BOOK

A matter of moral justice : Black women laundry workers and the fight for justice

Carson, Jenny, 1972- author

2021

Overview

\"This book addresses how a group of low-wage and primarily African American women workers found an industrial and interracial union in the 1930s and why their gender and race interests were subordinated within that union in the 1940s. Carson argues that race and gender explain, at every turn, the choices, challenges and opportunities for African American and White women laundry workers. The women's relationship to the work and to the union movement was at all times mediated by race and gender. Job assignments were based on race and gender, and laundry employers exploited existing gender and racial tensions to create divisions among their workers. Yet while race and gender limited African American and White women's occupational mobility, they were also the axis around which they organized. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, women laundry workers employed gender-conscious organizing strategies that included building alliances with the middle and upper-class leaders of the New York Women's Trade Union League (NY WTUL). In the 1920s, when large numbers of Black women entered the laundries, the workers and their allies employed race-conscious organizing strategies that included working with Black trade unionists in the short-lived Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers and with Black reform organizations. In the 1930s, Harlem communists who were inspired by the Third Period's directive to organize Black workers and who were genuinely concerned about conditions in the laundries launched a grassroots union campaign to secure racial justice for laundry workers. This study assesses the efficacy of these gender- and race-based organizational strategies and of the successes and limitations of the interracial and cross-class coalitions that they produced. The heart of this story is how race and gender shaped the forms of activism that women laundry workers pursued and the collaborations that they forged\"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Subject: African American laundresses United States Social conditions 20th century. / Laundry workers Labor unions United States History 20th century.
• ISBN: 9780252043901, 9780252085895

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
HD8039.L32 U593 2021	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE