![]() inferior species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have swallowed the bosses' thinking." The union was the UE, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, the most radical American union in the postwar period and in the 1940s what historian Ronald Schatz, appreciative of the UE's place in history, has called "the largest communist-led institution of any kind in the United States." In 1952 that same journalist wrote a pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers, that the historian Lisa Kannenberg, unaware of the identity of its author, has called "a remarkable manual for fighting wage discrimination that is, ironically, as relevant today as it was in 1952." At the time, the pamphlet helped raise the consciousness of Eleanor Flexner, who in 1959 would publish Century of Struggle, the first scholarly history of American women. Out of these conversations, she reported, emerged the realization that the women were "fighters - that they refuse any longer to be paid or treated as some. ![]() ![]() In 1951, a labor journalist with a decade's experience in protest movements described a trade union meeting where rank-and-file women talked and men listened. Betty Friedan, "It Changed My Life," 1976 ![]()
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