Beyond Norma Rae

How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4696-7612-8
Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Gender and American Culture

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 their 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Rechtswissenschaften Arbeitsrecht Betriebsverfassung, Personalvertretung, Mitbestimmungsrecht
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Über Autor(innen)

Aimee Loiselle is assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University.