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"Rights, not Roses": Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945-80 by Dennis A. DESLIPPE, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 259 pp., ISBN: 0-252-02519-9 (hardbound) or 0-252-06834-3 (paperback).
Dennis Deslippe's Rights, not Roses is part social history, part institutional history and part legal history. The book is a 7-chapter play that chronicles the complex and often contradictory relationship women workers had with the unions they were members of in the United States between 1945 and 1980. The play is all about structure. Deslippe divides the play into two periods: pre1964 Civil Rights legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in employment and post-1964.
In Chapter 1, Deslippe sets the postWorld War II labour scene, in which he describes women's forced expulsion from the war-making factory machine to lesser-paying jobs and unemployment lines. He then deconstructs the untenable myth that the late 1940s and 1950s were a mild period when happy homemakers gladly set aside rivet guns and work boots for Sunbeam toasters and fuzzy slippers. In this deconstruction, he is flanked by Lynne Olson, who in her 2001 Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 recounts how black and white women courageously laid the foundation in the 1940s and 1950s for the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. While laying this background, Deslippe introduces, or reacquaints, his readers to one of the many layers of complexity and conflict he tackles in the book: women's, men's and society's views of "protective legislation," namely state laws that, depending on one's point of view, kept women's hours short and their work safe or kept women out of higher-paying jobs reserved for men who didn't require...