Carmella, Adelina, and Florry

Mary Beth Lichtow	Mr. Nalius
American History, 4th period	October 10

ASSIGNMENT:	AN ORAL HISTORY NARRATIVE
	FROM THE PAST

COMMENT: My mother talked into our tape recorder about the time she worked in a factory. Then I typed up what she said. It was extremely interesting. Until I had this assignment, I never knew my mom had worked in a factory!

My other comment is that when I did research for my mother’s Oral History Narrative from the Past, I was really surprised to find out that only 20% of workers in the United States belong to unions. We did a whole unit on unions, so it seems they’re very important. But if 80% of workers don’t belong to unions, they must be pretty important, too!

(P.S., Mr. Nalius, maybe we can do a unit on workers who aren’t in unions? And if such terrible things still happen to them, as happened to my mother?)

ORAL HISTORY NARRATIVE FROM THE PAST:

My name is Zelda Sagan Lichtow. I guess that’s the first thing you’d want to know. I’m married, I have three kids, Susan, Jeff, and Mary Beth, and I work outside our home as a paralegal for Joffrey and Bogardus, who are terrific lawyers and married to each other. I only mention that last bit because it points up the fantastic difference between right now and the time I’m going to tell you about, which is the year 1949. That year I was nineteen and had just finished my first year of college.

In those days you might, just might, meet a woman who was a lawyer (or a doctor or an engineer) now and then, but most of us went to college to become teachers or librarians or social workers. It’s only occurred to me recently that I have a real interest in the law, which is one reason I’m working as a paralegal. To sort of test the water, find out if I want to go to law school. I don’t want to get off the point of my story, but this is background that I think is reasonably important.

Another thing about those days is that if you had the smarts to go to college, and if you could get up the money, you generally stayed in college. Dropping out was pretty much unknown, and certainly dropping out and then going back the way a lot of kids do today. In general everything about those days was less flexible than it is now.

Anyway, that fall when I was supposed to go back to school, I instead went to work as a punch-press operator in a mica-insulating factory. Now, to explain how I happened to go from college student to factory worker when I was perfectly happy being a college student, I’ll have to tell you something personal about a boy I met. Actually I don’t see how I can tell this story without being personal. (Besides, the idea that history isn’t personal is ridiculous. What else is history, except people?)

Okay, it was 1949. A few years after World War Two, and just before the Korean War, and long before the Vietnam War. A lot less money around than there is now. That’s what I meant about staying in college—lots of people were just too poor to get there. We were on the better-off side of poor. My father and mother had both worked all their lives. I mean my mother had worked outside the home, as well as inside. They had both come from poor families and each had left school early to help their families. Well, you can see why they didn’t want us kids to do that, and they did everything possible to see that we all finished high school and went to college.

I knew all this, but, no, I wasn’t rebelling when I dropped out to work in the factory. It was just that that summer, while I was working in Rader’s Cut Rite Drugs, I met Eric. Yes, enter Eric! An older man! He was twenty-five, and I was, well, dazzled by him. Maybe you’ll think this is funny, but I’d had only one real boyfriend up to then. My parents had been very strict with me while I was in high school and when I got to college, things weren’t all that much different. Colleges back then looked at themselves as in loco parentis—taking the place of parents, and especially for girls.

I had to be in my dorm by ten every night and have my lights out by eleven. On weekends I was allowed to stay out till one o’clock, but I had to sign in when I came back. And if I wanted to go someplace for a weekend, say, I couldn’t just go. I needed the permission of my house mother.

Oh, that was nothing! There were rules and rules for girls. I don’t know if anybody ever wrote them down, but every girl knew these rules by heart, anyway. Such as: You speak in a low voice. You don’t act smart around boys. Let the man take the lead. And don’t, above all, don’t have sex before you’re married. That was the way to perdition. [Laughs] If you could follow all those rules, you were considered a “nice girl” who’d be married before the dangerous old age of twenty-two!

Well, of course we all wanted to be nice, but, lord, it was so hard! You just couldn’t be yourself. A little for-instance—I loved wearing jeans. Wore them with the cuffs rolled up and with a big man’s shirt tied at the waist. Well, that was all right for weekends, but for school—forget it! It had to be stockings and skirts and little strings of fake pearls. Ladylike, you know.

And if you were the least bit plump—and I was, for a while—under that skirt you wore a girdle. Oh! Just thinking of that girdle gives me the willies. A torture garment. As for your—What do you kids call them now? Your boobs—there wasn’t a girl I knew, including me, who wasn’t miserable about what she had. Either too much or too little, according to some mystical idea of perfection. I mean, male idea of perfection! We all felt such pressure to be perfect! And to catch a man! That, after all, was the big goal. Success in life. [Laughs]

Listen, every night I rolled my hair up on metal curlers and then slept on those hunks of metal. More torture. But, heavens, you couldn’t go to school with straight hair! Everything really was so much more rigid and codified. That’s what appealed to me about Eric.

To begin with, he looked like an Eric—beautiful, Nordic, Viking type. He’d been in the army, he’d been to college (on the GI Bill), and he’d done this absolutely incredible thing of getting a degree, and then not using it. From college, with his precious bachelor of arts degree, he’d become a bus driver!

Now this bus he was driving happened to stop right in front of Rader’s Cut Rite Drugs at least four times every day. And he would come in, buy a candy bar, or a newspaper. You know. It wasn’t long before we went from joking over the counter to going out on dates. Oh, I was just dazzled. Eric was different from any of the boys I knew. He had ambition, but it wasn’t the ambition to be a professional and make boodles of money. His ambition was to be a union organizer. And more than that, he had principles. Socialist principles. He wanted to change society. Change people. Change the way things were done. I had never heard such ideas—the workers taking over the factories and having the profits, instead of the owners? And the words he used! Today, everyone uses words like establishment, power structure, and the military-industrial complex. But back then? I’d never heard things like that. Eric’s very favorite word, though, was bourgeois.

I can still remember his saying to me, “Zel, your father is a worker, but you are bourgeois to your soul.” It was the worst thing he could call anyone! It meant having middle-class values. Being concerned about things like getting a college degree and worrying about my appearance.

He was right about me. [Laughs] I was trying so hard to be nice, to get ahead, to do all these things. And what for? According to Eric, so I could leave the working class, which he spoke of as “noble” (as well as “exploited”), and become one of those people who lived a smug, self-satisfied life of materialistic values!

Furthermore, he said, when you got right down to it, the most bourgeois aspect of my behavior was my attitude about sex. To put it bluntly, Eric wanted to make love, and I was resisting. Naturally! I was a nice girl! Everything I’d been taught was that nice girls didn’t, not until they got married.

I remember one day, after the usual push-pull, Eric blurting out, “You must think it’s property. You act like an incipient capitalist, hoarding his stake. I guess,” he said, “it’s going to take you a lot longer to get rid of your false bourgeois attitudes.”

I just didn’t know what to say. I was crushed by his remarks. He sounded so reproachful, so regretful, so sad.

I’m sure that was the moment when I decided that if I couldn’t live up to Eric’s standards one way, I’d do it another way. I’d find a factory job and become one of the “oppressed masses” he revered.

My parents were stunned by my decision not to go back to school that fall. But I guess some things never change. When you’re nineteen and think you’re in love, you’re not listening to your parents.

Anyway, the first place I tried, MIF, Mica Insulating Factory, hired me. Just like that. Couldn’t believe it. Someone from personnel pointed me across a yard to the Women’s Building and told me to find Eddy, the foreman, and give him my hiring slip.

The Women’s Building was concrete with steel doors. I swear the walls actually quivered from the sound of what seemed to me to be a thousand presses. I found the foreman at the far end of this huge, noisy room near a stand-up desk. He took the hiring slip. “Your name is Zelda?” he shouted. I didn’t like his eyes—they were like little dirty pebbles—and I didn’t like the way he looked me over with those eyes.

“You fast?” he shouted. I nodded. “Not afraid to work?” He wrote something on a dirty yellow legal pad clipped to a dirty clipboard. Everything was dirty in that place—the floor, the walls, Eddy’s fingernails, the windows, his desk.

Oh, I should qualify that. The women who worked there—they sparkled. They dressed like gypsies or dancers, with big hoop earrings, and scarves over their hair, and swirly skirts and bright blouses.

Anyway, Eddy gave me a shove and pointed me toward Florry on number-ten machine. Florry was English, she was redheaded, she was about my mother’s age, and she was a great woman. I found her sitting like a queen in front of her machine, her back straight as a ruler. I stood and watched her for a moment. Her hands moved so beautifully, so fast, she was so perfectly coordinated with the machine that I knew I’d never be able to compare.

I tapped her on the shoulder and yelled that Eddy had sent me. “New girl?” she said. “Watch, now.”

From a basket near her left foot she took a handful of mica fragments, dropped them on the machine counter, slipped one golden brown chip under the machine arm, and pressed a lever with her other foot. The huge heavy arm came down—WHANG! It was the sound of those machine arms, fifty of them, coming down second after second that filled the air with such a thick, deafening din.

The arm came down on the mica and a round disc with a serrated edge was stamped out. Florry moved the mica, down came the arm—she did that again and once more. Got four cuts out of that one piece. A little like cutting cookie dough. Only with cookie dough, if you press the cutter too close to the edge and don’t make a perfect round, you can still bake the cookie. Here, you could keep only the perfect cuts, which were then pushed down a chute in back of the machine. The pieces you messed up went into a scrap basket. And you didn’t make any money on them.

“That’s it,” Florry mouthed to me, after showing me the procedure a couple more times. “Go to it.” She nodded to the empty machine next to hers.

I sat down on the iron stool, turned on the power, and watched the belt slipping around the arm. I was terrified as I slid the first piece of yellow mica under the arm and pressed the lever foot. WHANG! I had good reason to be scared. You could lose your fingers, with no trouble at all, to that arm. In fact, there were several three and four-fingered women working in the building.

WHANG! WHANG! WHANG! My foot slipped and I punched the mica three times without moving it around. I’d ruined the piece. I looked around, afraid Eddy was watching. He was! My face burned, my hands were damp. Oh, I was sweating. Those first hours I must have lost five pounds just from anxiety.

At noon a whistle shrilled and the machines shut down. My head felt numb in the silence. Then the quiet was broken again, but this time by the more pleasant sounds of fifty women laughing and talking, rushing toward the time clock.

Florry caught my arm and pulled me into the mass of women carrying sweaters, newspapers, lunch bags, and Thermoses. “Come along, girl! Did you bring your lunch? Hurry now, luv. We don’t have that much time. Twenty minutes.”

As it turned out, more than enough for me. The moment Florry led me into the “lunchroom,” I lost my appetite. Flaking vomit-green walls. Scabby-looking linoleum underfoot. And then the dandiest feature of the ‘ladies’ lounge”—a flimsy, shoulder-high partition separating those eating lunch from those using the row of toilet stalls.

The room was packed. Women leaned against the walls, squeezed onto a cracked brown leather couch and a couple of chairs, squatted on the floor, and sat in each other’s laps.

“Girls!” I noticed how everyone stopped talking to listen to Florry. “This is Zelda, the new girl on number nine.”

“Hi, Zelda, welcome to the zoo.”

“Zelda, cute name!”

“Think you’re going to like it here?”

The calls and shouts came from all over. I smiled. “Hi! I guess it’s going to be fun working here.”

You should have heard them then. Catcalls, hoots, laughter, groans.

A toilet flushed and I asked Florry if you could eat outside. “Certainly, luv.”

“Don’t do it,” someone said. “It makes you koo-koo.”

“Aww, she’ll go koo-koo just working here.”

“You wanna try the prison yard, honey, you try it. It’s great, ha ha.”

“Whatsa matter? You don’t like our ladies’ lounge? This place is just like home, ain’t it, girls?”

I smiled from one to the other. I didn’t have them sorted out yet into names to go with faces.

“She’s cute,” someone said about me, “but she don’t look old enough to even have her working papers.” This made me blush. My round baby face was always embarrassing me.

“You got a boyfriend, Zelda?” That was Carmella, a skinny imp with a cloud of dark hair and eyes that danced mischievously behind thick lenses. She and I got friendly, but that day I just didn’t know what to say when she went on, “Your boyfriend do you yet?” I blushed even harder.

“Aww, leave the nice baby alone.” Then a loud happy laugh. And that was how I first picked Adelina out of the crowd. She was a little soft-looking woman with huge dark popping eyes. A sweetiepie. Her husband had left her, she was raising four kids alone, she’d lost a home to fire and one child to polio, but she had the biggest, freshest, loudest, happiest laugh I can ever remember hearing. When Adelina laughed—and all sorts of things struck her funny—it was irresistible.

It seemed I’d hardly found a corner of a chair to sit on, had hardly begun talking to Adelina and Carmella, when the whistle blew. Everyone rushed for the door, scrambling to be first at the time clock. “You get docked half an hour if you’re more than five minutes late,” Florry explained, pulling me along by the arm. “Hurry!”

Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! That was the pace of life in MIF. Wake up in the morning and hurry to work! Rush that mica through the machine! Got to make the rate! Hurry to the lunchroom! Hurry back! Get to work!

Every night I was exhausted, aching. I’d never worked like this in my life. My parents watched me and said little. I think, now, that they were just waiting for me to get over my romantic ideas about the glories of factory life.

As for Eric—couldn’t have been more pleased! He was in his element, educating me, lecturing, pointing out to me that I had a unique opportunity. “These are the most downtrodden workers, Zelda. The unorganized. They are the most grossly exploited. You can help them understand that they can take their destinies into their own hands. They need to be organized.”

I didn’t disagree about that, but I didn’t think I could educate anyone in that shop to anything. As for “downtrodden,” that just made me laugh. Carmella? Adelina? Florry? Downtrodden? They worked twice as fast as I did, twice as hard, and they could still sing, scream jokes to each other, and notice every man who came into the shop.

Machines were always breaking down. “Number twenny-three down,” someone would yell. A mechanic came running, and the bawdy remarks flew through the air.

“Oh, lord, he’s so sweet,” Carmella caroled.

“Do you think he’s taken?” From another side of the room.

“Come here and see me, honey. I’m sure something’s wrong with my machine that you can fix.”

And I just listened, laughing, blushing. They dubbed me “the baby.” Why not? I was so naive. After working two weeks, my first paycheck thrilled me. “Look at all this money,” I said to Carmella. “This is great.”

“Ain’t nothing great but loving,” Carmella assured me, as if I were about twenty years younger than she was, instead of only two.

In fact, on Friday, when pay envelopes were opened, there was gloom in the lunchroom. Friday was the worst day of the week. Friday was when people found out if they made their piecework rate.

Here’s how that worked. A price was put on each little piece stamped out on the press. It might be an eighth of a cent if the die, the pattern, was tiny, or as much as a penny if the die was large. The smallest dies paid the least because you could get the most cuts from a single piece of mica. So, the theory was, it was an advantage. Whip that piece around, get eight cuts, and make that penny just as fast as someone with a large penny die.

But, in fact, the eighth of a cent or the quarter of a cent was earned only on good cuts. And how you got good cuts depended on lots of things. To begin with—pray for Eddy to deliver you a load of mica neither too thick nor too brittle. Pray for your machine not to break down. Pray you could keep that machine WHANG! WHANG! WHANG! WHANG! WHANGING! as fast as it could go. Never think about the fingers that had been lost to the machine. Never slack off. And, on a good day, you might make as much as a dollar and a half an hour. If you could do that every day, then there’d be sixty dollars in the pay packet. That was a lot of money. A powerful lot of money! Everyone was always trying for the big sixty. But only a few of Eddy’s pets ever made it.

For every good day when an operator made that kind of money, there were the other days when she made forty or fifty cents an hour. And on Friday, gloomy Friday, nearly everyone ended with a little more or a little less than forty dollars for forty hours of work.

A month passed. I was learning. No longer so glowing about facing that punch press every day. Amazed, abashed, to learn that Adelina had worked there for ten years, Carmella for four, Florry for five. And had no idea of ever working anywhere else.

“Well, well? Are you talking to them about the union?” Eric prodded me.

I mumbled something. He had such a—such a false idea of what I could do. What could I do? I was green, I was raw, I didn’t know half what anyone else in that place knew about what it meant to work, to be underpaid, and still hold up your head.

Then, in a manner I could never have foreseen, I did have something to do with changing things in MIF. It was totally accidental.

I remember, one day, Carmella’s asking me if Eddy had been bothering me. Well, he did hang around my machine a lot, but I thought he was just checking my work.

Carmella linked arms with me. “Watch out for him, he’s got roaming hands.”

“Oh, I can take care of myself,” I said quickly. I certainly felt like a big well-fed horse next to skinny Carm:

She laughed at me. She knew me better than I knew me. “If he tries anything, you just tell him—” And she chopped her right hand into the crook of her left elbow.

A few nights later I showed Eric the arm salute, proud of everything I was learning, of my independence, of my new swaggering style—gypsy skirts, bright scarves around my hair, and big hoop earrings. I’d had my ears pierced. Carmella had done it in the lunchroom. Put an ice cube on my earlobe, held it there for a moment, then punched a needle through the lobe and left a silk thread in the hole.

“You’ve changed,” Eric said. Did he sound a bit miffed? “I never thought you’d do it, you know. Go into the factory that way. And—” He looked at me, almost helplessly. “And everything.”

“I know. You thought I was too bourgeois.” I stuck out my tongue, like Angie, the new bride that everyone teased. And I gave him the arm salute again.

“You’re really getting sassy,” he said.

Sure I was! It was the influence of my new friends, my new world. I felt as if my parents had been keeping a secret from me all these years. I’d always felt sorry for them, having to go to work in a factory every day. But now it turned out they must have been having fun, too.

One night Eric and I parked. We talked about the shop first—that was “business”—then got into our inevitable hassle over how far we were going to “go.” “You’re still so backward,” he said at last, giving up. He frowned handsomely, smoking and looking out the window.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t see much of you anymore, either,” he complained.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m so tired at night.” Why did I keep saying to him that I was sorry? Sorry I couldn’t make love. Sorry I wasn’t on call. Sorry I was so ignorant. Sorry I hadn’t already converted everyone in MIF to union thoughts. I made up my mind that before I said “sorry” once more to Eric, I’d sooner cut out my tongue.

So there we sat, Eric sulking, me silent. I kept staring at his wonderful Viking profile. It didn’t seem to matter so much, anymore, that he was so attractive. The truth was, I realized, I thought more about the women I worked with than I did about him. And then I surprised myself again by thinking that I loved my shop friends more, much more, than Eric. Now that was a revolutionary thought. Don’t forget, the general idea then was that the company of any man (not even to speak of an exceptional one like Eric) was infinitely preferable to the company of any woman, no matter how interesting or lively. Oh, yeah? [Laughs] Wanna bet?

Well, a few days later, I was a little slow leaving my machine at lunchtime. I was mulling over Eric and where we were headed. Before I knew it, the room had emptied, Eddy loomed up, and yes, indeed, he did have roaming hands. I know it’s a cliché, but my heart was pounding so hard with shock, I really thought it was going to break through my chest. I don’t know if I said anything to him, pushed him away, or just ran for my life.

The next thing I remember is bursting into the lunchroom, and little fat Mary Margaret, with her mouth full of food, saying, “Look at Zelda, look at Zelda, her face is all red.”

Everyone stopped talking and looked at me.

“What happened, baby?” Adelina asked me in her husky voice.

“Eddy—” I gulped. All I could get out was his name. Didn’t want to cry, but the tears flowed anyway.

“Eddy, huh!” Carmella patted my back.

Everyone seemed to know without another word what it meant.

“Gee, don’t cry,” Mary Margaret said, “we all been felt up when we didn’t wanna be.”

That made me cry harder. And, with that, Angie, our bride, put her apron over her face and started to cry, too! It seemed that the day before, when she was at her machine, Eddy had put his hand up her skirt.

“Men! They’re all alike,” Adelina said hoarsely. “But that Eddy is a real dog,” she added.

“He’s got no right,” Angie bawled. “I didn’t give him the right.”

“Girls!” Florry sat up straight. “It’s a bloody shame when kids like Angie and Zelda can’t do a day’s work without being molested.” Her voice rose over Angie’s bawling. “We don’t belong to Eddy. We don’t belong to the company. Just because we work here, break our backs for pennies—!”

“Ain’t it the truth,” someone sighed.

Florry’s head snapped around. “Isn’t it bloody disgusting what we work for? Isn’t it bloody disgusting that we have to eat in this little pokehole?”

There were murmurs around the room. Agreement or disagreement? I couldn’t tell. My tears had dried up.

Florry stood up, put her hands on hips, and turned to look at each and every woman. When she had our attention, she said slowly, “Let’s do something for ourselves, for once. Stick together, for once.”

“What can we do?” a voice bleated.

Just then the whistle blew. There was the usual stirring, women standing, smoothing their hair, crumpling lunch bags. “Girls!” Florry raised her voice. “Why don’t we sit right here until bloody Eddy bloody promises to keep his hands to himself!”

“You mean not go back to our machines?” Mary Margaret squeaked. “Not go back to work?”

“That’s what I mean.”

For a moment the room went quiet with shock. Then came the protests, a hubbub of sound. “We can’t do that!” “They’ll fire us.” “I need my job.”

“Fire us?” Florry sniffed scornfully. “There are thirty bloody three of us here! They’re not going to fire thirty-three operators. Girls, do we or don’t we have backbone?”

Someone crunched an apple. A toilet flushed. And everyone looked at everyone else. Then the door burst open. Not even a knock, and Eddy was inside, pulling at his greasy hair, screaming. “What the hell is going on? You girls know what time it is?” He showed his yellow teeth in a snarl. “Get back to work!”

Carmella jumped up, crossing her matchstick arms, skinny elbows sticking out. “Why don’t you keep your paws to yourself,” she screeched. “We know what you did to Zelda and Angie.”

“Shut up, you! Now, haul ass back to them machines, or you’re all fired.” He grabbed Carmella, who was half his size, and started dragging her toward the door. That was a mistake. Adelina rushed to Carmella’s rescue. Then Florry. In another moment Eddy was surrounded by women screaming at him and dragging poor Carm away. A wonder her arms weren’t broken.

“You creep!” I could hear Adelina’s husky voice over everyone else’s. “You Jack the Ripper!” Her eyes were nearly popping out of her head. “You dirty old thing.” Then the clincher. “What’samatter, brother, you can’t get it at home?” And she gave one of her loud, joyous laughs.

Eddy turned brick-red. “I give you five minutes,” he yelled over the pandemonium, “or the whole bunch of you is out on the sidewalk.” He slammed out.

Well, then the silence. Like they say, you could have cut it with a knife. Adelina collapsed into a chair with a deep, sad sigh. After a bit she said, “Well, we had our fun, so now let’s forget it. You girls know I got to support my kids. I can’t afford to lose my job. None of us can.”

Three or four women slipped out. There was a general stir. Carmella nursed her bruised arm. “Girls,” Florry said quietly, “if we give in now, Eddy will be worse than ever. He’ll know we’re scared of him. I’m ready to sit. Is anyone else?”

Silence again. And again everyone looked at everyone else. Waiting for the other person to make the first move one way or the other, to say the first word. Then, of all people, little fat Mary Margaret, looking half scared to death, stood up, said, “I’ll do it!” and collapsed back into her seat, pudgy hands clasped at her heart.

We all stared at Mary Margaret, who, up till that moment, had made her chief claim to fame on eating three bananas every day for lunch. Adelina whistled through her teeth. Carmella gave a raucous laugh. “Hey! I ain’t gonna be shamed by Mary. I’ll stay, too.” She swaggered over to the couch.

Another few women left. Florry, like an avenging redheaded goddess, once again looked eye-to-eye with each woman. I could feel the tension, the nervousness, in the air, like strings being drawn across my skin. Were we going to stay? Or were we going to give in to Eddy?

Reve Fernmaker, a big motherly woman, tucked her gray hair back into its bun and cleared her throat. Heads swiveled. “Well,” Reve said comfortably, “I need my job, too.” She smoothed her apron. “But—I’m for staying.”

A deep sigh seemed to pass around the room, from woman to woman. Without another word of discussion everyone settled down. “What now?” Francie said. She was a pretty girl with a little cupid’s-bow mouth. Wore a whole lot of makeup, and supported herself and her boyfriend with her job at MIF and yodeling on weekends in bars. “What happens now?”

The same question we all had.

What happened was that fifteen minutes later Eddy was back. “Move, you pigs! Get to them machines!”

My God, I’ve never seen anyone so furious in my life. I thought he’d have a stroke on the spot. His face was boiling, twice its normal size. “Move!” He was screaming, out of control.

“We ain’t moving,” Adelina said. “We want some changes around here.”

“We—ain’t—moving!” Francie, the yodeler, chanted it, softly clapping her hands. And everyone took it up.

“We ain’t moving! We ain’t moving! We ain’t moving!” We pounded our feet on the floor. “We ain’t moving!”

We sat in the lunchroom all afternoon, talking and singing. Francie yodeled for us, did her nightclub act, and we all applauded, stamped, and whistled. I remember we sang popular songs, too, especially “Riders in the Sky.” Everyone was singing that one, that year. It was Vaughn Monroe’s big hit.

And every time Eddy stuck his head in the door and screamed at us pigs to get back to them machines, we laughed in his face. I remember Carmella saying, “How come we dopes didn’t ever do this sooner?”

One time when Eddy came in, Reve, the motherly one, went nose to nose with him and said very quietly, “And don’t you call us ‘girls’ in that tone of voice, mister. We are women. We are grown-up women, and we demand some respect.” It was a wonderful moment. I still get chills down my back, remembering.

Around four o’clock the company supervisor appeared. One of the big shots and quite a different person from Eddy. A handsome, silvery-haired man wearing a sweater and a tie. Very relaxed, easy, sympathetic. He listened to the complaints Florry listed, nodding, giving warm, fatherly looks. Florry spoke about the rates, Eddy’s roaming hands, and the ugliness of our lunchroom.

“I don’t blame you ladies for being upset,” he said. He made promises. A new lunchroom, longer lunch hour, and as for Eddy, he said flatly, “You won’t have any trouble with him, again.”

When he left, we all did, too. We thought we had won. Eddy watched us go, stood there, saying nothing, his hands in his pockets. After all the exhilaration, all the emotion, the singing and shouting, we left quietly, arms around each other. I felt wonderful—powerful, maybe, for the first time in my life.

The very next day, the lunchroom was painted a sunny yellow. Two days later three new chairs appeared. “You see what happens when we stick together,” Florry said. And Carmella said, “Ain’t it the truth!” Then, on Friday, when we got our pay packets, Eddy told Adelina, Carmella, Florry, and me not to bother coming back. Fired. All of us, fired for being troublemakers.

Everyone watched us leave. Everyone knew about the firings. That was the point—to scare all the other women into being “good” again. Florry was just sick about how we’d been taken in by the company supervisor. “That bloody smooth-talking bloody man!” Adelina was pretty upset, too, afraid she wouldn’t find another job.

Well, all of us managed to find work. We kept in touch the next few months. I went to work in a box factory, putting together cardboard boxes. [Laughs] Someone has to do that, you know. And then I had a job sewing baseballs and, for a short while, I worked as a chambermaid in a hotel. It was never the same as working in MIF, though. Never the same as working with Florry, Carmella, and Adelina.

By the time fall rolled around, I was ready to go back to school. And I did. And—you know how these things are—I didn’t forget my friends, but now our lives were so different.

Well, over winter vacation I was home, and I ran into Mary Margaret. We went into a White Tower and had hamburgers, and she told me that right after the firings there’d been talk about getting in the union. But it died down when the company promised to review the piecework rate, to increase paid holidays, and give ten days a year sick leave.

In fact, though, it was all talk. Nothing had changed. Everything was back to “normal.” Except now, a lot of women were for the union—they realized that without a union they had no power whatsoever. But no one dared come out in the open and say this. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs.

After that I didn’t hear anything for a couple more years. Then the strangest coincidence—the same month I graduated from college my mother sent me news that there had been (for the second time) an NLRB election in the plant, and this time the union had won. I burst into tears. I remember exactly how I felt, what I thought. At last! At last. A victory for the girls.

So, that’s pretty much the end of the story. Oh, one other point I was thinking about as I was telling you all this. You notice how we called ourselves and each other “girls”? And remember when Reve Fernmaker stood up to Eddy and told him we were women? I don’t think there’s really any contradiction there.

We didn’t say “sisters” then, the way some women do today. But I think calling each other “girls” was a kind of substitute for that. Sometimes it was ironic. Sometimes affectionate. But, always, there was all the difference in the world between the way we said it to one another, and the way Eddy or any other man said it to us.

Well, that really is the end of my story. Unless you want to know about Eric and me. That’s history, too, isn’t it? Even if, of a lesser kind. What happened was—we just saw less and less of each other. No longer found each other so interesting. I wonder if Eric even remembers me anymore. I can just see him wrinkling his handsome brow and saying, “Zelda Sagan? Zelda Sagan? Hmm.…” [Laughs] Of course I’ve never forgotten him. But not for his darling handsome face. Oh, no. What I’ve never forgotten is that except for Eric, I would never have known Carmella, Adelina, and Florry.