Union Maids

Duration: 600

Creator: Alice Lynd

Complete Record: Presents an adaptation of the book entitled Rank and file by Alice Lynd, about the American labor movement in the 1930's. Relates the personal experiences of three militant women who tried to organize laborers in Chicago in this period. The film is a product of a new class conscious socialist movement that is emerging out of the strengths of both the New and Old Lefts. Thus, this is a film about working-class history made to become part of the working-class future. It is carefully researched (although it contains some misleading implications which I will discuss below) and it is easy and accessible. It is about the emotional and personal as well as the objective and political reality of its heroines. This is a film about heroics, and therefore in the optimistic tradition of socialist realism. It reasserts the potential of leadership by people who are at once exceptional and ordinary. The film, a collective portrait of three women labor organizers active from the 1930s to the present, focuses on the CIO organizing drive of the 1930s. The three women were part of a community of working class Chicago socialists. They all came to Chicago in their youth, two from farms and one from New Orleans. All entered industrial jobs in the early 1930s and rapidly became rank-and-file activists, union organizers, and socialist leaders. Their stories first appeared, told by themselves, in Alice and Staughton Lynd’s recent book, Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working Class Organizers. Thus it is possible to find out even more about them than the movie tells us. In content as well as in conceptualization the movie is in some ways a cinematization of the book, and this is no slight to the film. Rather, it suggests the importance of the kind of class conscious, political, oral history that the Lynds are doing. Sylvia Woods was born in New Orleans in 1909, black, daughter of a craftsman roofer, a man proud of his skill. She is conscious of the political legacy given her by her father, who was an ardent union man and a Garveyite. As a schoolgirl she was already fighting racism and refusing to accept the acconmodationist ideology her school offered. Stella Nowicki also sees herself mostly as her father’s daughter. She grew up on a midwestern farm, leaving there in 1933 at age 17. Her father had been a coal miner, a socialist who read Lenin and Gorky in Polish, while her mother was a practicing Catholic. Stella learned Polish from her father’s revolutionary books, yet she also had to struggle against her father’s patriarchal control. Kate Hyndman is the only one of the “union maids” who speaks in the film of her debt to her female ancestors’ rebelliousness and toughness. (Since in the Lynds’ book, she too speaks mainly of what she learned from her father and how she struggled against him, one wonders whose decision it was, or whether it was merely chance, that she speaks of the women in her family in the film. This is one of several instances when the viewer senses that the filmmakers are not entirely in control of what their film says.) Hyndman immigrated to Iowa from Croatia at age five in 1913. Her father was also a coal miner.