| Portion of title |
How Puerto Rican and southern white women fought for a place in the American working class |
| Series |
Gender and American culture
Gender & American culture. ^A228874
|
| Contents |
Who makes the American working class: women workers and culture -- Women workers in the US Atlantic: seeing the raw material before cultural production -- Gloria Maldonado and Puerto Rican needleworkers: moving in colonial currents -- Crystal Lee and southern millhands: extracting a "life story" -- From Crystal Lee to "Crystal Lee" to Norma Rae: making and capitalizing on a the movie -- Norma Rae stands alone: eliminating alternatives -- The Norma Rae icon: inspiring neoliberal individualism -- Contesting who determines the American working class. |
| 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 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"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Issued in other form | ebook version : 9781469676159 |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2023034422 |
| ISBN | 9781469676128 (cloth ; (alk. paper)) |
| ISBN | 1469676125 |
| ISBN | 9781469676135 (paper ; (alk. paper)) |
| ISBN | 1469676133 |
| ISBN | (ebook) |
| ISBN | ebook |
| ISBN | PDF ebook |
