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UNION WOMEN: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America Mary Margaret Fonow Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; 251 pp.
Union Women: Forging Feminism in the United Steelworkers of America tells the story of the rise of union feminism in the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). Mary Margaret Fonow's telling of this story is important for several reasons. The USWA is a large international union, with a membership across both the United States and Canada. Because the union's membership has traditionally been blue-collar, male workers, an understanding of the development and growth of union feminism in the USWA must explore the history both of the appearance of women in "non-traditional" occupations in the steel industry, and of women's mobilization and collective identity formation as both unionists and feminists. In her book, Fonow charts how these two histories have unfolded and intertwined, drawing on both feminist and social movement theory to understand when, where, how and why women working in the steel industry were able to come together effectively to act in their own interests.
Fonow traces the often uneven and difficult struggle of women to gain access to jobs once held almost exclusively by men in the steel industry. In the years before World War II, few jobs were open to women in the industry. In World War II, white women and women of colour were hired in the steel industry in larger numbers, generally in less-skilled jobs that were often "refashioned to make them more 'suitable' for women - with the important exception of black women" (p.44), who like black men were only able to obtain more dangerous and less desirable jobs. Thus race, ethnicity and gender were significant organizing and stereotyping categories among and between women and men in the steel industry. During the war women joined the USWA "in record numbers" (p.44). Following the war, most women Steelworkers...