No Laughing Matter: The UAW and Gender Construction on Labor Radio in Fifties' America

This essay analyzes the competing feminist and misogynists messages projected by the United Automobile Workers' radio program, Eye Opener, to explore the constraints that limited efforts to promote gender equity with the UAW in the fifties. In a time when gender relations were in flux, Eye Opener, for a brief time tried to include appeals to both labor feminists and males anxious about the new worlds that encroached into the work and home. Through an analysis of the program's scripts and listeners' responses, it offers insights into the contradictions facing a post-war labor movement concerned with both broadening its horizons while shoring up its members.