The Loneliness of Working Class Feminism: Women in the

1
The Loneliness of Working Class Feminism Women
in the Male World of Labor Unions, Guatemala
City, 1970s

• By, Deborah Levinson-Estrada
• Presented By, Whitney Pankonin

2
Trade Unionism

• 1950s and 1960s workers rebuilt trade unionism
  despite violence against labor activists
• Subsequently industry declined, violence
  continued

3
What has it taken for women to become labor
activists?

• Sonia Oliva 1970s union leader at
  Japanese-owned ACRICASA thread factory in
  Guatemala City
• How she became an activist - she alone stood
  outside of normal gender relations
• She understood she had to live apart from the
  constraints of gender to join a union

4
Olivas Background

• Grew up in rural and urban ladino (mestizo or
  non-Indian) Guatemalan world
• Rigid conventions of proper female and male
  rights, obligations regardless of class

5
Male obligations

• Protect women and children
• Be stable breadwinner
• Public protector of the home
• Macho defend oneself and ones family, brave
  and bold

6
Women

• Defined as mothers
• Homemakers
• Emotional caretakers
• Men work for wages outside of home, thus work has
  greater social and economic value

7
Intersection of Class and Gender

• Gap between real and ideal male and female is
  wide in homes of working-class and poor families
  in Guatemala
• Guatemalan workers interviewed central drama of
  their lives was the failure of fathers
  maintaining the success of the family and the
  success of their mothers in doing so

8
Working Class

• Gender rules neither rejected nor strictly
  adhered to
• Live in gray are of gender imperfection
• Preserve sense of women belonging in the home
  female work for wages outside the home is
  temporary labor (factory work)
• Problem of conventional ideas reappeared in the
  union

9
Women at Work the ARCRICASA Union

• ARCRICASA opened 1973
• State-of-the-art machinery to make acrylic thread
  for the Central American Common Market
• Sonia Oliva the machines got everything they
  needed to function 24 hours a day without hitches
  or failures, but we did not.

10
Shop Floor Realities

• All workers shared low pay
• 12 hour shifts
• Lack of face masks against dust
• Problems specific to women absence of toilets,
  supervisors felt entitled to slap women workers,
  no transportation to plant (pregnant women)

11
February 1975

• Group of men workers started organizing drive
• Olivas official leadership post chosen because
  Labor Ministry mandated that unions have 9-person
  executive committee
• Women were elected to ACRICASA because there were
  not 9 men willing to risk being union officials
• Male trade unionists had to abide to Labor
  Ministrys rules, if they wanted ACRICASA they
  had to accept women

12

• After unions lawyer secured an injunction
  against company to prevent further firings over
  100 workers (most women) joined the union
• To win the union legal recognition they often
  crowded into managers office collectively
  demanded that management meet with union
• Fame as persistent trade unionists spread

13
Women from ACRICASA

• Taunted men workers
• We are women and weve organizedWhat have you
  men done?
• Link between masculinity and class

14
Oliva

• Attended all meetings she could
• Thought about the problems Guatemala faced
• Took action whenever she saw the opportunity
• Opposed capitalism and the state
• Even after Olivas union won a contract in early
  1977, workers continually had to pressure the
  company to abide by it

15
Demands of Conventional Motherhood

• Oliva brought son Pavel to meetings and
  demonstrations
• Did not leave her child in someone elses care
  she brought her son into world of activism
• When company did not implement a provision in the
  contract for day care Oliva brought 40-day-old
  Pavel to work
• to make a point

16
1978 Union was Strong

• Succeeded in guaranteeing compliance with a good
  contract
• Union was active member of a broader labor
  movement that called for Revolutionary Popular
  Government
• State reacted strongly against the unions in the
  popular movement

17
Violence in ACRICASA

• July 1978 9 male and 26 female union members
  seized by police, taken to prison
• October union leader Gonzalo Ac Bin
  assassinated
• Early 1979 Oliva and Pavel kidnapped, beaten,
  forced to leave the country
• June 21, 1980 union leaders Florencia Xocop and
  Sara Cabrera (7 months pregnant) kidnapped and
  disappeared

18
Working-Class Feminism

• Women violated ideal female behavior
• When they crowded into managers office, painted
  signs, argued with labor inspectors, or occupied
  the plant

19
Maternal Politics

• Their activism not simply an extension of their
  gender identity as mothers, wives, daughters
• (identity of politics to defend kin vicariously
  as one feminist scholar calls maternal politics)
• Politics based in ones femaleness

20

• One of ACRICASAS first concessions to workers
  installation of indoor toilets
• BUT supervisors clocked workers
• Ex) women stayed in bathroom over 4 minutes
  brought soiled sanitary napkin on managers desk
  when she was reported

21
Mothers Day Example

• By law Mothers Day was paid holiday
• ACRICASA granted it legally to married women
• 1977 single mothers demanded same right and
  company refused (manager claimed because women
  were not married)
• If you dont give me this holiday because I am
  not a mother, I will lie on your desk and you
  bring a doctor in here to decide in front of
  everyone whether I am a mother.

22
ACRICASA Women Workers

• Do not fit neatly into categories sometimes used
  by scholars to describe womens activism
• Not maternal, womenist, genderless politics
• Tension between accepting and rejecting ones
  proper role, rights, and obligations

23

• Women in union did not question inequalities
  between men and women
• None took issue with fact that ACRICASA gave men
  better-paying jobs
• Most leaders were men, even though most union
  members were women
• Most women union members did not question gender
  roles to the extent that Oliva did

24
Day Care

• Potentially subversive to gender constructions
  it can challenge the notion that women should be
  in the home
• Origins of day care in Guatemala 1944-1954
  feminist movement Alianza Feminina
• Day care centers established 1947 Labor Code
  required factories with 40 women workers to
  provide day care facilities

25

• Alianza Feminina (and most first-wave feminist
  groups in Latin America) had not departed from
  premise that child care was a womens issue
• The demand that factories with a certain number
  of parents have day care facilities was
  unimaginable to progressive Guatemalan women in
  the 1940s

26
1970s

• Male trade unionists opposed day care for
  factories where they worked
• They (the men) were killing themselves working to
  have a normal family (a wife at home)
• Many women said that their relatives at home
  would be shocked at the thought of putting a
  child in day care when there were female
  relatives at home for just that purpose
• even though my mother works (making food and
  selling it in front of the house), I would be
  rejecting her if I took my children to work with
  me every day

27
Gendered Activism, Gender Troubles

• Activism demanded extraordinary public heroism
  this sort of courage was male-associated
  character traite

28
Dont You Have Hair On Your Chests?

• Men trade unionists became
• Citys best breadwinners, most steadfast
  defenders of the family
• Machismo was important to good trade union
  leadership
• macho bullheaded worker, think with his
  balls

29

• Masculinity was empowering to certain point
  workers felt intellectually inferior
• Masculinity bound up with class action tough
  male worker stupid was connected with
  worker

30
Men Workers Defense of Women Workers

• I remember that there were these managers, these
  middleclass young guys with their cute little
  cars. And when the harvest came they needed a lot
  of extra women to work, so they always picked the
  prettiest ones, and what they did afterwards (the
  managers), they took them to drink on Fridays, on
  the weekend, I dont know what they did, and
  these poor women had to give in to what they
  wanted because they needed the job.

31
Suggestions by Critics

• This represents not outrage of sexual abuse but
  matter of messing with our classs women
  (class struggle over womens bodies)
• A question about who gets to sexually abuse
• Line between protect and possess is thin

32
Mens Mixed Feelings

• Organizing women into unions contradicted their
  views of male and female
• Treated women union member the way they always
  treated women didnt inform them of important
  meetings, decisions, problems, gossip
• Women recognized as important to the labor
  movement (like Oliva) were masculinized

33

• Male trade unionists rarely permitted own wives
  to be involved in unions
• Sexual possessiveness was at the heart of the
  matter
• Wives belonged to their husbands, could not be
  re-genderized
• Wives allowed to cook

34
Womens Struggles

• 1 against company
• 2 against state
• 3 against sanctioned models of gender behavior
  (men excluded from this struggle)

35
1980

• Repression union destroyed
• Once women became involved in union activity,
  unfeminine step, they had greater capacity to
  see beyond gender constructs
• They did not glue their union work to gender
  constructs, as men did

36
Conclusion

• No genderless working-class struggle in Guatemala
• Guatemalan Marxist Left maintained that womens
  oppression has been the result of capitalism
  that struggle for womens rights and liberation
  against machismo has been secondary in importance
  to primary battle between classes

37

• Olivas history indicates that this is false
  dilemma she had to challenge sexism to be a
  class activist
• A critical consciousness about class needs a
  critical consciousness about gender (vice versa)

38

• Women do not act only out of gender
• Activism stems from the multiplicity of their
  being, of which gender is a part
• Levinson-Estrada concerned about pigeonholing
  womens activism into maternal or womenist
  politics

39
Oliva

• Both concentrated on issues of womanhood and
  rejected woman as an identity
• Oliva is exceptional, but feminists have always
  been the exception regardless of class, time, or
  place

40

• Normative gender identities have had time, habit,
  culture, and social structure on their side
• The stakes in trade unionism and feminism have
  been unusually high in Guatemala
• To act as a historical subject has been to stake
  ones life

41

• Male Trade Unionists live out lives in the
  personal realm that do not overturn familiar
  customs of gender
• Women Trade Unionists face double insecurity of
  living with intense anxiety while traveling an
  unfamiliar emotional path alone
• All this demands courage that surpasses
  extraordinary courage.