Addie Wyatt and other UPWA delegates to the 1957 NAACP convention pose with Herbert Hill, NAACP labor liaison, and Philip Weightman,
AFL-CIO. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
By 1952, her co-workers, mostly white men, had elected her vice president of the local union, quite
an unusual arrangement for the time. A year later she stepped into the presidency and then ran successfully
for the UPWA’s national executive board on a platform emphasizing women’s rights and the advancement
of minorities. In 1954, she was appointed to the UPWA staff as the first black woman national
representative, a position she held for the next thirty years. Her religious faith and the close-knit
egalitarian community she discovered in the Church of God sustained her long career as a feminist labor
and civil rights advocate. She saw no opposition in being a Christian and a unionist, she often explained:
both sought to go beyond selfish individualism, and both wanted a more humane world.^5
The Legacies of the 1920s
Before looking at the workplace and policy changes labor-oriented social justice feminists sought and
won from the 1930s to the 1960s, it is important to understand the world of the 1920s in which many grew
up and the bitter debates that divided women reformers in this decade. The tensions that erupted among
feminists after 1920 would persist for the next fifty years, separating the women’s movement into two
hostile camps.
With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and suffrage affirmed, at least for the
majority of women, National Woman’s Party (NWP) founder Alice Paul and other leaders from the
militant suffrage wing began to mobilize with a new goal in mind. They proposed a second, but quite
different, constitutional amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which they believed would
secure full legal equality of rights for women. Some longtime suffragists protested this shift in emphasis,
given the continuing disenfranchisement of women of color, including African American women in the
South and Mexican American, American Indian, and Asian American women in the West. NWP
leadership, however, insisted that any problems related to these women’s continued lack of voting rights
were matters of race, not sex. Other women reformers, like prominent Progressive Era Hull House
founder and peace activist Jane Addams and National Consumers’ League secretary Florence Kelley,