Sisterhood Denied

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Durham, North Carolina was a growing town typical of the industrial New South. Depending on cheap cotton, cheap tobacco, and cheap labor to supply its infant industries, Durham accelerated the impoverishment of the neighboring agricultural society and the migration of rural farm workers into urban industry. This study traces the movement of black and white women between 1880 and 1940 from tobacco fields in the North Carolina Piedmont into Durham's textile, tobacco, and hosiery factories. Using a large number of oral histories, Janiewski tells the story of the New South as it was experienced by the women who contributed to the region's wealth while remaining poor themselves. Exploring gender, race, and class as manifested through women's work and position in the rural South, she studies the reconstruction of these relationships in the industry workplaces of Durham. Despite changes women experienced in the migratory and industrializing process, a complex hierarchy based upon race, class, and gender continued to shape the way these women thought and lived. Intense union activity by black and white women led to the first contract with a large Durham textile mill in 1941. But even while workers were celebrating victory, the unity in the workplace was very fragile, as employers maintained racial and gender divisions in working conditions and in pay. These divisions eventually had a devastating impact upon union organizing of Durham industries. Because the unions failed to address the issues of gender and racial inequality, they never fully mobilized the energies of the women workers or fully satisfied their needs. Dolores E. Janiewski is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Idaho.