The 1935 Meat Boycott and the Evolution of Domestic Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. LB. Twarog
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
City Council ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Cost Of Living ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Protest Activity

This chapter opens in Hamtramck, Michigan during the Great Depression with the story of Mary Zuk, a working-class housewife who spearheaded a national boycott against the high cost of meat in 1935. This chapter considers the shift that working-class housewives began to experience during the 1930s as their involvement in cost of living protests, such as meat boycotts, led to a more sustained involvement in organized political action. With the exception of a handful of working-class women, this was a relatively new result of protest activity. It also marks a turning point in women’s activism as Zuk used her experience during the meat boycott to continue her activism rather than fall back into the shadows. After the end of the boycott, Zuk continued to organize and eventually launch a successful bid for Hamtramck city council.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. LB. Twarog
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cost Of Living ◽  
Traditional Family ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Second Wave

The introduction traces the involvement of working-class housewives in political action from the 1930s as their involvement in cost of living protests, such as meat boycotts, led to a complicated involvement in organized political action. Tracing the entrance of these women into the political sphere through the emergence of the conservative right, it argues that as housewives negotiated the intersection of their homes, labor, community, and the marketplace, they formed a unique political constituency group in the twentieth century, which failed to find cohesion with the second-wave feminism in the 1970s, which dismissed domestic politics that these women were engaged in because it was rooted in the traditional family model, viewed with suspicion by works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. This left a distinctive form of activism to pave the way for conservative women’s movement made famous by anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative watch group the Eagle Forum.

Breaking the “Harness of Household Slavery”: Domestic Workers, the Women's Division of the St. Louis Urban League, and the Politics of Labor Reform during the Great Depression

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Male ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Local Chapter ◽  
Household Workers ◽  
Contractual Agreements ◽  
Everyday Resistance ◽  
Working Class Women

AbstractLargely denied membership in organized labor and access to basic labor protections, black domestic workers of St. Louis employed the local chapter of the Urban League's Women's Division to carve out a space for themselves in a growing, predominantly white, male labor movement and in the multiple coalitions that configured the New Deal. Domestics used household employment reform codes to lay the groundwork for dignity to manifest itself in their labor and contractual agreements. From the Household Workers Mass Meeting of 1933 to the close of the St. Louis Urban League's first phase in the late 1940s, black working-class women joined forces with progressive black women who led the Urban League's Women's Division to reform domestic employment through negotiation, enforcement, collective action, and everyday resistance. A border city with a large and settled black working class located within its core, St. Louis had acute class, gender, and racial divisions that shaped the terms of black women's economic activism. The Gateway City's mix of urban Midwestern-, northern-, and southern-style geopolitics propelled domestics’ mobilization, offering space for dissident women to call for changes to the social, political, and economic order.

“Apostles of a New Order”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bussel
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Awareness ◽  
New Order ◽  
Sense Of Purpose ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Union Movement

This chapter examines the crucial experiences that boosted the self confidence and social awareness of Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway and gave them a budding sense of purpose and direction. Before they first met in Chicago in the summer of 1937, the education of Gibbons and Calloway continued on parallel tracks. Amid the profound social dislocation of the Great Depression, each of them experienced epiphanies that they subsequently credited with bolstering their determination to lift up the working class. This chapter first considers Gibbons and Calloway's life in Chicago before discussing how the city's overlapping circles of reform and radicalism made it a political cornucopia for the two men following their escape from the constricted world of their coal patch youths. It also looks at three mentors who introduced Gibbons to the concepts of a strong union movement, independent political action, and the importance of education for effective citizenship: Annetta Dieckmann, Lillian Herstein, and Paul Douglas. Finally, it describes Brookwood Labor College's influence on Calloway's thinking as well as his anti-communism.

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