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WORK TITLE: Striking Beauties
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Savannah
STATE: GA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-haberland-8b466339 * https://southernlaborstudies.org/2016/11/10/haberland_mitchell_award/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2015055980
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2015055980
HEADING: Haberland, Michelle
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Florida, B.A., 1990, M.A., 1993; Tulane University, Ph.D., 2001.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Georgia Southern University, associate professor of history and director of Women’s and Gender Studies.
AWARDS:Recipient of grants from Georgia Southern University, including Student Technology Fee Grant, Faculty Research Grant, and Faculty Development Grant, 2003.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities, edited by Bruce Clayton and John Salmond, University Press of Florida, 2003; Work, Family and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Melissa Walker and Rebecca Sharpless, University of Missouri Press, 2006; Entering the Fray: Gender, Culture and Politics in the New South, edited by Sheila Phipps and Jonathan Wells, University of Missouri Press, 2009.
SIDELIGHTS
Michelle Haberland is a professor and writer whose research and teaching focus on U.S. labor, globalization, working-class history, Southern history, and gender/women’s history. She is associate professor of history and director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgia Southern University. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from Tulane University.
In her 2015 book Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000, Haberland reveals the confluence of women’s history, southern cultural history, and labor history as she examines the apparel industry’s impact on gender transformation and southern economic development in the twentieth century. The apparel manufacturing sector has a large footprint in the South and relies heavily on female labor. Haberland focuses on the varied experiences of the workers during the industry’s expansion beginning in the late 1930s through the closure of its southern factories at the end of the twentieth century.
After the Great Depression, the apparel industry grew tremendously in the South, an important part of the region’s industrialization. Consequently, gender and racial composition of the workforce changed, trade unions grew, technology was advanced, and capital investment grew. In the mid-twentieth century, apparel companies in the North took advantage of the South’s lower wages, lax labor laws, and lower taxes and moved their factories to southern states, employing more than 400,000 women as sewing machine operators. Before the 1960s, most of the women were white, but after the civil rights movement, the southern garment industry employed mostly black women, and the number of Latinas grew. As expected, racial and gender inequities became an issue in the region, but also nationally. By the 1990s, many apparel factories moved overseas for cheaper labor.
Companies enhanced profits by more effectively exploiting their women workers. Haberland explores how the struggles of southern working women for economic justice played out in the southern economy and how women, as the primary consumers of the family, had power to influence boycotts, union label programs, and ultimately solidarity. Haberland discusses women’s joining such unions as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), as well as the ACWA’s national boycott of Farah slacks during a twenty-two–month strike for union recognition by Mexican-American women. Writing in the Women’s Review of Books, Priscilla Murolo observed that Haberland does not allow women to speak for themselves in the book; however, she continued, “This approach to industrial history breaks new ground and, all told, reveals more about women workers than we can learn from their voices alone.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Women’s Review of Books, November-December, 2016, Priscilla Murolo, review of Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000, p. 16.
ONLINE
Georgia Southern University, http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/ (April 1, 2017), faculty profile of author.
Dr. Michelle Haberland
Associate Professor of History and Director of Women’s & Gender Studies (2002).
B.A., M.A., University of Florida, 1990, 1993; Ph.D., Tulane University, 2001.
Teaching and Research Interests: Labor History, Southern History, Gender/Women’s History, African American History, Recent American History
Upper Division Courses:
HIST 4132 Recent America, US Since 1945
HIST 4135 The United States in the 1960s
HIST 4635 Globalization & Its Discontents: U.S. Labor & Capital in the 20 th Century (senior seminar)
HIST 5232 Working Class History in the United States
HIST 5138 The New South
Website: http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~mah
http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/wgender/
Contact Information:
Department of History
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8054
Statesboro, GA 30460-8054
Office: 1208 Forest Building
Tel.: (912) 478-1867
Email: mah@georgiasouthern.edu
Fax: (912) 478-0377
Selected Publications:
“Look for the Union Label: Organizing Women Workers and Women Consumers in the Southern Apparel Industry” in Entering the Fray: Gender, Culture and Politics in the New South, edited by Sheila Phipps and Jonathan Wells. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Forthcoming in 2009.
“‘It Takes a Special Kind of Woman to Work Up There’: Race, Gender and the Impact of the Apparel Industry on Clarke County, Alabama, 1937-1980” in Work, Family and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century, edited by Melissa Walker and Rebecca Sharpless. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
“After the Wives Went to Work: Organizing Women in the Southern Apparel Industry”in “Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities, edited by Bruce Clayton and John Salmond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Professional Activities, Awards, and Honors:
Southern Labor Studies Association, Program Committee
Student Technology Fee Grant, Georgia Southern University, 2003
Faculty Research Grant, Georgia Southern University, 2003
Faculty Development Grant, Georgia Southern University, 2003
Current Research:
Book manuscript: Striking Beauties: Garment Workers in the United States South, 1937 – 1980. Under contract with University of Georgia Press.
Book Project: The Right to Boycott: An Examination of Consumer Actions in American History — This study traces the history of boycotts and other consumer actions in the name of political, social and economic justice throughout the course of American history and considers the conceptualization of consumption as a politicized process as a perennial force in American history.
The difficulty of solidarity
Priscilla Murolo
The Women's Review of Books.
33.6 (November-December 2016): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the US South, 1930-2000
By Michelle Haberland
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015, 228 pp., $26.95, paperback
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Striking Beauties is the first book-length study of an industry that twice transformed the economies of southern states. Over the course of the midto
late-twentieth century, more than 400,000 women became sewing machine operators in southern garment factories. Most of those companies
had abandoned their factories in the North to take advantage of the lower wages, lax labor laws, business-friendly tax structures, and putatively
docile work force available in the South. By the 1990s, this region was home to almost half of the nation's garment workers.
If the companies had come to profiteer, the work they offered was nonetheless better than that previously available in most of cities and towns
where they set up shop. For several decades, virtually all of the new opportunities were reserved for white workers and, in some parts of Texas,
women of Mexican descent. Black women found work on the sewing machines during World War II, but this was a temporary arrangement; once
the war ended, they were pushed out. Then, in the 1960s, the civil rights movement and civil rights laws changed the landscape; the southern
garment industry became a large employer of black women, and Latinas' presence expanded.
While women poured into the factories as soon as the doors opened, however, they did not simply accept what they found there. Joining hands
with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), many southern
garment workers unionized their shops, engaged in strikes, and promoted consumer boycotts and union-label campaigns. Women workers--eighty
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percent of the industry's labor force--played prominent roles in these initiatives. As early as the 1970s, then, the garment companies that had
formerly been attracted to the southern states were once again seeking greener pastures. The trend accelerated after the mid-1990s, when new
international trade deals made off-shore manufacturing all the more lucrative. From 1994 to 2002, so many companies moved operations overseas
that the number of jobs in southern garment factories dwindled by almost sixty percent.
In Striking Beauties, Michelle Haberland aspires to tell this complex story from women workers' standpoint, analyzing their interactions with the
power structures that framed their lives. Sometimes she pulls this off in remarkably fruitful ways. Drawing on oral histories she collected from
both black and white women, Haberland illuminates tensions between the "rough" and "respectable," as well as divisions based on race. Though
US labor historians have written a great deal about white and black workers' scabbing on each other's strikes, Haberland is, to my knowledge, the
first to discuss strikebreaking based on cultural stratification, as when churchgoing black women on strike at a New Orleans suit factory in 1954
found themselves replaced by unchurched black women from a tough neighborhood. One of the strike's veterans explains, "[T]hey would fight
and that frightened me"--so much so that she left the factory for good and returned to domestic work.
Among white workers, too, differences with regard to religion, education, and family income militated against unity. The color line was always
the sharpest divider, however. A white woman who sewed undergarments in southern Alabama reports without apology that when her factory
began to hire black women in the 1960s, she promptly quit her job. Many other white women did the same. As Haberland's interlocutors make
clear, worker solidarity is hardly a natural phenomenon; it needs to be built.
Her subjects' labor activism seems all the more significant on that account. This theme figures prominently in two chapters. One surveys strikes
from the 1930s through the 1960s, when employers' staunch resistance to collective bargaining often forced workers to walk off the job to enforce
their right to organize. A chapter on garment factories' desegregation zeros in on interracial unionism, which was generally more advanced in the
post-Jim Crow South than in the garment unions' northern strongholds. Shifting the focus to unions' national headquarters, another chapter
discusses the ILGWU's and ACWA's campaigns to promote the union label and ACWA's national boycott of Farah slacks during a 22-month
strike for union recognition by Mexican-American women employed at its plant in El Paso, Texas.
While a number of these stories have happy endings--workers won union contracts at quite a few southern factories, including Farah's--the
victories were short lived. The more forcefully southern women showed that they were not in fact putty in the garment industry's hands, and the
more creatively labor leaders mobilized consumer support for garment unions, the more assiduously the industry's bosses pursued opportunities to
shift operations to the global South. Haberland makes no bones about this; the book's final chapter and epilogue note globalization's devastating
effects on southern garment workers and their communities. Even so, her accounts of labor activism are inspiring, in that they demonstrate how
routinely women workers have turned out to be more proudhearted, resourceful, and militant than their employers anticipate.
Despite these strengths, Striking Beauties often fails to deliver on the introduction's promise to reconstruct history "from the perspective of
women workers." The personal testimonies that Haberland gathered figure prominently in only two of the book's six chapters, and the workercentered
narrative repeatedly gets overshadowed by prolonged discussions of ancillary topics, such as southern towns' efforts to attract industrial
investment; federal labor policy under the New Deal; racial discrimination in New York City's garment unions; the CIO's decision to make textile
mills the primary target of its Operation Dixie southern organizing drive; international tariffs and trade deals; and the condescending vision of
Latin American garment workers articulated by the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development. All of this might have cohered
had women workers, or at least the southern garment industry, consistently remained in view. Instead, these perspectives frequently disappear,
and digressions that could have complemented a more durable core narrative come across as distractions.
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Then, as the book draws to a close, it seems to lose all interest in recounting history from the bottom up. The penultimate chapter, on union label
campaigns and the Farah boycott, devotes about a quarter of its pages to what I would term deep background: the role of boycotts in the
American Revolution; union boycotts' shifting legal status from the Progressive Era through the 1950s; the union label's origins in white
cigarmakers' race-baiting of Chinese immigrants in the 1870s; and garment unions' label campaigns prior to the postwar era, when ACWA and
the ILGWU began to deploy them as primary tools for organizing in the South. Haberland does not consider how this history affected southern
women's experience or outlooks as members of garment unions. In fact, a rank-and-file point of view scarcely enters the picture at all. Like the
background material, the discussions of both the Farah struggle and southern organizing in connection with the union label center on labor
leaders, lawmakers, and courts. The pattern carries over into the book's final chapter: its analysis of southern garment factories' movement to
Mexico reveals much more about how prominent labor spokespeople have understood this development than about its meanings to the workers
and communities that the runaway shops left behind.
The final chapters' abandonment of a rank-and-file perspective seems most unfortunate with regard to the Farah strike and boycott. Several years
after the strikers' victory in 1974, three feminist researchers (Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig) collected oral histories from
women who played especially active roles in the struggle, and this project generated several articles that quote generously from their testimony,
including statements from strikers who traveled across the country to drum up public support for the boycott. Although Haberland cites two of
these articles, she doesn't use them to assess the boycott's significance for women workers. Thus she forfeits a golden opportunity to delve into
the ways that labor activism not only propels working women into a bigger world but also makes them feel bigger. That theme, which surfaces
fleetingly in the earlier chapters on strikes and interracial unionism, deserves elaboration in a book that identifies itself as an effort to preserve
working women's voices.
Greater attention to labor politics seems in order too. The book neglects anticommunism's impact on and within the US labor movement--the redbaiting
that suffused anti-unionism, for example, and the fact that the American Institute for Free Labor Development was a cold-war initiative
funded and controlled by the State Department. Nor does it examine the labor movement's connections to the Left, from the communists and
socialists of the 1930s to black liberation, feminism, Chicano/a nationalism, and other sectors of the New Left of the 1960s and seventies. If
Haberland's many digressions are irksome, it's largely because they crowd out attention to political forces that help to explain the ebbs and flows
of women's militancy in the southern garment industry--their readiness to take risks when progressive causes were gaining momentum in society
at large and their retreat into more defensive postures when the momentum stalled.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For all of these reasons, I found Striking Beauties as exasperating as it is informative--but only so long as I continued to think of it as a study of
women's labor history. Once I finally decided to go with the flow--to ignore the introduction's promises and read the book as a gendered history of
the southern garment industry--things fell into place in a more satisfactory manner. Digressions aside, and despite the shifts in point of view,
there's continuity in Haberland's analysis of the sex-gender system's interplay with the garment industry's strategies for enhancing profits by more
effectively exploiting women; inter-regional and international competition to attract the industry by making women's labor available on terms
pleasing to employers; organized labor's efforts to curb exploitation, often by speaking for women workers instead of empowering them to speak
for themselves; and women workers' assertion of their own agendas, which have expanded or contracted depending on their calculations as to
how much or how little they could achieve at various moments. This approach to industrial history breaks new ground and, all told, reveals more
about women workers than we can learn from their voices alone.
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Reviewed by Priscilla Murolo
Priscilla Murolo teaches history at Sarah Lawrence College. She is working on a second edition of her book From the Folks Who Brought You
the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States (2003), co-authored with Ben Chitty.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Murolo, Priscilla. "The difficulty of solidarity." The Women's Review of Books, Nov.-Dec. 2016, p. 16+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474042076&it=r&asid=74f7612b2e7c305b3ad495fd4b0d66f7. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474042076