Marching together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-1957

Marching Together examines women\u27s participation in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids from the union\u27s founding in 1925 through the dissolution of its International Ladies\u27 Auxiliary in 1957. The dissertation analyzes the role of race, class and gender in the history of this famous predominantly African American male trade union. It describes the work of Brotherhood women and compares the union\u27s treatment of Pullman maids and other members with its attitude toward the Ladies\u27 Auxiliary. The study describes the historical context for black manhood rights, analyzing how this union demand shaped the Brotherhood story. Manhood rhetoric cast women as uxorial admirers in the twelve-year unionization struggle while it signalled to white railroad Brotherhoods that the BSCP intended to join their fraternity as equals. The Brotherhood treated female union members unfairly. It allowed the Pullman Company to assign train maids by race, not seniority. Union leaders then denounced the white stewardess-nurses who displaced African American and Chinese maids. Yet the union spent thousands of dollars to fight race discrimination against black locomotive firemen and for equal pay litigation for porter-brakemen. Brotherhood wives\u27 participation went beyond the reproduction of (union) labor. The Women\u27s Economic Council and its successor, the International Ladies\u27 Auxiliary, developed their own political agendas. The Auxiliary helped other African American women to organize unions, and honored picket lines and Women\u27s Trade Union League boycotts. As union wives, they promoted labor-conscious consumerism, founded a cooperative store in Chicago and a credit union in Montreal. As followers of BSCP President A. Philip Randolph, women joined the March on Washington and other U.S. and Canadian political movements, through the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. Yet as porters\u27 standard of living rose in the 1940s and 1950s, their families aspired to middle class status. African Americans conformed to (white) gender roles to show their respectability and to justify claims for first class citizenship. Women refuted the emerging social science discourse on black family pathology by identifying themselves as suburban housewives. Many women abandoned the union for civic and social organizations and in 1957, the BSCP abolished the International Ladies\u27 Auxiliary