Beyond Norma Rae - (Gender and American Culture) by Aimee Loiselle

About the Book

"In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources-union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism. While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are"--

Book Synopsis

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories--Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and its labor activism.

While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Review Quotes

"Loiselle aptly chronicles the problems in developing the film, the differences between the film and reality, and the influential role of the Norma Rae icon in presenting the union concerns to the broader public. Through intensive scholarly research, numerous in-person interviews, illuminating and validating photographs, charts, and more, Loiselle achieves her goal while contributing to oral history and academic archives."--Oral History Review

"The value of Loiselle's Beyond Norma Rae is in its rich details. The needed context of globalization and disaggregation of the garment industry tells a familiar story of worker disempowerment and the role of the state in perpetuating this dynamic."--H-Caribbean

"Well-written and extensively researched, combining archival sources, popular periodicals, oral histories, autobiographies, filmography, and secondary sources into a rich cultural analysis without overburdening the reader with theory. . . . [U]ltimately this is a work of cultural history, and a very good one at that."--North Carolina Historical Review

"A compelling analysis of the capitalist forces that led to [Norma Rae's] failure to include the sixteen-year fight by Black and white southern workers to get a union contract at J. P. Stevens. . . . An adept analysis of the reproduction and adaptations of the Norma Rae icon from the 1980s through 2020."--Journal of Southern History

"A compelling history of the intersection of colonialism, sexism, and capitalism. . . . [A] great addition to the scholarship on not only labor, but also gender, media, and film studies."--Society for US Intellectual History

"A deft analysis of the ways in which race, gender, and immigration status determine how media has portrayed the labor movement. Recommended for readers interested in labor history and popular media."--Library Journal