Abstract
Word spread fast. On the afternoon of June 12, 1951, sheriff’s deputies came to the union hall with an injunction issued by New Mexico’s Sixth District Court: officers, agents, and members of Mine-Mill Local 890 had to stop picketing the Empire Zinc Company or face immediate arrest.1 This court order, coming just a day after a fight between striking miners and sheriff’s deputies at Empire Zinc, electrified the mining district in this southwestern corner of New Mexico. Phones rang, cars threaded their way to the picket, and women hurried to tell their neighbors. Men starting their shift in other mines told workers who were just leaving. That night, crowding into the biggest dance hall that could be found, hundreds of union members and supporters confronted their dilemma: if the union obeyed the injunction, replacement workers could enter the mine and the ten-month-long strike would be lost; if it disobeyed, all of the picketers could be arrested—and the strike would be lost.
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Notes
In 1947 Congress passed, over President Truman’s veto, the Labor-Management Relations Act, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Taft-Hartley affirmed workers’ right to not join a union, made it easier to get a court injunction against strikers—a return to the years before the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, which had limited such injunctions—and specified unfair labor practices thenceforth forbidden to unions. It required all union officials to sign affidavits stating that they did not belong to the Communist Party. The unions that did not file noncommunist affidavits lost access to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leaders refused to sign these affidavits for over a year; Mine-Mill and other left-wing unions held out even longer. Anticommunism was more than a weapon of the companies; political battles over communism and anticommunism tore many unions apart during this period. For this process in Mine-Mill, see Vernon H. Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 1932–1954: A Story of Leadership Controversy, Cornell Studies in Industrial and Labor Relations, vol. 5 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954).
Braulia Velásquez, quoted in Proceedings of the 48th Convention of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Nogales, Arizona, September 10–15, 1951 (Denver: International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers), 64; Aurora Chávez, telephone interview by author, May 9, 1997. Chávez was married to Empire Zinc striker Agustín Chávez; Chacón to Hurley worker Juan Chacón, and Jencks to union organizer Clinton Jencks.
Historian Jack Cargill reports that the discussion split along gender lines, with International representatives Bob Hollowwa and Clinton Jencks joining the women. Jack Cargill, “Empire and Opposition: The ‘Salt of the Earth’ Strike,” in Labor in New Mexico: Unions, Strikes, and Social History since 1881, ed., Robert Kern (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 203.
Recent work on masculinity in the mining and railroad industries has shaped my understanding of Local 890’s gender politics. Thomas Miller Klubock enhances Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with an incisive gender analysis to explain miners’ acceptance of and resistance to corporate power in Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Michael Yarrow has marked out two different kinds of masculine identities corresponding to different periods of workers’ mobilization. Unionized coal miners of the 1930s defined true manhood as a worker’s vigorous challenge to management prerogative (and to management’s paternalism), but in a period of union retrenchment, these miners articulated and acted upon a different definition of manhood, one marked by hard work and the breadwinner ethic. Michael Yarrow, “The Gender-Specific Consciousness of Appalachian Coal Miners: Structure and Change,” in Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, ed., Scott G. McNall, Rhonda Levine, and Rick Fantasia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 285–310. See also Steven Penfield, “‘Have You No Manhood in You?’ Gender and Class in the Cape Breton Coal Towns, 1920–1926,” in Gender and History in Canada, ed., Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld (Toronto: Copp Clark, Ltd., 1996), 270–293; Mark Rosenfeld, “‘It Was a Hard Life’: Class and Gender in the Work and Family Rhythms of a Railway Town, 1920–1950,” Historical Papers/Communications Historiques (Windsor, Ont., 1988), 237–279; Paul Michel Taillon, “‘What We Want is Good, Sober Men’: Masculinity, Respectability, and Temperance in the Railroad Brotherhoods, c. 1870–1910,” Journal of Social History 36, 2 (2002), 319–338.
Women’s historians from the 1970s onward have recast American labor history to account for community-based unionism, not just the workplace unionism that had long dominated institutional labor histories. See Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Laurie Mercier, Anaconda: Labor, Community, and Culture in Montana’s Smelter City (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
In general, the Communist Party held that women’s oppression would evaporate under the enlightened conditions of socialism; “feminism” meant one thing—the bourgeois feminism that masked real class relations and sacrificed working-class women for their bourgeois “sisters.” See Van Gosse, “‘To Organize in Every Neighborhood’: The Gender Politics of American Communists between the Wars,” Radical History Review 50 (Spring 1991): 109–141; Rosalyn Baxandall, “The Question Seldom Asked: Women and the CPUSA,” in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of American Communism, ed. Michael E. Brown et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 141–161; and Robert Schaffer, “Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930–1940, Socialist Review 45 (May–June 1979): 73–118. In the 1940s, some women challenged this simplistic view, and groups like the Congress of American Women pushed a leftist agenda without trivializing women’s issues. See Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in U.S. History as Women’s History, ed. Linda Kerber et al. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296–312; Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Linn Shapiro, “Red Feminism: American Communism and the Women’s Rights Tradition, 1919–1956” (PhD diss., American University, 1996); Harriet Hyman Alonso, “Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists during the McCarthy Era,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, ed., Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 128–150.
Patricia Yeghissian, “Emergence of the Red Berets,” Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies 10 (Winter 1980), 1–2.
For other examples of the movement from domestic to political, see Neala Schleuning, Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike of 1985–1986 (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1994); Lynda Ann Ewen, Which Side Are You On? The Brookside Mine Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1973–1974 (Chicago: Vanguard Books, 1979); and Judy Aulette and Trudy Mills, “Something Old, Something New: Auxiliary Work in the 1983–1986 Copper Strike,” Feminist Studies 14 (Summer 1988): 251–268. While Schleuning and Yeghissian posit a sharp division between “public” and “private,” other historians have acknowledged the permeable boundaries between the two and have expanded the scope of the “domestic” to include neighborhoods. See Ann Schofield, “An ‘Army of Amazons’: The Language of Protest in a Kansas Mining Community, 1921–1922,” American Quarterly 37 (Winter 1985), 686–701; Temma Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918,” Signs 7 (Spring 1982), 545–566; Sylvie Murray, “A la jonction du mouvement ouvrier et du mouvement des femmes: La ligue auxiliaire de l’Association Internationale des Machinistes, Canada, 1903–1980” (MA thesis, University of Quebec at Montreal, 1988); and Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott developed the concept of the family wage economy in their influential Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rineholt and Winston, 1978; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1989). Analyzing reactions to married women’s employment during the Great Depression, Alice Kessler-Harris has shown that women as well as men strenuously upheld the breadwinner model, in which men earned a “family wage” and could thereby provide for their families. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990). Miners’ wives daily felt the power of companies, which often controlled housing, utilities, and social institutions like schools. Every aspect of their own household work bore the marks of class and ethnic injustice. Only the “Anglo” houses in Kennecott’s two company towns, Santa Rita and Hurley, had running water; Mexican American tenants had to haul water from wells. Hanover, the site of the Empire Zinc strike, was similarly segregated. As Anita Tórrez complained, “Empire thinks us second class citizens—no plumbing as in Anglo houses.” Anita Tórrez, letter to editor, Silver City Daily Press, April 5, 1951.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982).
Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988), v–vi.
Michael Wilson and Deborah Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1978), 81–82.
Ibid., 82.
Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 39. Biberman directed the movie, which was in many ways a family affair: his sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, served on the production committee; producer Paul Jarrico was Wilson’s brother-in-law, and his wife Sylvia worked on the film production as well. The Jarricos had first discovered the Empire Zinc strike in the summer of 1951, when they met the Jenckses at a ranch in northern New Mexico.
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© 2006 Jaclyn J. Gier and Laurie Mercier
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Baker, E. (2006). “I Hate to Be Calling Her a Wife Now”: Women and Men in the Salt of the Earth Strike, 1950–1952. In: Gier, J.J., Mercier, L. (eds) Mining Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73399-6_12
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