Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939

This research becomes somewhat problematic in the chapter, "Sisters in the Amalgamated." [JO ANN ARGERSINGER] shows that while ethnic and gender differences served as effective union recruitment tools, at the same time they "also impeded the achievement of a larger unity within the union." (71) However, the author's analysis of the actual circumstances in which race and gender played a role in the shops is limited, as both have little active voice. This is partially a result of the limited range of her sources. She claims her "research challenges those studies that suggest that all women responded similarly to inequality in unions or that limit women's aspirations to fantasias of mass culture or vision of home and hearth," (5) but in this chapter of the book her focus on the union movement's internal politics hampers Argersinger's ability to provide a larger analytical framework for working class gender dynamics during these years. As the author documents women's fight for separate locals, she argues that "Political, economic, and social changes in the post war environment, along with the concerns among union men about women's visibility in the ACW, figured prominently in making separate institutions more suspect and susceptible to rejection."(119) Yet she provides only limited evidence to support this assertion and does not analyse how separatist organizing strategies were influenced by the predominant ideologies of the period. After the defeat of women's locals, trade union women took advantage of trade union education programmes to draw women into the union community, making the programmes a central site of gender struggles in the union. Did women's experience in separate locals facilitate their work in the mainstream of the union? How did the transformation of women's place in the larger society alter trade union women's trade union strategies? If far more of Baltimore's needle trades women held skilled jobs than was true in other centers, did this affect how women participated in the union there? Were gender struggles in Baltimore played out any differently than in New York or Toronto? Unfortunately, she does not provide insights about how women's working-class culture contributed to women's sense of themselves inside the union. Jo Ann Argersinger gives the reader a rich descriptive narrative of women's experience, but the book falls short of explaining ongoing male resistance to women's equality in the ACW.