Working-Class Masculinity in Crisis: Gender Relations and Labor Radio in Fifties America

In April 1954, the United Automobile Workers began broadcasting Eye Opener, an innovative early morning radio show that targeted male autoworker driving to the plant.  But it also sought to attract female workers and wives. Part of  the UAW’s effort to recast the consciousness of industrial workers, the show mixed political, economic and social messages with news and updates on union affairs.  One regular theme, important in a union that continued to struggle against discrimination against women, was the principle of gender equality.  Eye Opener celebrated women’s history and women’s contributions to the union and vigorously challenged inequities in the home and workplace.  However, the entire atmosphere of the program marginalized its feminist messages.  The show attracted its primarily male audience by mixing more serious issues with comedy.  Much of this comedy lampooned women or depicted men as victims of overbearing wives who controlled the domestic sphere.  The humor in Eye Opener provides important insight into the emerging tensions and anxieties in gender relations in postwar America.  According to contemporary social critics, women were responsible for a crisis in masculinity.  Most contemporary observers as well as subsequent scholars focused primarily on middle-class men who feared a decline in patriarchal authority.  Labor historians suggest that the deskilling of the workplace and the movement of blacks and women into formerly all white, male workspaces diminished blue-collar masculinity.  We know less, however, about challenges to masculinity in the working-class home.  Contemporary sociological studies describe working-class husbands as authoritarian and wives submissive.  Yet Eye Opener was peppered with humor about domineering wives.  This paper analyses Eye Opener to explore the complexity of gender relations within the auto industry and within working class households in the postwar era.