Rethinking the urban and rural divide in Latino labor,recreation, and activism in West Michigan, 1940s–1970s

During the 1940s–1970s, Latino labor experiences could not be confined to either urban and industrial or rural and agricultural settings. Unlike large metropolises, Grand Rapids, Michigan is a mid-sized, Midwest city wherein the urban center and industrial labor opportunities are located within thirty miles of agricultural areas. I argue that Latinos in West Michigan used both rural and urban areas for labor to meet their economic and social needs. Due to the gendered realities of labor from the 1940s to the 1970s, women played an instrumental role in planning and executing the movement of their families between spaces. In turn, this community’s activism was not limited to the boundaries of urban or rural space. This research shows how Latinos etched out an economic and social survival in places wherein they are not the majority or have a plethora of resources. As the Latino diaspora spreads into areas in the southern United States, we can look to how Latinos in Grand Rapids and the Midwest lived and worked to better understand the lived experiences of twenty-first century Latinos.     

Cab fair: taxi driving and South Asian labor activism in New York City, 1985–1999

Abstract

The labor strike of 13 May 1998 was an historic event for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). Under the leadership of Bhairavi Desai, 98% of New York City’s 24,000 yellow cab drivers refused to work. The strike disrupted the flow of city life, but it also shattered the belief that taxi drivers were atomized and therefore unable to organize, effectively exercise power, or earn basic working rights for themselves. This unprecedented strike was thus an act of self-assertion for taxicab drivers in the 1990s, who were predominantly of South Asian origin and had been victims of unjust violence and discrimination in the city. This article questions how immigrant taxi cab drivers came to cooperate with one another in the late nineties to fight for fair wages. It also explores how members of the NYTWA overcame class disparities and ethnic differences among themselves to serve common goals.     

‘Give us peace’: Gladys Avery Tillett and the search for women's political activism in the United States, 1945–1950

As previously demonstrated by scholars, the social justice feminism movement in the United States accomplished its two central goals by the time of that nation's official involvement in World War II. This article examines the subsequent development of former social justice feminists' search for political activism after World War II through the activities of one of the social movement's later, significant leaders, Gladys Avery Tillett, particularly in her participation in the controversial and bitter campaign of North Carolina United States Senator Frank Porter Graham to retain his seat in the 1950 Democratic party primary.     

The Seattle Teamsters and the procedural state, 1935–1942

The Teamsters Union often clashed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Seattle between 1935 and 1942. At times the Seattle Teamsters resisted the NLRB, yet in other cases the union worked within the agency's procedures to expand. In the years after the Wagner Act, the Teamsters exploited the NLRB to block employees from choosing their own union. This article uses archival records to explore cases where the Seattle Teamsters successfully adapted to federal regulation of collective bargaining between 1935 and 1942. Seattle workers opposed to the Teamsters bravely fought to protect their right to organize, yet these employees faced a union skilled at working with the procedural state. These cases show the increasing ability of the Seattle Teamsters to enroll workers wary of the union by complying with NLRB rules.     

The American decision to join the international labor organization∗

The relationship between Communism and Americanism during the Popular Front period is now largely perceived as a positive one. By promoting the idea that Communism was an extension of specifically American political traditions, the argument runs, Communists were able to advance their participation in the unions and in a left-oriented cultural-political alliance with broad popular appeal. Against this perspective, this article highlights the repressive significance of liberal nationalism as a resource for the narrowing of political culture in the New Deal labor movement. In particular, the analysis focuses on the importance of Americanism to attacks by the Reuther caucus on the Communist Party in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from the end of the 1930s through the war. Such factional politics are significant both as a reflection of more general developments in the Congress of Industrial Organizations and because of the UAW's centrality to the political trajectory of the labor movement. More broadly, this history reveals how a liberal anti-Communism embraced the demonizing politics typically associated with the post-war red scare, linking New Deal political culture to a long tradition of countersubversive discourse in America.     

Union labels and boycotts: Cooperation of the knights of labor and the cigar makers international union, 1885–6

Hard‐Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910. By Mark Wyman. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979. x, 331 pp. $15.95.

Wage‐Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. 266 pp. $14.95.

Feigned Necessity: Hawaii's Attempts to Obtain Chinese Contract Labor, 1921–1923. By John E. Reinecke. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc., 1979. xvi, 697 pp., n.p.

Lumber and Politics: The Career of Mark E. Reed. By Robert E. Ficken. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. xi, 276 pp. $14.95.

The Mess in Washington: Manpower Mobilization in World War II. By George Q. Flynn. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1979. xi, 294 pp. $17.95.

The Great Fear: The Anti‐Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower. By David Caute. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978. 638 pp. $14.95.

Which Side Are You On? The Brookside Mine Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky. By Lynda Ann Ewen. Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1979. 139 pp. Appendix. $4.95.

A Ghetto Grows In Brooklyn. By Harold X. Connolly. New York: New York University Press, 1977. xv, 248 pp. $15.00.

Voices of Discord: Canadian Short Stories from the 1930's. Edited by Donna Phillips. Introduction by Kenneth J. Hughes. Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1979. 220 pp. $7.95.

Popular Disturbances in England: 1700–1870. By John Stevenson. New York: Longman, 1979. vii, 374 pp. $24.00.

Before The Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Brit‐tain. By Ursula R. Q. Henriques. New York: Longman, 1979. 294 pp. $10.50.

Aristocracy and People: Britain 1815–1865. By Norman Gash. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. vii, 375 pp. $20.00.

Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth‐Century London: John Gast and His Times. By I. J. Prothero. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 418 pp. $30.00.

The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability 1900–1914. Edited by Alan O'Day. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979. 199 pp. $19.95.

Goodbye to the Working Class: A Study of 122 Former Grammar School Children from Dagenham. By Roy Greenslade. London: Marion Boyars, 1979. 192 pp. $ 5.95.

The Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism. By Paul Mazgaj. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 281 pp. $24.95.

Paths To Authority: The Middle Class and the Industrial Labor Force in France, 1820–1848. By Peter N. Stearns. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. 222 pp. $12.95.

French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851. By Ted W. Marga‐dent. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. xxiv, 379 pp. $25.00.

The Service City: State and Townsmen In Russia, 1600–1800. By J. Michael Hittle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. viii, 297 pp. $20.00.

Karl Marx, Romantic Irony and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism. By Leonard P. Wessell, Jr. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 297 pp. $20.00.     

The women’s liberation movement,activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985

The women’s liberation movement was the impetus for the founding of new institutions of psychological and mental health care for women in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article draws upon the archive of one such site, based in Islington, North London, to explore the ways that members of the movement interacted with local politics and were attentive to racial and economic oppression. It demonstrates that consciousness-raising groups and feminist magazines made women’s distress visible and that this visibility led to the development of feminist critiques of mainstream psychiatric care. The critiques of mainstream provision laid the ground for grassroots interventions into women’s mental healthcare in the community.     

Sugar and unfree labour: Reflections on labour control in the dominican republic, 1870–1935

This article takes issue with theories which suppose an essential contradiction between capitalist production and unfree labour relations. Using the history of sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic as a case study, it is argued that capitalist entrepreneurs tried very hard to restrict free wage labour relations. On the Dominican sugar plantations this goal was reached by a system of differential mechanisation which brought about a rigid separation between the mass of unskilled field workers and the restricted number of (semi‐) skilled workers. This labour division could be reproduced over a long period of time because the field workers were migrant labourers from Haiti liable to strong racial discrimination within Dominican society.     

All the labor problems fit to print: the New York Times and the cultural production of the U.S ‘labor problem’, 1870–1932

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in the New York Times by analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data.     

Pills,potions, and purgatives: women and abortion methods in Ireland, 1900–1950

This article examines women's efforts to induce miscarriage in Ireland (the Irish Free State, Éire, and the Republic) from 1900 to 1950. It demonstrates that, when possible, Irish women avoided surgical procedures, preferring instead to consume pills, potions, and purgatives to cause abortion. Irish women viewed emmenagogues and abortifacients as more natural than surgery and in keeping with women's traditions; these substances, they understood, had been used for centuries to restore menstruation and return the female body to normalcy and health. Overall, it was control—control over the methods of abortion and control over what they put into their own bodies, as well as autonomy when it came to managing their own reproductive health—that mattered most to Irish women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Irish women's abortion efforts expose their resolve to manage their reproductive lives and thus remind us how they sometimes rejected the dictates of the conservative twentieth-century state-Church consensus, bypassing legislation and negotiating religious cultural norms.     

Religion,Same-Sex Desire,and the Imagined Geographies of Empire: the case of Constance Maynard (1849–1935)

Although a devout Evangelical, living in an era that largely predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard (1849–1935), the prominent Victorian educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. This essay focuses on Maynard's relationship with the Anglo-Irish Marion Wakefield (1876–1956), exploring the role of Maynard's erotic imagination in the constitution, contestation, and consolidation of the imagined geographies of imperialist discourse. Maynard's erotic positioning of her lover in diverse imperial landscapes reveals the ostensibly ‘private’ discourses of the erotic imagination to be profoundly implicated in the ‘public’ discourses of empire. At the same time, the domestic settings in which these landscapes were imagined and in which the women's illicit desires were enacted, pose a challenge to the gendered spatial dichotomies—private/public, domestic/imperial, and home/away—of both imperialist discourse and the historiography of empire.     

Organizing the neglected worker: the Women's Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950

From 1930 to 1950, the New York and Boston Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) chapters focused on organizing poorly paid female service employees, many of them African American or Hispanic, whom the AFL and CIO largely neglected. Scholars who studied the WTUL generally confined their work to the period before 1920. Drawing on new primary sources, this article challenges previous characterizations of the WTUL as moribund after 1920, revealing the WTUL's vitality and innovative organizing methods. The WTUL maintained that New Deal protective legislation would prove largely unenforceable if workers remained unorganized. The article examines how the WTUL combined energetic organizing and legislative lobbying on behalf of laundry workers, domestic servants, cafeteria workers, hotel chambermaids, textile workers, and teachers, considered among the most difficult workers to organize.