Abstract
In large part, scholarship on southern labor history has focused on the textile industry and the struggles of its workers. However, as Michelle Haberland observes, this focus on textiles has obscured the importance of the apparel industry as a major force in the twentieth-century southern economy and the fortunes of southern workers. In this succinct study, she traces the industry’s rise and fall in the Southern United States; assesses the complex interplay of class, gender, and racial identities in shaping the experience of its workers; and reveals ongoing tensions in garment unions where male leaders exercised authority over a predominately female membership.
Although northern apparel employers expected to find a more pliant workforce in the rural, nonunion South, they often encountered militancy and resistance from women workers seeking to improve their shop-floor conditions. This militancy transgressed southern cultural norms regarding appropriate feminine behavior and subjected union activists to widespread condemnation from the power structures in their local communities. Haberland underscores that southern employers and local law enforcement felt no compunction in using violence and intimidation to suppress the activism of female unionists. Nonetheless, women workers were able to organize and establish a precarious foothold for apparel unionism in the Southern United States.
The union that represented most of these workers, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), attempted to organize on an interracial basis, spurred by the civil rights movement and the passage of legislation outlawing employment discrimination. Haberland credits the ILGWU for its unapologetic commitment to interracial unionism in a hostile political environment and its cultivation of close alliances with civil rights organizations. At the same time, she notes the union’s reluctance to challenge fully the racial privileges of its white membership. Unwilling to overturn local custom, the union often accepted occupational segregation within its own ranks, condoning arrangements that relegated African American women to lower paying, less prestigious jobs within apparel workplaces.
Haberland also reviews the union efforts to counter the rising tide of imports that ultimately led to the apparel industry’s demise during the latter decades of the twentieth century. She criticizes both the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) for crafting union label campaigns that largely appealed to women’s traditional roles as consumers while neglecting to acknowledge their equally important identities as workers. In contrast, Haberland praises the ILGWU’s famed “Look for the Union Label” advertising effort for depicting women as both consumers and producers, and encompassing the ethnic and racial diversity of the union’s membership. She argues that these ads reflected the influence of the emerging women’s movement and suggested the potential for the garment union’s female members to play a larger role in the life of their organizations.
Striking Beauties concludes with Haberland’s account of union responses to globalization, most notably the shift of apparel jobs to maquiladoras in Mexico. Here, she chides male union leaders for portraying Mexican women as hapless, exploited victims rather than as empowered wage earners capable of action and agency. This too-brief section of the book relies mostly on secondary sources and would benefit from further development. Although Haberland does provide evidence to support her argument about a victimization narrative that U.S. unions used to describe Mexican women, she fails to acknowledge more recent efforts to organize independent unions in Mexico and the rise of cross-border solidarity work that reflects an empowerment rather than a victimization sensibility. Moreover, her epilogue returns to a victimization narrative that undercuts her previous argument.
This book addresses an important gap in southern labor history, offers a valuable perspective on the experience of women in a major southern industry, and illuminates the enduring challenges faced by southern workers in building durable unions. It could be profitably used in labor studies classes on working-class history, and in classes and workshops on topics such as union organizing, gender and racial justice, and political economy.