“We Didn’t Know We Were Making History”: The United Automobile Workers’ Women’s Auxiliaries in Great-Depression Era Detroit

In a 1937 UAW file photograph, members of the Flint, Michigan women’s auxiliary prepare food in the General Motors sit-down strike kitchen. A publicity photograph from later that year shows UAW organizer Walter Reuther handing out packets of leaflets to women’s auxiliary members hours before they were involved in what has become known as the Battle of the Overpass. These photographs reveal what has been largely invisible in written and visual histories of the UAW’s early years – the presence of a vibrant and sustained auxiliary movement, without which the UAW may never have secured its early victories and survived the violent and tumultuous late 1930s. This project argues that the working-class housewives of the UAW auxiliaries used their roles as the female family members of male unionists to participate in the strikes of the mid-to-late 1930s. They did so via traditionally female labor, including the operation of strike kitchens, and less traditional, more dangerous work on picket lines and in protests. Although some scholars have characterized auxiliary labor as ephemeral and unimportant, this project supports Dorothy Sue Cobble’s contention that a dearth of women in union leadership positions did not constitute of lack of influence. Throughout this period, the auxiliaries operated according to communal, gender, and class consciousnesses that challenge the vocabulary we use to describe women’s activism in the first third of the twentieth century. In so doing, they force us to have “difficult conversations” about the type of women’s activism we value in the academy.