Women Auto Workers and the United Automobile Workers' Union (Uaw-Cio), 1935-1955.

Abstract

This study examines the experience of women in the UAW, the quintessential industrial union, in the two decades following its formation. It seeks to explain how and why the UAW acquired a reputation as one of the few unions to treat women workers fairly and assesses the extent to which this image was deserved. The answer to these questions lies in the 1940s. The increase in the absolute and relative number of women in the automotive labor force during World War II helped to expose the arbitrary character of the sexual division of labor in the automobile industry, prompted stronger efforts by the UAW to integrate women into the union, and created new opportunities for women to assume leadership positions in the organization. The changes that occurred during the war shaped the character of gender relations within the UAW in the postwar years. Although thous and s of women left or lost their jobs in the auto industry during the period of reconversion that followed World War II, the UAW inherited a vital legacy of activism on gender-related issues. The efforts of women in the UAW to challenge sexual inequality during and after World War II contrast with the widespread view of working women in this period as quiescent and socially conservative. They also indicate that historians have overlooked the importance of the trade union as an arena for female activism in the 1940s and 1950s. The indifference and , at times, open hostility of union men toward the campaign of women auto unionists to abolish sex-based wage scales, job classifications, and seniority lists from contracts frustrated the effort to obtain equal rights and opportunities for women in auto plants. Women activists, however, remained committed to the UAW, regarding it as the only vehicle for change in a notoriously conservative era.