movement to combat
discriminatory practices, common especially in communities across the Southwest and West, barring
“nonwhites” from housing, schooling, and jobs. Feminists in church, peace, internationalist, and consumer
groups as well as in welfare rights and other poor people’s movements also agitated for women’s rights
and social reform.
This chapter is not a comprehensive history of these struggles or of feminism in this period. It
foregrounds labor-oriented social justice feminists or those who worked primarily with the labor
movement. I focus on this group because they led the social justice wing of the women’s movement in this
era and because their vision of feminist reform has much to offer a twenty-first-century world facing
economic and social problems not unlike those they sought to address.
They were a diverse group in terms of race, class, and culture. Wolfgang was raised in a Jewish
immigrant family that had prospered in the 1920s, but most had Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, and
the majority came from poor or working-class households. Many were African American. The life
histories of Caroline Dawson Davis and Addie Wyatt, two working-class feminists who held leadership
positions in powerful and progressive labor organizations in this era reveal the forces propelling
working-class and minority women into activism.
Caroline Dawson Davis, the head of the Women’s Department of the United Auto Workers (UAW)
from 1948 to 1973, was a leading voice for the rights of women and minorities within the auto union and
nationally. She grew up in a poor white Kentucky mining family steeped in unionism and Protestant
religion. In 1934, she got a job as a drill press operator in the same Indiana auto parts plant that hired her