My (hastily written) abstract for HM New York: Wildcat Feminism: Women Coal Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union, 1973-1979. Our narratives of the Miners for Democracy (MFD), the only union democracy movement in the US to succeed in winning control of the international, have typically followed a set and misleading narrative: that the election of the MFD spelled the end of demands for militancy and democracy in the UMWA. Yet women miners, who only won the right to work underground in 1973 (the year after the MFD won election), played a central role in organizing a continued rank-and-file rebellion in the mines that resulted in wildcat strikes at 10 times the rate of other industries. The story of wildcat feminism thus illuminates the vacillating and often contradictory state of the labor movement during the 1970s and forces us to re-examine the common narratives of working class politics and declension in the 1970s, particularly regarding growing divisions between working class politics and feminism. For the women of the UMWA, womens liberation remained bound up with workers power. Still, even as women led wildcat strikes, they had to fight for male coworkers to allow them on picket lines. As such, the women miners took a decidedly feminist approach to union organizing that ultimately succeeded in forcing the UMWA to recognize their leadership as well as to recognize the struggles of working women more generally.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 04:12:20 +0000