For many years, US trade unions declined in union density, organizing capacity, level of strike activity, and political effectiveness. Labor's decline is variously attributed to demographic factors, inaction by unions themselves, the state and legal system, globalization, neoliberalism, and the employer offensive that ended a labor-capital accord. The AFL-CIO New Voice leadership elected in 1995, headed by John Sweeney, seeks to reverse these trends and transform the labor movement. Innovative organizing, emphasizing the use of rank-and-file intensive tactics, substantially increases union success; variants include union building, immigrant organizing, feminist approaches, and industry-wide non-National Labor Relations Board (or nonboard) organizing. The labor movement must also deal with participatory management or employee involvement programs, while experimenting with new forms, including occupational unionism, community organizing, and strengthened alliances with other social movements.

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In the autumn of 1994, a Rolling Stone special issue on ‘Women in Rock’ proclaimed that ‘A change has come to rock & roll’. This pronouncement – which acknowledged women's traditional under-representation in rock music while consigning it to history – was hardly a new one. The ‘discovery’ that ‘an unprecedented number of female performers were now carving out a substantial place for themselves in the rock world’ has been a recurring staple of music journalism for at least two decades (Garr 1992, p. xi). Yet women's participation in the rock music world continues to be noteworthy, defined by their status as numerical minority and symbolic anomaly. ‘In rock as in life, what is male continues to be perceived as known, normal and natural, whereas what is female is taken to be a mystery in need of explication’ (Udovich 1994, p. 50).

Drawing on interviews with women and men musicians, this study examines women's overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instrument's greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of “womanly” affinity. The entrance of women into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production, yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies.

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