WESTERN WORK AND THE MASCULINE IDEAL

FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH through the late twentieth century, resource-based industries—logging, mining, agriculture, fishing—distinguished the gendered and racialized character of work in the U.S. and Canadian Wests. Even though women and people of color worked in these industries or the service sectors that supported them, narratives about regional work reinforce the concept of a white, male “wageworkers’ frontier.”⁵ These occupations elicit images of tough, masculine outdoor work and independence. They have also resisted hiring women and certain ethnic groups except when labor demands have overwhelmed the exclusionary rigid boundaries they erected. The white male breadwinner ideal and the reputed toughness of the work that supposedly discouraged women from employment often disintegrated when labor markets expanded, when families required multiple breadwinners, or when these “rugged” jobs became seasonal and low-paid, which then made women and people of color “ideally suited” for the work.⁶ “Fishplant reality,” Jill Stainsby finds in her study of the gendered division of labor within British Columbia canneries, offered a stark contrast to the romanticized autonomy of the male fisher and exposed women workers to “noisy machinery, unpleasant (often cold and wet) surroundings, long hours of performing monotonous, repetitive labor, and inadequate rewards.”⁷ Industries, unions, and male workers perpetuated this social order and a regional identity that reinforced the belief that its work required rugged masculinity. Unions and workers might preserve jobs for white men, but employers could resist improving conditions or providing adequate workers’ compensation by exploiting stereotypes that rendered workers “tough enough” to handle the most dangerous conditions or too rootless and family-less to warrant company-provided protections.⁸

Even during World War II, when much of Canada and the United States opened industrial jobs to women, company, government, and union officials sought to preserve men’s claims to traditional western occupations. Montana’s war manpower director, for example, claimed that the state needed “men for the hard, heavy and unpleasant jobs” in mines, mills, and woods “where women cannot be used.” Anaconda Copper Mining Company and Mine Mill union officials agreed that mines, mills, and smelters could not employ women because the work required strength and stamina. But physical prowess evidently was not the chief requisite, because the company began recruiting retired and disabled men. When the company tried to bypass union seniority rules to give women “soft” positions, union leaders, struggling to preserve a male breadwinner workplace while maintaining labor principles, alternated between insisting that women be excluded as a weaker sex and that they be treated equally.⁹

The war years provide ample examples to illustrate the shifting ground of gendered and racialized work categories. In the northern U.S. West’s one-industry towns, employers and city officials often pushed to hire local women to avoid attracting southern blacks, southwestern Mexican Americans, or immigrants to their communities. In Anaconda, Montana, the Anaconda Company manipulated perceptions of difference to convince union representatives to allow women into its smelter. Appealing to racial prejudices, management threatened to import African Americans and Mexicans to fill the labor void, emphasizing that they would prefer Anaconda women “rather than Mexican boys,” but the federal government could send “colored men” any time. Management and labor then agreed that they would preserve community values that championed white male and female breadwinners.¹⁰

Wartime labor demands and subsequent relaxation of occupational barriers presented unprecedented opportunities for women of many races and ethnicities, especially in new aircraft and shipbuilding plants. Mining and logging remained off limits, however, except for a small percentage of women who found work in processing ore and timber. Why did western urban shipyards and aircraft plants actively recruit women, while mining and most logging communities resisted hiring them?¹¹ Well-entrenched gender ideologies, accompanying lore about the work, and past union struggles for job security in automating industries influenced practices. The industry’s needs and economic position also explain the difference: the minerals industry had been declining except during the war boom, and as a new industry, shipbuilding demanded new recruits. Whereas women never constituted more than 5 percent of the smelter workforce in Anaconda, they made up 28 percent of Portland’s shipyard workers.¹²

The postwar period brought a rapid resumption of restrictions, underscoring the fluidity of these ideologies and how pinned to power relations they were. None the less, women in mining communities were often fundamentally changed by their wartime experiences, as represented by married women’s increasing participation in the labor force. Women who worked in the Anaconda smelter during the war lost their jobs, but the independence they tasted lasted in subsequent work and family roles. Erma Bennett recalled that after the war people “tried to change it back,” but it was “the beginning of the change” in women’s roles as they sought greater public and economic participation.¹³

Women had better luck inserting themselves into some of the region’s forest products mills. Although their work in the woods was limited to cooking and truck driving, women found some opportunities in sex-segregated production work. Unlike their counterparts in the minerals industry, who were laid off and replaced by returning servicemen at war’s end, a small percentage of women remained in forest products mills. In 1942 when a plywood factory opened in Port Alberni, British Columbia, to aid the war effort, women rushed to apply for positions and soon became 80 percent of the workforce. Susanne Klausen demonstrates how the women’s presence challenged “the tenacious myth that women are unsuited to forestry.” Yet the single-industry community gave preferences to local women and expected them to leave their jobs after the war. Industries, male workers, and their unions appealed to stubborn ideologies about occupational segregation as well as to the women’s sense of community solidarity that privileged the male family breadwinner. Port Alberni plywood women were not forced to leave after the war, but their numbers and status shifted as the mill hired more male workers. The range of “women’s jobs” narrowed while “men’s jobs” expanded, and tensions between male and female workers increased.¹⁴

In the postwar period, many western union leaders and workers seized upon a special regional masculine identity to advance their clout and resist employer and anti-communist attacks. Unions highlighted regional differences to assert an independent and often more militant course, distancing themselves from what they perceived as eastern, conservative, bureaucratic unionism. Union iconography and rhetorical traditions championed masculine workers in contrast to weak and feminized bosses. Mine Mill survived anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s partly through its embrace of a masculine regional identity to resist red-baiting attacks by the USWA-CIO, (U. S.) House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the U.S. Justice Department, the Canadian Congress of Labour, minerals corporations, and the media.¹⁵USWA organizers, in fact, realized that they were dealing with “an entirely different unionism” in which workers and their locals valued their autonomy and tight-knit communities more than international unions. Geography, the nature of the mining industry, and a masculine, militant heritage, these organizers concluded, had made western locals more independent and less susceptible to redbaiting.¹⁶ However, Mine Mill’s association of militancy with masculinity created strains with community women it hoped to organize in support of union efforts and in resistance to Cold War attacks.

MINE MILL AUXILIARY MOVEMENT

ALTHOUGH RELATIVELY FEW WOMEN worked in mines and mills during the war, women’s auxiliaries expanded, reflecting women’s desires to participate in the political and economic decisions affecting their lives, even if excluded from minerals industry workplaces. Women had initiated or revived auxiliaries across the United States during the CIO organizing drives and strike waves of the 1930s. Canadian unions followed suit. Yet many international unions were ambivalent about women’s potential clout and interference. For example, USWA president David McDonald laid down strict guidelines for emerging auxiliaries that explicitly excluded the women from steelworkers councils and granted them limited roles to “create a closer and more fraternal feeling between the families of union members” and assist the union.¹⁷

IUMMSW recognized the broader political and economic value of women’s participation and actively encouraged organizing women into auxiliaries, often pronouncing, “A union without the women is only half organized.” Eighteen of ninety-five organized auxiliaries sent delegates to the Mine Mill convention held in Joplin, Missouri, in August 1941. In a series of resolutions offered to the convention, the Butte-Anaconda women delegates, at the forefront of organizing efforts since the 1930s, urged male unionists to adhere to the 1940 convention pledge to organize auxiliaries for every local.¹⁸ Auxiliaries had the right to send delegates to union conventions and to attend local union meetings and make recommendations. The 1944 constitution of the IUMMSW Ladies’ Auxiliary differed significantly from other union and fraternal auxiliaries that stressed women’s helping roles. The women adopted the union’s preamble, which emphasized class struggle and emancipation of the working class through industrial unions.¹⁹ Also at the 1944 convention, in what seemed to be an assertion of their independence, Ladies’ Auxiliary delegates by a majority vote asked that the union’s constitution be amended to convert the auxiliary into an autonomous organization. The international officers, executive board, and delegates concurred.²⁰

Despite Mine Mill praise for the move, auxiliary women did not universally welcome the autonomy vote. Many auxiliary members wrote to international president Mary Orlich of Butte to complain about the changes, and some officers resigned their district posts. Many women believed they would lose their hard-won clout, since their auxiliary was the only one in the CIO to gain a voice and vote at Mine Mill conventions, and they feared financial instability. Responding to complaints, Orlich agreed that she was sorry to hear about the international election results, “but we still feel that we cannot afford to discard all the hard work that has gone into the creation of the Auxiliary movement... It may be a little difficult to start out on our own, but...there is a great deal for the women to do, so let us not become discouraged, because we are no longer with the men. I think that we all can show them that we can do the job better as women leaders.”²¹ A few months later, after a failed membership drive, Orlich scrambled to rally her locals at the same time she alluded to a changing world that made women less interested in joining auxiliaries: “We are going to have to adapt ourselves to [the Autonomy]....I realize how difficult it is to organize women, because in my own home local, we have a good-sized [union] membership, but we have a poor percentage of women in the Aux.... I realize also that women are going on the production lines, but I say that should not break up our Auxiliaries.”²² The lack of women’s interest in joining auxiliaries plagued the auxiliary movement in the postwar period. As more women entered the workforce, and as male unions stubbornly resisted expanding substantive opportunities for women’s participation or championing women’s issues, there was little appeal to join yet another community organization that required dues.

While end-of-the-war wage opportunities and the auxiliaries’ autonomy hampered organizing in the States, District 8 (eastern Canada) and District 7(western Canada) successfully organized new locals and expanded memberships. Part of the enthusiasm came with the revitalization of mining unions—once strong under the WFM in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—when in 1944 the Canadian government relaxed union organizing regulations. The culture of Mine Mill may have shaped eastern and western mining communities more profoundly than particular regional or Canadian sensibilities, but the long history of western militancy assisted union organizing as wartime migrations put westerners in contact with eastern workers. Pearl Chytuk, who moved to Sudbury, Ontario, from Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1941, observed striking regional differences. Chytuk was able to get a job at the Inco smelter during the war, but she was surprised that people were fearful of talking about unions: “Out west we were talking unions for beauty salons and restaurant workers, but in Sudbury, people were reluctant to talk about it.” While working at the smelter, Chytuk could not participate in the auxiliary, so she actively organized for Mine Mill Local 598. She remembered the hesitancy of some of her male co-workers, but many of the women activists were “from the west where we always felt more free.” At the end of the war when the women at Inco were laid off, Chytuk returned to the Ladies’ Auxiliary where she actively pursued working-class goals.²³

GENDER AND THE GOLD WAR

DESPITE MINE MILL’S ENTHUSIASM for auxiliaries across borders, by the late 1940s the Cold War intervened to heighten gender and ideological divisions within the international. President Mary Orlich, tireless advocate for the auxiliary movement, mounted anti-communist charges against the left-leaning union in the conservative Saturday Evening Post: “I want to organize all the housewives in America to fight this scourge; I want to inform the women of America how their way of living is threatened. The commies are a common enemy, and the people don’t know it.”²⁴ Through the 1940s Orlich had frequently invoked the language of class in urging others to “war on these big bosses [for] a decent living wage” and to “share the profit.” Despite the hardships of the 1946 strikes, Orlich implored Mine Mill women to mobilize others to join auxiliaries and to be more than “a card carrier” and fight for a guaranteed annual wage and to “impress upon the minds of our Parent Union locals the need for women’s organizations.” But within a year, Orlich, like many North American labor activists, became alarmed at publicized threats of communism and quickly diverted her wrath away from corporations and onto Mine Mill. Her correspondence reveals that Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, New Deal populist turned anti-communist, and cio conservatives persuaded her that domestic communists, many of whom were in the labor movement, threatened American security. Her claims that communists had overtaken Mine Mill and her calls for women’s militancy created a firestorm among the union’s supporters.

Women’s reaction to Orlich was mixed; some called for her resignation, others offered support. The Canadian locals appeared most outraged, suggesting that anti-communist charges held less potency north of the border. Kay Carlin of Sudbury wrote to Orlich that the article “is having one hell of an effect over here.... I know that we are in this Union Movement to fight reaction and big business regardless of our race, creed or political beliefs....I can only say it has thrown a blight over the Union when you accuse them of being dominated by Communists, when you know that is not the truth....By doing these things you are playing right into the hands of reaction.... I may be forced to take a stand on that article by members here in Can[ada] and by my own sense of what is right.” Charlotte M. Rash, recording secretary of the Copper Mountain, British Columbia, Auxiliary No. 139, signaled to Orlich that her local “voted unanimously to demand your resignation as president of our auxiliary. We no longer feel that you are worthy of our confidence.” E.M. Bausquet, recording secretary of the Trail District Ladies’Auxiliary No. 131, reported to Orlich that

at our last meeting [we] unanimously endorsed all letters written by our Sister Locals demanding your resignation as Pres of the Auxiliaries....You say it is the Commies who are disrupting the unions, but if you want our frank opinion, it is people like yourself, who are the stooges of Big Business by playing right along with them in the labor splitting tactics, who are the true disruptors....We women of the Auxiliary are fighting with our brothers of the Unions for unity of all people and security for the people, not for disunity and unemployment. This is also what our boys in the armed forces fought for. You are in the same category as the Hitlerites in Germany and Mussolinis in Italy who first disunited the unions through rotten propaganda and then were able to build Nazism and Fascism. Do you want this to happen in America? We believe that you have made a terrible error in attacking a minority group in the Union and that you [must] resign immediately as President of the IUMMSW Auxiliaries and as Vice-President of the [Congress of Women’s Auxiliaries] CIO.²⁵

A few Canadian women, however, wrote to Orlich expressing their confusion about the affair and questioned the motives of their leaders. Referring to the Canadian auxiliaries’ boycott of the special auxiliary convention called by Orlich in Salt Lake City in September, Maes Whitehead, of Lake Penage, Ontario, asked Orlich to clarify whether “all this trouble of Canadian delegates not attending the convention” was due to “trouble” from the International or District 8’s own Kay Carlin: “Surely we didn’t put all that work in the Auxiliary to have it torn down by gossip...a lot of our girls in Sudbury are in an uproar over our delegates not going to Salt Lake.”²⁶ The evident dissension in Sudbury would simmer for the next decade and ultimately unravel labor unity in the East.

While women may have divided ideologically over the affair or questioned the tactics of Orlich or her opponents in damaging the auxiliary movement, male Mine Mill members widely condemned Orlich for “meddling in men’s union affairs.” When Orlich publicly blasted what she viewed as communist domination of Mine Mill, male unionists dismissed her red-baiting as a particular gender rather than political weakness and characterized Orlich as a “simple little housewife” who foolishly contributed to “anti-union hokum.” They insisted that because “women are different” they were susceptible to disloyalty, unlike “true men” who “always feel bad when they’ve betrayed their friends.” Moreover, men questioned the efficacy of the auxiliary movement and marginalized its potential strength. William Mason, Mine Mill executive board member for District1, and Harry Baird, treasurer of the Montana Anti-Discrimination League, wrote in the Saturday Evening Post that “this sort of meddling in men’s union affairs is responsible for the present situation wherein only 35 of the 1000s of Butte miners’ women care to be in the auxiliary.”²⁷ The auxiliary may have had few members, revealing its weakness in the union and community, but unlike its male counterparts who were required to join Mine Mill in closed shops, women were voluntary members, often without their men’s support, and often lacked money to pay dues or fund their activities. Mine Mill may have halted this early anti-communist attack in its backyard, but its gender stereotyping eliminated an important source of potential support and ultimately impeded working-class solidarity as it faced accelerated anti-communist attacks in the Cold War period.

The controversy, which “paralyzed” auxiliary activities through 1947, led the IUMMSW executive board to investigate charges and to appoint a trial committee. Mine Mill president Maurice Travis urged local auxiliaries to keep their organizations intact despite the flap.²⁸ As her “trial” approached, Orlich and financial secretary Dora Young wrote to all local auxiliaries emphasizing that the “International has absolutely no authority.... Ours is an autonomous organization and all Local Auxiliaries are legally and morally bound to follow our own constitution...if any local auxiliary ignores, as officers we have no choice but to follow provisions of our constitution (art 17).”²⁹ Orlich’s absolutism indicated to many women that her tactics paralleled the undemocratic methods of the “red” union that she attacked.

A trial committee met in Chicago on 4 February 1948 and charged Mary Orlich and her associates as seeking to destroy the IUMMSW through “illegal machine control,” slandering the International Union and, among other allegations, deliberately neglecting Canadian locals “for disruptive reasons.” The trial committee recommended to the executive board that a new Ladies’ Auxiliary be organized, that auxiliary locals “desiring to remain loyal” send per capita tax not to the former auxiliary but to the IUMMSW office until new officers could be elected, and that all auxiliary charters and documents be retrieved from Orlich.³⁰ Protesting to CIO secretary James Carey, Orlich provided examples of where Mine Mill refused to provide any rulings or information because the auxiliary was no longer in its jurisdiction, “yet they meddle into our business because we women will not be dominated by their Red Tactics.” Mary Orlich continued her fight against communism but became marginalized after she lost her auxiliary platform. Even the Steelworkers, which initially found her useful in attacking Mine Mill, by 1955 urged their members to leave her “out” of raids planned in Butte-Anaconda, labeling her “nothing but a Company stooge.”³¹

A NEW AUXILIARY

DESPITE ITS PROMISES to increase the Auxiliary’s autonomy, the IUMMSW, alarmed at the destructive potential of the women’s group, used its constitutional authority to dissolve it. Nonetheless, IUMMSW men chose to revive and reform, not eliminate, the auxiliary movement. After the trial the executive board appointed Marie Go forth as a fulltime organizer for the new Ladies’ Auxiliary. Canadian auxiliaries, under the leadership of Kay Carlin, Dorothy McDonald, and others, remained strong, but the U.S. movement was slow to reorganize after the Orlich debacle. Mercedes Steedman notes that in the shadow of Orlich’s early red-baiting, “US auxiliaries moved cautiously, at the same time as the Canadian auxiliaries pushed for a stronger position within the recently autonomous Canadian Mine Mill Council.”³²

Mine Mill made a concerted effort to generate greater enthusiasm by expanding auxiliary coverage in its newspaper. For example, it featured an essay contest on “What Being a Member of a Mine-Mill Auxiliary Means to Me,” and it included the essay of prize-winner Rachael Wood, financial secretary of the Trail auxiliary. A former wartime smelter worker, Wood justified wives’ increased participation in union affairs as she affirmed women’s loyalty to Mine Mill political goals. She reminded her sisters that women needed to join men in “upholding our International Constitution” and “preserve the democratic rights of all workers” including “freedom to choose one’s own...politics.”³³

Although the Auxiliary seemed safely purged of rebellious elements, women members still pushed for amore active role in union issues, resisted men’s meddling, and often pursued their own agenda that did not match men’s goals. The Mine-Mill Union reported that at the 1951 Women’s Auxiliary annual convention held in Nogales, Arizona, the women adopted an ambitious program of education and support for IUMMSW but failed to report what appeared in a banner headline in the Auxiliary’s own newsletter concerning women’s rights. The newsletter announced that delegates to the convention had adopted a new women’s rights resolution advocating equal opportunity for women in the workplace and public life, revealing how working-class women embraced feminism long before the “second wave” women’s movement became activated in the 1960s. The women also vowed to seek joint activities with local unions to discuss the role of women. Mine Mill’s silence on these goals indicates reluctance by the union to share with its locals the more independent interests of its auxiliary women.³⁴

The newsletters and files of the Mine Mill Auxiliary reveal local women’s persistent struggles during the 1950s and early 1960s to gain acceptance in their communities and to win the respect of their union men while pushing for wider roles. Male delegates to the IUMMSW convention consistently offered support, and the executive board and organizers repeatedly plugged the potential women could offer labor. But resistance on the local level must have been firm. Recognizing the lack of follow-up to their annual resolutions supporting the Auxiliary, some male union members reminded their compatriots that “very often the winning or losing of a major labor struggle hinges upon [women’s] support in the home, in the community, and even on the picket lines.” But the rank-and-file’s ideas of “support,” except during a strike, kept women at home, and many auxiliary women pushed for broader participation in union affairs.³⁵

Despite the hard work of several Auxiliary officers to win more substantial roles for women in the IUMMSW, the Auxiliary international movement limped along, severely lacking in funds to send delegates to the international convention, pay a coordinator, or print a newsletter. The international’s lofty rhetoric about gender inclusion was not matched by its paltry budgetary allocations to women’s efforts. Just ten women delegates—all from the western United States and western Canada—attended the 1956 Mine Mill convention, focusing their attention on community projects, political action, and the revival of the Auxiliary newsletter. The women pushed to become part of policy committees of local unions, particularly Health and Welfare, convincing men that women could watch their doctor and hospital bills more effectively. Auxiliary president Eva Pence, of Cobalt, Idaho, demanded to know why men hesitated in asking women to help in policing the health plan. “Are they afraid to take the women out of the home for an hour or two? Or,” she asked, “is it that they think all women are without a mind to think with?” She noted that women “are the ones” who stay with children when they are sick, take them to the hospital, administer medicines, and speak with health professionals and were certainly capable of working on the health committees. Pence instructed auxiliary members to offer their help to the local union and, if refused, to try again until they see “that the women can do more than cook a good dinner, put on a banquet or help with that dance or picnic.” Pence’s irritation persisted, and in subsequent convention meetings she complained that local unions always depended on the auxiliaries in a crisis, such as strikes, election campaigns, or for “some food cooked and served...but when we need help we are forgotten and have no place in the labor movement.” Ultimately she and other Auxiliary leaders decided to drop their national effort to revive auxiliaries and revert to organizing members and programs on a local level.³⁶

American women envied their sisters in Canada, whom they believed wielded more influence in the labor movement through their auxiliaries. There, women could attend local union meetings and make recommendations. “We had a voice, we could always express our views,” noted auxiliary member Ruth Reid, “even if we couldn’t always vote.” Former Mine Mill organizer Clinton Jencks recalled his efforts in New Mexico to involve more women in the union, but men resisted because they feared losing some of their power and privilege. Jencks wondered “why the Canadian women were so courageous and making the international officers so uncomfortable and demanding the right to attend international union conventions and...to say something on the floor and not just to be the auxiliary that serves the coffee and the cookies.” He discovered that some Canadian male and female activists realized that Mine Mill could be so much more effective in gaining women allies by strengthening the auxiliary movement. After the Canadian auxiliary became autonomous in 1955, U. S. and Canadian sisters continued to exchange news and ideas. In a memo to auxiliary members, President Eva Pence grumbled, “The women in Canada are receiving the aid of the Mine-Mill. In the two years since the Autonomy, Canada has advanced while we are just moving along.” Pence concluded that this was “due to the Local Union members” whose ambivalence or outright hostility turned away potential supporters.³⁷

In some ways Canadian women may have had a greater voice in union affairs, but examples from the East reveal that gender and Cold War divisions were not restricted to the States. During the critical 1958 Inco strike in northern Ontario, Sudbury merchants and politicians organized a “back-to-work” movement of union members’ wives. Auxiliary members organized counter-demonstrations in support of the strike, but the local and national media were predisposed to favor the anti-communist effort in order to weaken Mine Mill. Mercedes Steedman describes how gender tensions within the union provided fertile ground for an effective use of Cold War propaganda among the women. Women’s Auxiliary No. 117 provided food for picket lines and organized outside aid for striking families, but as the strike wore on and families became more desperate, the Back-to-Work women launched a campaign to purge the local of its “red” leaders as well as end the strike. The Mine Mill Auxiliary sought to counter this effort with its own mass meeting and pledge to march on City Hall to demand support for the union in its negotiating efforts. The union bargaining team, however, was furious that the auxiliary had ventured a politically naive act that might backfire and tried to halt the event, which then allowed Back-to-Work supporters to dominate the public arena. With Mine Mill men and women divided, anti-Mine Mill forces gained control of the union. Soon, workers and their families switched allegiances to a different union.³⁸

Far to the west a similar catastrophe struck Mine Mill in Anaconda, Montana. Despite geographical differences, Sudbury and Anaconda had much in common. They had two of the largest Mine Mill locals, making them strategically important to those who wished to destroy the union and were thus specific targets of USWA raids. The communities were ethnically diverse, predominately Catholic, opened their smelter jobs to local women during WWII, limited women’s economic opportunities after the war, and were dominated by large multinational minerals corporations. Both communities created alternative politics and cultures based on Mine Mill’s influence, developing, for example, a summer camp, an annual smelter workers’ celebration, and union halls that served as community centers. In the postwar period, both Anaconda and Sudbury were transformed from company towns into union towns. Unlike in Sudbury, where the women’s auxiliary was quite strong, the Anaconda auxiliary disintegrated after the Mary Orlich scandal. Yet in both places the local unions were ambivalent at best in supporting women’s auxiliary work, and gender divisions helped anti-communist arguments take root. Workers and their families came to believe anti-Mine Mill propaganda that linked the union to the strikes that created tremendous economic hardships and bargaining ineffectiveness. Many decided that they were better off to relent than to continue to endure USWA and other union raids in order to preserve what remained of community unionism. The case of Anaconda and Sudbury demonstrates that more than a western, masculine, militant heritage shaped the Cold War ideological struggle. Religion, local politics, USWA strategy, and gender divisions played greater roles in undermining Mine Mill than did regional and national influences. Most of Mine Mill’s western locals in Canada and in the U.S., aside from Anaconda, remained impervious to Cold War assaults, but the capitulation of the two important locals severely damaged Mine Mill’s ability to survive and ultimately led to the formal merger with USWA in 1967.³⁹

AUXILIARY DECLINE

BY THE 1960S, almost all the women’s auxiliaries of Mine Mill had become inactive or dissolved. The international made an effort to revive them, but its preoccupation with USWA raiders, trials of its officers, an empty treasury, a changing industry, an endless cycle of contract negotiations, and its persistent adherence to gender assumptions contributed to its lukewarm response to the auxiliary movement. Women still complained about men’s meddling, and the weakened international seemed incapable of bringing gender peace to its locals. In June 1962 the Bisbee Ladies’ Auxiliary of Local 551 complained to the international that Mrs Elkins was controlling the auxiliary’s presidency thanks to her husband, who was president of the union. Ruth Brady wrote that Mr Elkins had said, ‘“As long as I’m president there will be no re-election.’ We then asked him who gave him authority to decide? He then said, ‘When you step out of line it is his job to stop it, we could either go on like we were, or desolve [sic] the auxiliary.’ As I see the situation, we need no [Dictator].”⁴⁰

The Bisbee situation reveals another reason why men and women were often indifferent and at times antagonistic toward auxiliaries. Although they often provided spaces for women’s democratic participation in labor politics, auxiliaries, like many male unions, pursued agendas of a leadership that varied in ideological interests. Many leaders, such as Mary Orlich, had conservative political goals in adopting a rigid anti-communist position, but relied on militant strategies that asserted auxiliary autonomy from male union dictates. Her successor, Eva Pence, was not a cold warrior but continued to seek an independent, active role for the Auxiliary.⁴¹ Both women’s frustrations lay not only with the international for its insignificant financial allocations despite public claims to boost Auxiliary membership, or with men’s open resistance in many union locals, but also with women who neglected their auxiliary duties. It was difficult to find volunteers to serve in elected posts or to pursue activities that advanced both unions and auxiliary.

Auxiliaries were not necessarily representative; they counted as their members a very small percentage of the eligible wives, sisters, and daughters of union members, and unlike unions that required workers to vote and fund union activities, auxiliaries were voluntary, independent, and self-sufficient. But efforts to dismiss auxiliaries as potentially detrimental rely on old myths in the labor movement (and labor history) that portray women as fundamentally conservative. These preoccupations with women’s position rest on gendered assumptions that do not account for individual ideological difference or the forceful personalities who shaped (and sometimes controlled) auxiliary affairs. After all, analyses of labor unions’ anti-communist or anti-Cold War positions, or their accommodation to or resistance to management’s demands, do not rest on the degree of conservatism among men as a group.⁴² Sometimes women’s and men’s goals were different, as when Mine Mill women advocated equal rights or better health care, but women were hardly less militant than men.

Other ideological differences among women surfaced in addition to perceived threats of communism. Just after the war, Mary Orlich had tried to resolve the racial tensions that haunted Alabama auxiliaries as white women refused to work with District vice-president Viola McGadney, who was African American.⁴³ Similar tensions arose in the American Southwest, as Mexican American women sought equal treatment and opportunities to serve as officers in their auxiliaries. In 1956 Mexican American women from Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, complained to the international that Anglo women “run the show.” Women’s outspokenness often challenged Mine Mill official positions against racial discrimination. For example, several women questioned the union’s editorial in 1952 that called on readers to protest to the National Broadcasting Company its “use of a stereotyped, clownish Mexican character” on the Judy Canova show. Mrs Annie Petek, of East Helena, Montana, protested that “what has made America strong is that each of us can take a joke about ourselves” and suggested that the anti-racist editorial “sounds very much like something Joe Stalin would print to stir up trouble.” Although Mine Mill Auxiliary members took an oath to oppose discrimination, latent racism emerged in letters to the Mine-Mill Union newspaper, and one suspects in other forums, through the 1950s, revealing how intertwined were ideologies about race, the Cold War, and the role of the labor movement.⁴⁴

Local gender tensions conflicted with more egalitarian ideals advocated by the international, revealing that such ideologies were often contested. The left-leaning Mine Mill simultaneously advocated difference—the uniqueness of mining and smelting required rugged men—and equality. Its 1954 film Salt of the Earth in many ways reflects the union’s enlightened gender politics—while at the same time rendering its women’s auxiliary powerless. Based on the 1951 strike by predominantly Mexican American zinc miners in New Mexico, the film featured blacklisted Hollywood producers and mining community actors. Banned and boycotted at the time because of its “communist” makers, the film has become a minor cult classic in college courses because of its feminist content. Striking Mine Mill miners allowed their wives to take their place when an injunction prevented their picketing, and emboldened by their activist roles, the women began demanding that their issues, such as clean water, be considered in union negotiations, and that in the household men allow them more autonomy. Admired by mining women who saw the film, the New Mexico auxiliary members, who initially after the strike were allowed greater roles in the union, gradually lost their clout due to men’s resistance. The well-publicized New Mexico story offered hopeful possibilities to auxiliary members who longed for social change, yet it also revealed how temporary those gains might be. Union members both sought women’s support, especially during critical strikes, and worked to contain that support within domestic roles. Although auxiliaries appeared to reproduce the sexual division of labor, the degree to which women acted independently and asserted their own class goals reflected the changes in family structure and women’s visible roles in the workplace and public arenas, which many men found threatening. Ideologies about difference often sank deeply within many rank-and- file workers who resisted their own union’s rhetoric of solidarity across skill, race, region, and gender.

An analysis of women’s labor auxiliaries in male-dominated industries reveals how women and men searched for, negotiated, and contested appropriate political roles for women. The story of women’s auxiliary participation in strikes is well known; but although many women yearned for greater and long-term political involvement, local and international unions seemed incapable of granting them more than limited roles. In most union auxiliaries, women searched for an appropriate niche. They may have pledged to build industrial unions, but excluded from the work-place and discouraged by male unionists from participating in substantive local affairs, they often fell back on traditional auxiliary activities, sponsoring card parties, socials with the male union, and showers for brides. In the postwar period, as women entered the wage market in increasing numbers, became influenced by a revived women’s movement, and found other avenues for political participation and social expression in their own unions, political parties, and clubs, auxiliaries became anachronistic for most.

By following the rise and decline of the Mine Mill auxiliary, we see that gender and political ideologies shaped union responses to the Cold War in Canada and the United States. Mine Mill’s celebration of its western, masculine, and militant independence helped the union resist red-baiting and shore up support in its western locals. However, the persistence of beliefs about men’s superiority in work and union affairs and the infrequent ability to embrace the potential of working class solidarity across gender lines, damaged the long-term survival of the progressive, embattled union. As women’s aspirations for greater participation in union affairs rose, they became more disappointed in male resistance, especially at the local level. Unions and their auxiliaries provide a fruitful arena in which to explore how political and gender ideologies take root and spread across nation and region. These examples underscore how many women persisted in their pursuit of active political roles in the male unions that shaped their lives and communities.

NOTES

1. 1.Laurie Mercier, “‘Instead of Fighting the Common Enemy’: Mine Mill versus the Steelworkers in Montana, 1950–1967,” Labor History 40 (Fall 1999): 459–80.
2. 2.Ruth Reid, quoted in “Panel Review,” in Hard Lessons: The Mine Mill Union in the Canadian Labor Movement, ed. Mercedes Steedman, Peter Sucschnigg, Dieter K. Buse (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1995), 151.
3. 3.For discussions of auxiliaries see Melinda Chateau vert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998); Paula F. Pfeffer, “The Women Behind the Union: Halena Wilson, Rosina Tucker, and the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” Labor History 36 (Fall 1995): 557–78; Susan Levine, “Workers’ Wives: Gender, Class and Consumerism in the 1920s United States,” Gender and History 3 (Spring 1991): 45–64; Marjorie Penn Lasky, “Where I Was a Person: The Ladies’Auxiliary in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ Strikes,” in Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of US Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge Press, 1985), 181–206; Christiane Diehl-Taylor, “Partners in the Struggle: The Role of Women’s Auxiliaries and Brigades in the 1934 Minneapolis Truck Drivers Strikes and the 1936/37 Flint General Motors Sit-Down Strike,” unpublished research paper, University of Minnesota, 1990; Judy Aulette and Trudy Mills, “Something Old, Something New: Auxiliary Work in the 1983–1986 Copper Strike,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 251–68; Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, ed., Salt of the Earth (New York: Feminist Press, 1978).
4. 4.See, for example, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, “Not Pink Teas: The Seattle Working-Class Women’s Movement, 1905–1918,” Labor History 32 (Spring 1991): 193–230.
5. 5.Carlos A. Schwantes has written extensively about the male worker’s milieu. See, for example, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885–1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); “Protest in a Promised Land: Unemployment, Disinheritance, and the Origin of Labor Militancy in the Pacific Northwest, 1885–86,” Western Historical Quarterly 13 (October 1982): 373–90; “Images of the Wageworkers’ Frontier,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 38 (Autumn 1988): 38–49.
6. 6.Ideas about domestic roles, region, race, gender, and class become so closely enmeshed that the segmentation of work around difference appears to be “natural.” Feminist scholars have explored this process of segmentation, the promotion of inequalities in the workplace, and the male breadwinner wage ideal and accompanying female wage. See, for example, Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 1–19; Maurine Weiner Greenwald, “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 118–49; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 6, 124. For reviews of some of the literature that links the social construction of masculinity to work, breadwinning, gender relations, and skill monopolization, see Steven Maynard, “Rough Work and Rugged Men: The Social Construction of Masculinity in Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travail 23 (Spring 1989): 158–69; Karen Anderson, “Work, Gender, and Power in the American West,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1992): 481–99; Jens Christiansen, Peter Philips, and Mark Prus, “Women, Technology, and Work: The Gender Division of Labor in U.S. Manufacturing, 1850–1919,” Research in Economic History 16 (1996): 103–26.
7. 7.Jill Stainsby, “‘It’s the Smell of Money’: Women Shoreworkers of British Columbia,” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 103 (Fall 1994): 59–81.
8. 8.William G. Robbins, “Labor in the Pacific Slope Timber Industry: A Twentieth-Century Perspective,” Journal of the West 25, no. 2 (1986): 10, 8.
9. 9.Plant Manpower Analysis, 18 November 1943, ACM Collection, Box 62, Folder 3, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena, MT.
10. 10.Laurie Mercier, Anaconda: Labor, Culture, and Community in Montana’s Smelter City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 67–68.
11. 11.For a description of the specific myths, traditions, movements, and legislation that forbade women from working underground, see Angela V. John, By the Sweat of their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Jane Mark-Lawson and Anne Witz, “From ‘Family Labor’ to ‘Family Wage’? The Case of Women’s Labor in Nineteenth-Century Coalmining,” Social History 13 (1988): 151–74; Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (New York: ILR Press, 1989), 1–21.
12. 12.Karen Beck Skold, “The Job He Left Behind: American Women in the Shipyards during World War II,” in Women, War, and Revolution, ed. Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 57; Amy Kessleman, Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver During World War II and Reconversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). Karen Anderson, in her study of women war workers, concludes that labor markets, rather than community values, determined such variations. She notes, for example, that women made up just 4 percent of Baltimore shipbuilders, compared to 16 percent in Seattle, because of greater availability of black male workers in the East. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 31, 46.
13. 13.Mercier, Anaconda, 91.
14. 14.Susanne Klausen, “The Plywood Girls: Women and Gender Ideology at the Port Alberni Plywood Plant, 1942–1991,” Labour/Le Travail 41 (Spring 1998): 199–235.
15. 15.The literature on the Cold War and labor unions is extensive. See, for example, Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
16. 16.Mercier, “‘Instead of Fighting the Common Enemy,”’ 472–73.
17. 17.“Description of Method for Applying for Charters,” 1938, USWA Hague collection, Box 47, folder 12, Labor Archives, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
18. 18.International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW), “Report of the Proceedings of the 38th Convention of the IUMMSW,” Joplin, Missouri, August 1941, 9–10, 84–85.
19. 19.IUMMSW, “Constitution of Ladies’Auxiliaries,” 1944, Norma McLean collection, Shelf G3, Box 184, Anaconda Historical Society, Anaconda, MT.
20. 20.IUMMSW, “Report of the Proceedings of the 41st Convention,” Pittsburgh, 11–16 September 1944, 47–48.
21. 21.Mary Orlich to Mrs G. B. Colwell, Bessemer, Alabama, 6 February 1945, Orlich collection, courtesy of Don Orlich, in possession of author (hereafter cited as Orlich collection).
22. 22.Orlich to all auxiliary district vice-presidents, 18 February 1945, Orlich collection.
23. 23.Orlich report to auxiliaries, 2 September 1946, Orlich collection; Mike Solski and John Smaller, Mine Mill: The History of the IUMMSW in Canada Since 1895 (Ottawa: Steel Rail Publishing, 1985), 124; Steedman, et al., Hard Lessons, 162–65.
24. 24.“Miner’s Wife Fights Off Red Invasion of Union,” Saturday Evening Post, 18 January 1947.
25. 25.Kay Carlin, Sudbury, to Orlich, 27 January 1947; Charlotte M. Rash, rec sec, Auxiliary No. 139 Copper Mountain, BC, to Orlich, 25 March 1947; E.M. Bausquet, secretary, Trail & District Ladies’Auxiliary No. 131, Rossland, BC, to Orlich, n.d., all Olrich collection.
26. 26.Maes Whitehead, Lake Penage, Ontario, to Mary 0, 4 October 1947, Orlich collection.
27. 27.Correspondence, Orlich collection; William Mason and Harty I. Baird, Butte, to Editors Saturday Evening Post, 23 January 1947.
28. 28.M. E. Travis to all IUMMSW Ladies’ Auxiliaries, 9 December 1947, WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 126, folder “Executive Board Action re Controversy,” University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (Hereafter cited as UCB.)
29. 29.Orlich and Young to all local auxiliaries, February 1948, Orlich collection.
30. 30.“Report of the Committee to Try International Ladies’Auxiliary Officers,” 4 February 1948, Chicago, WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 126, folder “Executive Board Action re Controversy,” UCB.
31. 31.Otto Orr to Charles J. Smith, USWA, Los Angeles, August 4, 1955, USWA District 38, Box 8, Folder 10, Labor Archives, Pennslyvania State University, University Park, PA.
32. 32.People’s Voice, 12 November 1948; Margaret Driggs, “A Mine-Mill Wife Looks at Miners’ Con Problem in Butte,” 1 April 1949; Mercedes Steedman, “Godless Communists and Faithful Wives, Gender Relations and the Cold War: Mine Mill and the Strike against the International Nickel Company, Sudbury, Canada, 1958,” in Mining Women: Gender in Development of a Global Industry, 1670–2000, ed. Laurie Mercier and Jaclyn J. Gier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006). In 1955 Mine Mill became the first international union to grant autonomy to Canadians.
33. 33.Rachael Wood, “What Being a member of an MMSW Auxiliary Means to Me,” The Union, 24 April 1950, 6.
34. 34.Mine-Mill Union, 8 October 1951; “Women’s Rights—New Plank in Auxiliary Program,” Ladies’ Auxiliary of the IUMMSW, Newsletter, v. 1, n. 1, October 1951, WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 159, folder “Auxiliary Newsletter,” UCB.
35. 35.“Substitute Resolution for Resolution 41,” IUMMSW convention, n.d., WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 9, folder 1, UCB.
36. 36.Mine-Mill Union, April 1956; IUMMSW Auxiliary president Eva Pence, reports, ca. 1955 and 1956; Pence to IUMMSW and Ladies’Auxiliary, n.d., WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 159, folder “Auxiliary,” UCB.
37. 37.Reid and Jencks quoted in Steedman, Hard Lessons, 8, 153, 171; Mine Mill Auxiliary Newsletter, 21 July 1955; and Eva Pence, to members of the International Union of Mine Mill and Ladies’Auxiliary, ca. 1957, WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 159, folder “Auxiliary Newsletter,” UCB. That the border and auxiliary separation remained fluid is represented by continued British Columbian attendance at Auxiliary meetings and conventions in Spokane, Salt Lake, and other United States western cities.
38. 38.Solski and Smaller, Mine Mill, 136–67; Steedman, “Godless Communists.” See Katherine G. Aiken’s discussion of pro- and anti-Mine Mill women activists in Kellogg, Idaho, in “‘When I Realized How Close Communism Was to Kellogg, I Was Willing to Devote Day and Night’: Anti-Communism, Women, Community Values, and the Bunker Hill Strike of 1960,” Labor History 36 (Spring 1995): 165–86.
39. 39.For a full discussion of the role of gender, ideology, and regionalism in Mine Mill’s decline in Anaconda, see Mercier Anaconda and “Instead of Fighting the Common Enemy.”
40. 40.Ruth N. Brady, Bisbee, to IUMMSW, Denver, 15 June 1962, WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 258, folder 16 “Ladies’Auxiliary 1962,” UCB.
41. 41.Scholars have often overlooked the role of leadership in shaping a union or auxiliary. Julia Ruutila steered the ILWU auxiliary in Portland in a more radical direction in the 1960s, protesting police brutality, boycotting Dow Chemical, participating in Peace Walks against the Vietnam War, and supporting the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. As Sandy Polishuk has noted in her oral history biography of Ruutila, these auxiliary leaders carefully strategized ways of “bringing along” other women in the auxiliary as well as in the male union. Polishuk, Sticking to the Union: The Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila (New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2003). Explaining their broader interests beyond the workplace, ILWU auxiliary president Valerie Taylor noted in 1962 that “Waterfront workers’ wives hate injustice and human exploitation...[and] know foreign policy marches through her [sic] kitchen.” Joan Fox, comp., A History of Federated Auxiliaries of the ILWU, 1934–1984 (Seattle: self-published, 1993).
42. 42.Where older studies of western industrial unions and communities have ignored women altogether, more recent studies have often debated whether women have had a more militant or conservative influence on labor unions. Richard Rajala contends that single male loggers supported the iww because “work and life were not separate spheres” and “their class orientation was not mediated to the same extent as in the case of those with stronger family and community allegiances.” Elizabeth Jameson and John Belshaw, for example, have found that settled families actually fostered militancy and increased demands for better wages and conditions. Richard Rajala, “Bill and the Boss: Labor Protest, Technological Change, and the Transformation of the West Coast Logging Camp, 1890–1930,” Journal of Forest History 33 (October 1989): 176–79; Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); John Belshaw, Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
43. 43.Mrs W. A. Oneal, president, Bessemer, AL (Frances Perkins Auxiliary) to Maty Orlich, February 26, 1945, Orlich collection.
44. 44.Dulcie M. Johnson, IUMMSW secretary, Denver, to Eva Pence, chairman IUMMSW Auxiliaries, Cobalt, Idaho, 22 June 1956, WFM-IUMMSW collection, Box 159, folder “Auxiliary,” UCB; “Open Forum: the Judy Canova Show,” Mine Mill Union, 25 February 1952.