WITH BABIES AND BANNERS

FILM REVIEW

Since the feminist movement reappeared in the late 60's, a narrow trickle of good women's films has managed to seep through the littered heaps of "ain't men good buddies" movies and "sharks/terrorists/devil/body snatchers are taking over the world" movies. Each film about women is hailed by critics as proof that, yes, even Hollywood can respond to women's problems-stridently, of course.

Some of these films I loved, but even the best of them-A Woman Under the Influence, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Julia, The Turning Point, Girl Friends-left me wishing for something that wasn't there. All of them showed women struggling, failing, succeeding, possibly succeeding, as women alone, as individuals making the best of a bad social deal. The struggle might be eased by friendships among women, sometimes very moving, but "Honey, in the end, it's you and you alone who'll make a place for yourself or get where you want to go."

With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade is completely different. It joins an even smaller spoonful of films, none commercially distributed, which show working women becoming more than themselves through a collective fight: Salt of the Earth, The Inheritance, I Am Somebody, Blow for Blow, Union Maids. In these inspiring films, mostly labor documentaries which focus on women's struggles, the fight is not to get a tiny piece of a too-small, too-stale cake, but to rebake the cake itself. In the struggle, women grow, remake themselves.

With Babies and Banners, produced by the Women's Labor History Film Project, tells the story of the great General Motors Sit-Down Strike in Flint, Michigan in 1937. This bitterly fought, victorious strike against one of the largest, most repressive companies in America opened the gates for the great wave of CIO organizing in auto, steel, mining and other industries. It was the women-the working women, the wives, mothers and sweethearts of the strikers-who became the backbone of the strike. They called themselves the Women's Emergency Brigade. How many of us have heard their story?

The film is built around a group of nine women who get together to celebrate the Emergency Brigade's fortieth anniversary. Interviews with them are skillfully interwoven with rare film footage of the 1937 strike, and the story unfolds in the words of the survivors themselves. The women talk about what it was like to live and work in a GM-controlled company town where wages were 25 cents per hour for a ten-hour day, where workers collapsed and sometimes died at the end of their shifts, and informers reported any discontent to the company for firings. "We were fighting for dignity—to be treated like human beings," one of the women remembers.

When the men in Fisher Body Plants 1 and 2 sat down on December 30 for better wages and working conditions and the right to belong to a union, the company spread rumors among the wives that their husbands were sick, or that they were having affairs with other women. "They'd have done anything to turn one against the other." Some women, isolated and afraid, came down to the plants and pulled their husbands out. Genora Johnson, a socialist who had a husband on strike herself, realized that without the organized support of the women, the strike would fail; she started the United Auto Workers Women's Auxiliary, which turned into the Women's Emergency Brigade.

The Brigade began with traditional auxfliary activities: making and serving soup and sandwiches. But there was a desperate need for militant support lines outside the plants to keep police and national guard assaults from breaking the strikers inside. "You've got men who can peel potatoes," the

women said, and forced the union (yes, they had to push) to let them take a more active role. They organized along semi-military lines, with squad captains, red berets, red armbands; they carried two-byfours whittled at one end for protection against

police, guards, and company goons. Four hundred women joined the group, and many more supported it. "A new type of woman was born in the strike.... Women who only yesterday felt inferior to the task of organizing, speaking, leading, as if overnight had become the spearhead of the battle," one journalist reported.

The Emergency Brigade was tested during the 34th day of the strike, when the union seized Chevy Plant 9 and Chevy Plant 4, the company's key enginebuilding plants. When one of the women saw her husband's bloody head gasping for air at an open window at Chevy 9, she yelled to the red berets, "They're smothering them! Let's give them air!" The women proceeded to break all the windows they could reach with their two-by-fours (cheers from the movie audience) to let air in and tear gas out. “We walked right along with our flag at our head. The gas floated right out towards us. But we'd been gassed before, and we went right on."

The union then declared February 3 as "Women's Day". Women began pouring in from cities all over the midwest. The Emergency Brigade organized a march, 5,000 women strong, which massed in downtown Flint and descended on Fisher Body Plant 1, joining the thousands already there and encircling the plant. They were wearing their red berets and armbands and carried clubs, pokers, crowbars and lead pipes-the sitdowners inside went wild. A week later, the strike was over; GM had been brought to its knees.

The Babies and Banners film footage of the women's march is remarkable. I wasn't the only one in the audience who was wiping her eyes as the women came marching down the hill, men waving and cheering from the plant's windows, women singing "Solidarity Forever," daring the police and guardsmen to try to retake the factory. I wished there had been more footage of the organizing meetings, the picket lines, the marches, the confident, strong faces.

The women filmed forty years later are old, quietly dressed; one is obviously ill. Forty years ago they put down their two-by-fours and went back to the children and the dishes-a specifically feminist

movement was lacking to prevent traditional roles from creeping back. (What did happen to each woman after the strike was won? The film can't tell us that.) But a couple of them wear their red berets. As they warin to their subject, women's eyes gleam,

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they smile. "I felt so good," says one. “It gave the men a different outlook on the ordinary housewife," remembers another. "We wasn't individuals, we was part of an organization."

The fight of the women at Flint was hard but not lonely, unlike Alice's in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or Susan's in Girl Friends. They felt their strength because they were part of a movement, the spearhead of a struggle that was to change American society instead of adapt to it. And as part of that movement, they gained confidence, changed, developed, made a better life.

There are far too few movies like With Babies and Banners, and we don't get to see the ones there are often enough. Hollywood and the distributors aren't interested in them. These films remind us that women can organize, can be strong, can change things, and though the struggle is long, it continues. With Babies and Banners was shown at a celebration of International Women's Day, March 8, the working women's holiday. This spring it will run again, with other working women's films, in the Women in Labor film series planned by Commonworks. The films will run five Thursday nights beginning May 31. Watch for them!

-Carolyn Platt

Norma Rae is Here!

As What She Wants goes to press, a most powerful film has appeared in local theatres. Although Carolyn Platt will write a thorough review of Norma Rae for next month's issue, I encourage everyone to see this film.

Norma Rae documents the recent story of a real woman's experience living and working in a southern town that is dominated by the textile industry. What is extraordinary about Norma Rae is her spirit and drive, dramatically developed by Sally Field, in the face of terrific obstacles. That this feminist, prolabor and pro-union film ever left its Hollywood editing room both perplexes and thrills me. Please see this film!

-Carol Epstein

April, 1979/What She Wants/Page 7