'Cowering Women, Combative Men?': Femininity, Masculinity, and Ethnicity on Strike in Two Southern Ontario Towns, 1964-1966

Abstract

, 450 women employed at the Lanark Manufacturing Company, an auto parts plant in the southern Ontario town of Dunnville, walked off the job; the bargaining committee for local 523 of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers (UE) announced that negotiations with Lanark management had yet again broken down. Filoména Carbone, an Italian immigrant from the Abruzzi region of southern Italy, who had been working at the factory for only a few months, went home instead of joining her co-workers on the picket lines. Though the strike lasted five months, Carbone stayed away only until mid-October when, at the prodding of her husband, she crossed the picket line to resume work at the Lanark along with about a hundred other workers. Far from expressing solidarity with her striking co-workers, Carbone declared the strike to be, in her own words, "stupid." "Why people got to stay out when people need the job?" she asked. "It was five, six months with no pay, and for what?' 'Personal interview. I have used pseudonyms throughout to protect the privacy of oral informants (though most did not ask me to), except in instances where the persons in question are, or were, public figures. Interviews-30 of them-were conducted in the summer of 1994. Of the formal interviews, fifteen were with immigrant workers, six were with former union officials. The remainder consisted of informal interviews with immigrants and their Canadian-bom children. Initial contacts with the immigrant informants were established by relatives of mine, immigrants themselves. So many thanks to Nina DeFelice, Rita Sciarra-Ventresca, and Ruben Sciarra for their invaluable help in this regard. The interview format was generally formal in nature-with interviews tape-recorded and respondents answering

“An Unlikely Collection of Union Militants”: Portuguese Immigrant Cleaning Women Become Political Subjects in Postwar Toronto

“…Yet, despite such fears being widespread, the vast majority of the Portuguese women did not cross the picket line but stood firm, and their defiance is important in showing that so-called "respectable" gender norms did not dampen the militancy of this group of ethnic female strikers, as has been noted for groups of Anglo-Saxon women workers in earlier periods (Parr 1990;Sangster 1995;Sugiman 1994). Like other strikes in which immigrant women predominated, these women were not constrained either by dominant notions of femininity or working class ones (Guard 2004b;Ventresca 1996).…”