Beyond Norma Rae : How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class
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| Title: | Beyond Norma Rae : How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class |
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| Description: | In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism.While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are. |
| Authors: | Aimee Loiselle |
| Resource Type: | eBook. |
| Subjects: | Textile workers--Labor unions--Organizing--United States--History--20th century, Women--Political activity--Southern States--20th century, Puerto Rican women--Political activity--20th century, Working class women--United States--History--20th century, Women in the labor movement--United States--History--20th century, Needleworkers--Labor unions--Organizing--United States--History--20th century, Labor movement--United States--History--20th century, Women labor leaders--United States--History--20t |
| Categories: | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies |
| Database: | eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) |
| Abstract: | In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources—union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories—Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism.While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are. |
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| ISBN: | 9781469676128 9781469676135 9781469676159 9798890862495 |
