Welcome to the Working History Podcast. I'm series co-host Dave Anderson. With me is my guest Dr. Amy Loizell, assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University, and author of Beyond Normal Ray, how Puerto Rican and Southern White Women fought for a place in the American Working Class, published by University of North Carolina Press in November, 2023.
Hello Amy, welcome to the Working History Podcast. Hi Dave, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. Oh, it's our pleasure.
Beyond Normal Ray is an innovative book that covers a lot of geographical and conceptual terrain. I noticed that in one of your blurbs, Jesse Wilkerson approvingly describes it as a wide-ranging journey. Could you briefly describe the book's structure in its three sections for listeners? So when I started thinking about how to cover both labor history and how labor is represented in popular culture, I had to think about those two sections, but then I also, because I was bringing together Puerto Rican needle workers and Southern millhands, I had to think, how am I going to set them together as well?
And so my initial idea for constructing the book was that it would start with like a wide lens, and that's how I conceptualized it in my mind, was that there was a wide lens that covered what I came to call the U.S. Atlantic, that there were these women workers, they were in interconnected trade routes and labor markets, and I wanted them to be visible, because so often when scholars look at popular culture, they just look at the popular culture, and then they analyze it as almost like a freestanding text. And I wanted to show that the popular culture is extracting from these women workers. So I start with a wide lens with the women workers, then it clones in on two women, Gloria Maldonado and Kristole Jordan at the time, then Kristole Sutton, and follows them as they move through the textile and apparel industry.
And then it increasingly focuses on Kristole because her story gets pulled out of the larger historical context, and she becomes part of major contests within the Hollywood creative system as to how her story is gonna be told, and she really wants it to represent one vision, and the Hollywood creative professionals wanna make a lot of money, so they want another one. So, and then it narrows down even more onto the movie, Norma Ray, and then eventually a really close up lens on the Norma Ray icon. So I viewed it as a wide lens going in closer and closer and closer until it was just looking at the icon. But to help the readers with that, I decided to use three sections of the book.
The first section was really an intentional effort to make Puerto Rican needleworkers a part of US labor history, not because Puerto Rico is rightfully part of the US. I always emphasize that, that Puerto Rico is colonized, it is not part of the United States in any kind of constitutional or state way, it's a colony, but it is part of US labor, and it's very intentionally used as a labor market. And then I look at Gloria Maldonado at the end of that because she's gonna become the main Puerto Rican needleworker who gets followed. Then the second section is about the Southern Millhans, and I really wanna place them into US history in a new way in which they are part of that US Atlantic as well, not as I think in the past, and this has already been under revision by multiple historians before me, but in the past it was kinda seen as Northern factories move to Southern sites, move to the Global South.
And I really wanted to say that all three, the North, South and Puerto Rico were part of this US Atlantic that business people and workers and unions, all viewed as interconnected, they weren't separate to them. And I wanted to see the South as part of that, while also acknowledging why the South wasn't appealing labor market for certain businesses, which had a lot to do with the fact that each area had a different racialized, gender, nationalized labor market that were set in to a catalog in which they offered different positive qualities that the companies would be looking for and that exploited the workers in very different ways. And then the third section really is the cultural history of how do you take something as complex as this massive interconnected businesses and trade packages and women and turn it into this hyper individualized single woman that becomes the representative of all Southern workers. So those three sections were really an intentional way to kind of work the reader through that, the process I had in my mind of the zooming in on Norma Ray.
All right, so just to sum it up as a reader, this is the way I approached it, is that the first section you give us a history of Puerto Rico, how it becomes part of this production network, beginning in the 1890s when it becomes part of the US and how it becomes integrated into this production network along the Atlantic. And by the 1950s, thoroughly integrated, and this is when you bring in Gloria Maldonado, who becomes an union organizer, a worker first, and then a union organizer. And that first section really illuminates for me, I didn't have a lot of background in that, illuminates why Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican workers and Puerto Rican women workers in the needle trades are especially important and why they end up in New York, why we see a film like West Side Story featuring Anita and Maria who are needle workers, although as you point out, are extracted from the working class as delinquent teenagers, as you put it. In the second section, you go to the North Carolina Piedmont and the famous Norma Ray and Crystal Lee example.
And especially there you show how in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, these former family mills are now conglomerates. And then the, and how her experience is tied into that Atlantic production network. And by this time, global. I noticed in a, not to make a pun here, but how their lives are intertwined with US trade policy by this time.
And then the third section is a cultural analysis of the film Norma Ray. Would that be a good way to summon up? Or that's the way I experienced it? Yeah, and I think that's a great way to see it.
And you brought up some of the key things that I'd left out about really connecting the women into trade policy and that colonial and trade policy are all intertwined. Cause I think they've tend to be segmented. Oh, we look at like congressional acts for trade policy and then the colonial acts are almost invisible. Or I wanna acknowledge that Puerto Rican studies scholars have been working on this for many years.
I'm building on and engaging their work and I'm really appreciative of, you know, the Puerto Rican studies scholars that have been looking at this. And then I would say with the third section, it's a cultural history, but it's a cultural history that's looking at it through a lens of labor and history of capitalism. So rather than looking at the movie as just like, here's the movie, let's analyze the images and what's accurate or not. I would say, I'm not interested in accuracy.
And I say this in the book too, because no movie is gonna be accurate. You can't take anything that's happened in real life or any person's real life, condense it to 90 minutes and have it be accurate. So I'm more interested in what are the contests and fights over who gets to tell these big stories? And there are labor historians that look at working class culture in the sense of how working class culture plays out at the grassroots or in the streets or in factories.
I was really interested in who gets to tell the big mainstream pop narratives of who American workers are. And what I saw was that Krista Lea was right in their fighting and because many people said to me, well, of course, Hollywood made the movie that way. That's Hollywood. And I'm like, no, no, no.
You're a historian. Everything's contingent. How can you say that? Of course they made the movie that way.
So I was really interested in changing the cultural historical approach too. All right. So with the book, this innovative and building on these, different streams, different historiographies, what is the book origin story? Where did you get the idea to merge the history of Puerto Rican needle workers and US trade policy and colonial policy with Southern quote unquote, mill hands and then to write or merge labor history, feminist history, immigrant history, economic history and cultural history in the introduction, you stay, right?
It would have been simpler just to stay in Southern, the conventional bounds of Southern label of history. But what inspired you to move beyond those boundaries? The first thing was, I started just with Southern mill hands because I've always been fascinated by how mainstream popular culture constructs meetings for people because I would have repeated conversations with people about all types of complex subjects. And I would hear back from people, these very simplistic reiterations of stuff they had seen in popular culture, things like, oh, like Normare, or oh, women's live.
And people would talk about broad burning. And I would say, like, that's not actually what happened. And so I was really interested in that. Normare just kept coming up when I typed in 1970s history and working class.
Normare came up over and over and over again. And as you point out, it was coming up in television shows. I mean, I was watching, identified on Netflix as I was working on the book. And I was like, oh, there's another Normare reference.
It just kept coming up. And so I became really curious about how does something that's based on something so complex as the textile and apparel industry, which is this major global driver of US ambitions, which, you know, makes billions of dollars for people and has workers all over the world, get shrunk down into like this movie. And then that becomes this random reference. So that was the start of wanting to merge them because I thought, I am not going to repeat the erasures of Normare.
And I felt like if I just talked about Christalia in the movie, I would repeat the erasures of all those, the Puerto Rican women and other women of color and the fight of black workers in the South to get into the southern mills. And I did not want to repeat that. So I thought, if I'm not going to do that, then I'm going to have to step out of the simplistic box and I'm going to have to find a way to put labor history with cultural history. And then I was talking about this with some friends of mine and I had worked at a school for pregnant parenting, pregnant parenting, Puerto Rican women in Holyoke.
And most of the staff and almost all the students were Puerto Rican. And so I was talking with some friends that I had made there about my project. And two of the women said, oh yeah, my mother worked in factories in Springfield and Holyoke in the 1970s. And I was like, wait a minute, what?
I grew up in Western Massachusetts. I am a historian of women and labor. And I've never heard of Puerto Rican women working in factories in Springfield and Holyoke. So then I started doing some research and they were in Bridgeport, Hartford, Willamantix, Springfield, Holyoke, Lowell, Boston.
And I thought, oh, here's another erasure. You were not just, Normare doesn't just erase the complexities of the southern labor market. And it also is erasing all of these Puerto Rican women. And this was a line I didn't have to tread carefully because I'm not a Puerto Rican studies scholar.
So I worked with a lot of Puerto Rican studies and Puerto Rican historians. And I read really deep into that historiography. And so I think, I remember once I was at a conference where Cornell Chang was talking about doing histories of East Asia that wasn't just like Japan or just South Korea. And that if you want to do these kind of big piece histories, then you're going to have to read deep in historiography that wasn't necessarily part of your training.
And so that was really important for me to do that. And then I had to think to myself, how am I then going to talk about the fact that you have Puerto Rican women in the main island working in factories being recruited to the Northeast from the 30s into the 70s and you have southern workers. And I said, oh, that whole linear narrative or even the narrative of globalization of things moving out of the US into the world. I'm like, it's actually cycling through the US Atlantic.
And then I found, unfortunately, an archive that was closing for lack of support, the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, which is no longer exists. I think it gave most of its papers to Cornell. I found the pamphlets for the 1900 Southern South Carolina West Indian cotton exposition. And I was like, oh my god, they are framing it this way.
They framed it this way in 1900. I'm not creating something new. So as you know, whenever historians find something like that, I'm like, yep, I have proof. So you have this idea of southern millhands.
Now Puerto Rican workers. And then what was the next step to get to the final book? So what I started to do was try to put things in chronological order so that, again, I didn't want the movie to eclipse the women. So I thought, OK, I'm going to have to tell the story of Crystal Lee because she's the woman's life story that becomes the movie.
I need a counterpart to that. And so I found I did multiple searches. And there wasn't any mass quantity of archival evidence that could count that could balance with Crystal Lee. I mean, she became a well-known celebrity.
And so there's just massive newspapers and even folders in all different types of archives about her. But I found that Gloria Maldonado did have a very visible presence within the Northeast, that she had multiple archival folders. And so I thought I'm going to use her as that counterbalance to say here's some kind of representative examples. And it became clear when I was looking at this that Gloria Maldonado should come before Crystal Lee because she's employed in textiles in apparel before her.
She's active in the ILGWU before Crystal Lee. And so it just worked really perfectly to say, OK, this allows me to lead in and get the reader to kind of go with me on this idea that Puerto Rican women are part of US labor history and are interconnected with Southern women. And I can tell Gloria Maldonado's story about becoming active in her union. And she also fights in various ways about representation and storytelling as well as about wages and trade policy.
Then I can get to Crystal Lee, and that chronologically works. And I can talk about how Southern Mill women are also being impacted by this trade policy. And the pivot point for me was 1934 because there were massive waves of strikes all over Puerto Rico as well as in the South. And the South gets a lot of attention in labor history.
And Puerto Rico gets a lot of attention for the sugar workers that were striking in Puerto Rico. But I was like, oh, I'm going to foreground 1934 as a pivot where they both have these explosive strikes. And then 1958 as the next pivot where there's a massive strike in New York. And Carmen Welland does some really great work on the strike and sets it into more of a social history in her work.
And also in 1958 is when you start to see changes in the South as well with a move towards more synthetics and a move away from cotton and even bigger conglomerates buying up and moving factories or investments around. So those two years from the book were kind of anchors for both groups of women. And then the third section, which is on cultural production in Hollywood, and then an analysis of the normal Ray icon, when did you come to or how did you figure out how I'm going to put this as the third section? Was that the last section you wrote or?
Yeah, when I was working on it, I knew that I always wanted the movie to come a little bit into the second half of the book because, again, I didn't want to repeat the way pop culture just tends to obscure everything that's behind it. So I decided that I would look at the movie. And when I started doing the research, I was amazed at how aware Christelie was of fighting about this movie. That, again, many people made assumptions that she was this country bumpkin who was taken advantage of.
And of course, they made the movie this way. And I said, no, she fought right through. And even after the movie came out, she continued to use the movie as a platform for her own agenda. She sued the studio multiple times and got tens of thousands of dollars.
So what I wanted to look at with the movie increasingly was less of it as a text. I wanted to summarize it in the book because I knew many readers, especially those under 40, would not have necessarily seen the movie. But I didn't want the ultimate film to be set on its own. I wanted to get behind it to see that it was contingent.
And that's where I use peer-bordeaux's idea of cultural fields of production, that people have different sets of status, different sets of capital. But they're all fighting in there. Who's going to tell the story? And how?
And that even Christelie, as a worker with no leverage in the movie industry, was still able to force them to make changes. And if we get away from a win-lose or an accurate or not accurate kind of simplistic binary, what you can say is she was in there fighting right through. And she even used it towards the end of her life, calling herself the real normal rate to challenge her insurance company, which was not paying for her treatments for a brain tumor. So she was very savvy.
And she got savvier the more she had to deal with them. And for her, she always wanted to tell a union story. And she was always frustrated that people would focus on just her or just Norma Ray when she wanted to tell a story that there were thousands of workers before her organizing in the TWA. And she joined a movement that was already going on for years and that she wasn't the first worker fired.
That was always important to her. But then, because of my searches, I also knew that what I call the Norma Ray icon, that the movie, coverage of the movie, but also coverage of Sally Fields. People were fascinated by Sally Fields because she had been Gidget and the flying nun and she'd been kind of this cutesy Hollywood star. And now she wanted to become a serious actress with Oscar-contending roles.
And so all the mainstream media that covered movies repeatedly talked about Sally Fields and really almost conflated her with Norma Ray as these hyper-individualized women who overcame the odds and fought for their own self-actualization. And because this is the 70s, it was intertwined with a lot of women's liberation language. And all that coverage started to just hone in on the one image of Sally Fields as Norma Ray holding the union sign overhead. And that became this visual icon.
I mean, there were, in the initial weeks after the movie, there were many images from the movie that were used in all types of newspapers and television reviews. But by the 80s, it's really just Sally Field with the union sign. And then that becomes something that becomes what I called like a free-floating icon, that people use for any individualistic stand. At the same time, they became the linguistic part of the icon, started popping up in television.
And that would be called going Norma Ray or having a Norma Ray moment, again, reducing this massively complex effort and collective movement with all of its contradictions and successes down to this one person making a stand. And whenever it was used, it was used for comedy. It was never used to say, hey, there's this person doing this great thing. It was always like a joke.
And so I was really fascinated with its constant circulation in that way. And even as I was working on the book, I had a colleague come in and say, my mother just said that I went Norma Ray because I went in and said something to my boss. And I was like, oh my god, this is unbelievable. It just keeps giving and giving.
Right. You should put it in the book. But, okay, so what do you see as the main takeaway for, especially for labor historians and the American South? Yeah, I really had to kind of mull him this a lot, especially when I was working on the book proposal.
And I came in my mind to the idea that there were really two different takeaways. And I was okay with that. And so one takeaway has to do with the content and what historians would call like the argument of the book. And that is that women workers fought in the unions, in their workplaces, but also in trade policy and in popular culture.
They fought in all of those fields, in all of those arenas to try to advance their own visions and agenda and improvement of their conditions. They weren't just that these women, Puerto Rican and Native workers and Southern millions in this case, but that they weren't just doing what the union told them or just like simply trying to increase wages. They were engaged with these larger issues of race, colonization, gender, especially for Crib Stoli. It was the idea of gender and the idea of this like working class femininity that she really wanted to push out of.
And the union became a way for her to push out of that. The union wasn't dictating to her, just like here do these activities. Organizers weren't just telling her, she really viewed it as a platform for herself. And that we need to understand the women workers fighting in all those arenas if we want to really understand the working class history.
And then there is a methodological takeaway that I hope, and this is more for scholars, that it's possible to traverse geographic and methodological boundaries without overwhelming your argument or your readers. I hope that the book does that. So that was my goal. And because I was unwilling despite people questioning me and saying like, well, you can't put Puerto Rican and Southern workers together or you can't do labor history and history of capitalism and cultural history.
I was like, I'm gonna try and I hope that I succeeded for the reader to say that it really allows us to better understand the workers. If we don't understand the workers within businesses and within trade policy and within how cultural meanings determine those things, that culture is interacting with those and when we leave culture out of it, we don't understand why trade policy or labor policy is being advocated in a certain way. For Southern historians, I think like in particular, what that means is I joined those historians like Cindy Hamovich with No Man's Land or Wanda Rushin with Memphis and the Paradox of Place saying that the South needs to be set into a more global context and that you don't have to lose what's happening in the South, the specificity of certain states or certain regions like the Piedmont, if you set it into the larger context and that's going to, for me, really reinvigorate Southern labor studies and also that when you do that, you start to see that the South isn't an aberration, but it's one piece of how the companies, these giant conglomerates that just get bigger and bigger now we deal with these like massive transnational corporations that we don't even know where they're manufacturing anymore because they move things so fast now. And that the South isn't this aberration, but is like an interconnected part of this catalog of labor that both the companies and the workers understand that they're moving through.
And I love that about the Puerto Rican needle workers. They really show the importance of transience and migration as a means of worker empowerment. It's not going to change the system. It's not the same as organizing in a collective way, but it does push into these global systems where they navigate and then as a result, alter the way the labor is being used.
You know, when we tend to look at the South, I was thinking of the metaphors are horizontally like from the Atlantic coast to Texas or whatever. And this, you know, in my mind reminded me, you know, it's very fruitful to look at it vertically. Like from the South is from Caribbean up to Canada, in a sense, when you look at the production networks that way. And the other thing is that, like I said before, intertwined it is in trade policy.
I mean, there's a reason why during the Cold War that Japanese and Taiwanese apparel and textile manufacturing become part of US trade policy and actually are affecting workers' jobs in the Northeast and in the South. And you know, why even today you look at the label on your shirt or something, it'll say made in Honduras or something. This is directly connected to the American South. And so for that, I'm grateful to your book.
Yeah, I was really surprised when I started reading this. I mean, I kind of just had, I think like many of us, this inherent thought that, oh, the South offered like lower wages and cheaper land. And so that's why factories went there. And then they just went to other places for cheaper labor and cheaper land.
And then when you read the trade policies, you're like, oh my God, like there was a direct conflict between domestic labor, you know, issues and this foreign economic policy that developed through the Cold War. And then there's kind of this split, there's the Cold War, foreign economic policy. And then there's the rise of the neoliberal labor policy, which is, but in both of those cases, the US military and the State Department and the trade offices are all in direct conflict with domestic employment. The one reason I really wanted to put that in the book too, was because I think we hear a lot, even in labor history, that worker unrest or worker union demands or worker wages drive, you know, relocations.
And that's true to a small extent, but it's a much bigger extent is that is how capital is allowed to move is a much bigger thing. And I didn't really understand how important the 1978, you know, revenue act was in like allowing, you know, this idea that we're gonna give tax cuts to rich individuals because they're gonna create jobs. I mean, we're still living with that. And that did more than like unions to drive capital out of the United States.
All right, so with that said, let's now focus on the South here. And you don't remember in 1979, we know the big buzz about this movie, Norma Ray. And I'll admit, I went and saw it. And even today, that scene with Sally Fields getting on the table, I mean, I get emotionally choked up.
And in some way it did inspire me to study workers and had a big effect on the whole generation, especially in the late 70s, when workers in general are what is it later Thomas Gagan's flight on their back, right? And it was like a sliver of hope. But just four of us who aren't familiar with it, you know, who was Norma Ray and what was Norma Ray the film, if you could just summarize that. And then we can dig into the history and historiography of it.
I think I always want to say to people, if the movie wasn't inspirational and effective, then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. So obviously, the movie, obviously, those scenes, and we're particularly programmed in the United States through our popular culture to want to identify with the underdog hero. Like I say in the book, there's many examples of this, you know, Rocky, you know, Shane. I mean, you can, I mean, that's the American pop culture narrative is like rooting for the underdog hero.
What we see with Norma Ray is that because of women's liberation, it becomes acceptable for a white woman to be that underdog hero, which hadn't really happened before. So I do think it was a cultural pivot point for a lot of women producers in Hollywood and women actresses and, you know, women audience members to say, wow, look, here we can make stories about these individual heroes. But I think the problem is, is that when these are so emotionally effective, is that we don't even realize we're absorbing the feelings and the meanings. And I do think labor unions still effectively use like the movie Norma Ray, they still show it at like, you know, rallies or at fundraising events or at like women's history month events, because it is inspirational.
And it was for me too. And I remember seeing like Norma Ray and Silkwood, another movie about like an underdog woman, union woman, but we are losing something. I guess I always want to emphasize that. And so I often compare it to like salt of the earth, which is still an inspirational and moving 1954 movie about families, including women collectively making change.
And you can watch that one and express it as emotionally moving, but you don't leave it thinking like, oh, this one person did all of this. And so I just want people to be aware of what they're absorbing. And that Crystal Lee didn't want the Norma Ray to be like that. But she was like, that's not the way she experienced it.
As a member of a union. And especially as it gets pulled out into that visual icon and the linguistic icon of going Norma Ray, it increasingly just becomes kind of a joke. And so when we create these hyper individualized heroes that are kind of almost flat as they get, you know, reiterated and recirculated, then we get further and further away from the idea of how does society actually operate? Well, let's set the context for the actual person that the film character was based on and for the film as well.
That several labor historians have studied Norma Ray and it was based on an actual organizing campaign. Where did this, what was the campaign? Where did it take place? And then how does the actual character, Crystal Lee Jordan, how does she get into this story?
Or how does she enter the story? So the textile workers union of America had started this Southern drive in 1963 actually. And it wasn't its first in the, even in this town. So Roan O'Grapids is where she is in North Carolina.
And there had already been union efforts in the 40s and 50s that had been successful in getting workers to sign member cards. It hadn't been successful in getting certified and getting a contract. But the union knew that there were people in this area already interested and involved. So there was a history before her.
Then in the 60s, she's really getting married and raising kids. And then in the early 70s, she gets a job at JP Stephen's Delta Plant number four. And she folds towels. So she's not in the weaving room.
She's not in the dusty, linty area. So that was a choice made by the director and screenwriters because they said it was more recognizable and dramatic. So she folds towels, which is still a monotonous boring, you know, job standing on your feet, making very low wages. Why did they pick JP Stevens and Rono Grapids?
They picked JP Stevens because it had so many factories through the South. And so they were organizing in multiple cities throughout the South. And this was just one of the places that they selected. And they picked Rono Grapids in particular because the union organizers sent out response postcards.
And he got the most back from Rono Grapids. That all happened before Krista Lee. So she was always frustrated that the movie made it seem like Norma Ray started the union when really, it was really black workers that were the most responsive in the beginning and without the black workers, without the Civil Rights Act, without the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, this campaign never would have taken off. It was the black workers that signed the cards and sent the postcards in and were the most active.
But the white workers were still the majority. So the union knew it had to get the white workers to sign cards. And so when Krista Lee went to a union meeting, her family told her not to go. And her husband told her she shouldn't be going to a black church to a union meeting.
But she went to anyways with a friend. And when the union organizer saw a white woman at a black church, she was like, this woman will be willing to push on gender and racial norms. You know, again, I say in the book, she's not radically anti-racist. But the organizers and Krista Lee were aware that she would be effective because she knew the southern protocols and expectations.
And she was willing to push against them and even cross lines in order to organize for the union. At one point, there's a memo that's put up on the bulletin board in all the factories by the company. So JP Stevens puts up this letter. And it's a letter to try to scare the white workers away from the unions because it says that the union is, it gives a warning to black workers to not think that the union is going to put them over white workers and that to not go along with the union and think the union is really going to do this, which the union was not doing.
But this was a very effective way to make white workers feel like the union was about black power, which, you know, we can have a totally separate conversation about that. But just for the purposes of the book, Krista Lee understood that the union was not advocating black power. It was advocating an integrated union. It was having black and white union members at integrated meetings.
But that the majority of workers were white, and this was just trying to scare them away from the union. So she tried to copy it because the union organizer said he needed the exact language for a grievance. She was fired for trying to copy it. Well, as you know, they always say, you're being fired for using the phone or bathroom during like work time.
But she was basically fired in the midst of trying to copy this letter. And then she goes to her, her towel folding station, writes union on a piece of cardboard and holds it overhead. But for her it was a collective act. She never thought anyone else was going to see it.
And I talk about this in the book. For her it was, I know my neighbors, my family members, my friends, my union members are all here. And I'm going to make this last collective statement before I leave, before the police escort me out. And she never imagined, and the other workers never imagined that this would become anything.
For them it was a union collective moment in this factory. And that's why she was always so frustrated with what ended up happening in the movie. And then she gets escorted out, fired. And so the union organizer, when a journalist comes looking for possible interviews about the TWA campaign, she is one of the workers he talks to.
And he's like, she's a good talker. I mean, he knew right away he had a character. So I always say, I want to get Crystal, he or props. She was an activist, vocal, verbal, willing to push on gender and racial stereotypes and boundaries.
But she would not have been there without the larger collective union campaign that had already been going on for 10 years. That's what made her visibility possible, as well as her vocal refusal to comply with gender and racial norms. That became an article. And then the article was in the New York Times Magazine.
So it's seen by Miz Magazine, editors. It's seen by Hollywood producers, two women producers. And they both, at the same time, get the idea that this woman would make a great story. And Miz works with PBS to create a feminist documentary and Krista Lee as part of that.
At the same time, the women producers are waiting for the right moment to start a screenplay called Crystal Lee. It was originally called Crystal Lee. And they wait until Rocky is a big success, because they then say, Crystal Lee is a woman Rocky. And that's a very marketable pitch to get the five million for the movie.
So the campaign is going on. It creates these opportunities for Crystal Lee and then she gets involved in mainstream media. As you said, a lot of other historians have talked about this. But I think many of them, when they talk about the TWA campaign, are doing it as a conventional labor history.
And they might pop Norma Ray in at the end. And out of this came Norma Ray. I saw that particularly in Timothy Mention's work. He kind of just says, oh, and Crystal Lee was part of this.
And that made the movie Norma Ray. Others focus in on Norma Ray as reflective. Jefferson Cowie did this and staying alive. And I wanted to push against his interpretation of its function in the 1970s, because it's not reflective.
It's to me, it's like this active field of contest over who's going to tell this story. Then you have other folks. And I think that as she uses the idea that people know about Norma Ray to then say there were many Norma Ray's. There were many women like Crystal Lee.
She wasn't the only one. And to kind of, in a similar parallel way as me, as I do, she wants to return to the women workers and make them visible. And then you have James Hodges' essay, which was really helpful to me to find his archival sources, which he does talk about Crystal Lee battling with the Hollywood producers. But again, he's a little bit more interested in just accuracy and how accurate the story is.
And I really build from the place that the story was never going to be accurate. It's more about the fights and then what ends up in the final product and why, because it was never going to be accurate. But I relied on all of their work and I'm in conversation with them for sure. What I found just fascinating was your description and use of sources to show how the production company, which was a female production company and director Martin Ritt, who's held up as this kind of liberal icon director and Sally Field too as well.
And reading your book, you show that they have their own agenda, which in essence tends to de-emphasize is the nicest way I can put it. Crystal Lee and also in fact, at times they're in conflict with her about how this story is going to be told. And that becomes, I think, the central plot point of that part of the book is Crystal Lee fighting for this, her version of the story, and Ritt in particularly fighting for his particular fictionalized, highly fictionalized version. And he doesn't come off very well and neither does Sally Field.
How did you put that story together? It really amazed me when I went out to the library for the Academy of Motion Pictures. That Ritt left all of this stuff. And he really was that defensive.
He really was like, I did a good thing here. And Crystal Lee is just this terrible person. And I thought, wow, he really believed it because he left so many papers. He's a great director.
He's done many humanist stories. So I don't want to, he's not this commercial machine. But at the same time, he needs to make millions of dollars for these studios, or he's not going to get another contract. So his priority on this, because he did not have success with the Molly McGuire's, which starts Sean Connery.
It was a flop, critically and financially. So he says, right? I did not want a union movie. I did not want something that was about the collective efforts.
I did not want this to be about labor issues. I wanted it to be about a woman's self-actualization, which is part of Crystal Lee's story as well. So I think he just latched onto that thread, which is a thread that Miz latched onto as well. And it's documentary about her.
This idea of the individual liberal feminist point of view of self-actualization. And the women producers needed a hit. They're the first women independent producers to make a movie of this size. And they need a hit.
And Sally Field, I found very fascinating because she just refuses right even down to her memoir that came out a few years ago to acknowledge Crystal Lee. I mean, in her memoir, it's the first time she uses the name Crystal Lee in anything. And it's just in one sentence to say that this was based on Crystal Lee's activism out of a thick memoir and a very long chapter about Norma Ray. So I found that that really is an indicator to me of if you want to be a creative professional in Hollywood, even if you want to do left-leaning or humanist or stories about the underdogs or the marginalized, you still have to play the Hollywood game.
And you're still going to have to erase and eclipse complexities, and Sally Field, somebody said you shouldn't put the picture of Sally Field with George Wallace on the book and she'll get mad. I'm like, I hope so. I hope she finds out that the picture is out there. But yeah, I mean, Martin Ritt told her, George Wallace helped us get this site to make the movie grow up, like go take a picture with him.
And she did it because that's the game, right? You have to, elites play with elites. That's how they help each other and move each other forward. And Sally Field really was a disappointment for me, I have to say, because I was surprised when I read, especially that she really was like, she said Martin Ritt was Normare, and one of her speeches, like Martin Ritt is Normare for all of his resistance.
And I thought, how can you get up and say that when you know that's not the truth? Yeah, I mean, it forced me to rethink the film as well. And if the film was sort of a window, it got you into labor history, and then it might lead you to other sources and to understand the full story, then it may have done the work that it wasn't intended to do. And so we can read it any way we want.
But I would say, just to interpret, I would say that's only possible because Christmally contested it. If Christmally had gone quietly away and just been like, well, that's it, they made the movie that way, but she refused. And so then the movie does become a portal into it, but only because Christmally, as soon as the movie came out, started doing interviews as the real Normare, which then led people into the TWA campaign and more of the complexities. If somebody had just watched the movie, maybe they would be interested in the TWA campaign, but they would not necessarily understand why the depiction of Normare is not a positive thing for labor movement building.
Even if it can be a moment of inspiration, it's not actually a movement building film. And Christmally is the person that makes that feel clear. And as you judge, your phrase is it reinforces neoliberal individualism as opposed to collective action and solidarity, which she, tell her, dying day said this is what the film is about, collective action, it's about union, it's about those that came before me. And you do in a sense recover her wishes and her purpose, which I'm grateful for in the book.
And then finally, you end up the book with analysis of, as you mentioned before, how the Normare icon can be just repurposed and refashioned. I mean, in the film, the office, I mean, the TV series, The Office, it's used. And it's extracted from its origin in working class activity. And again, I was amazed at how many times we see Normare, she's gone Normare or it's a Normare moment, but they don't have that cultural power that the original act has, as you say, a backstage gesture that would have been understood by every worker in that factory of what she was doing.
And this is, I think, a great reminder of what was the original story and about the importance of cultural production in the working class, not just the US and the world. Yeah, and to me, that idea of who is the working class has to be as much about these cultural meanings as it is about the political or shop floor realities. Because it's through these cultural meanings of who is the American working class, who do people picture, who do people imagine when they're writing their legislature, or who do congressional reps and senators imagine when they're designing policy, and that these cultural meanings are significant, they're interactive, they're not just a write off of like, oh, well, that's cute that they kind of have this Normare icon. That actually works in people's minds to make them understand what is the working class.
And in a lot of people's minds, it's this gritty individual in a factory, which is not representative of the American working class. And I think it's particularly interesting that the icon, somebody on Facebook said that Trump was going Normare during the insurrection. And I thought, wow, that really captures exactly how fully extracted this icon is that somebody is applying it to Trump on the day of the insurrection. And so that's where it becomes that neoliberal hyper-individualized, just like anyone being defiant for any random reason, it could be over Nillowafers, it could be over the American election system.
Any act of defiance is applicable. Well, Amy, thank you very much. I recommend this book for anybody with an interest in workers in the textile and needle trades in US trade policy, but in women workers and in a feminist history of the working class and workers in the American South. And we just scratched the surface in the book.
There's other sections that I'm sure readers will benefit from. But thank you very much. Thank you so much. This was really fun.
I enjoy talking about it with you. Working History is a production of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Learn more and become a member at www.southernlaborstudies.org. Thanks for listening.