Click on the headline to link to an American Left History entry on this film and mention of the real Norma Rae (Chrystal Lee Sutton) who passed away a couple of years ago.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1979, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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"Norma Rae": A Review by Ellie Raitt
"Norma Rae" is an often gripping story of a proletarian heroine. Set in a small Southern town dominated by a textile mill, the film depicts the arrival of a union organizer, Reuben Warshovsky (played by Ron Liebman), and the unfolding of his relationship with Norma Rae (Sally Field), a 31-year-old widow with two small children who works in the mill along with both her parents. Their efforts to organize a union among the socially conservative mill workers form the plot of the movie, but its substance is less concerned with this potentially explosive subject than with Norma Rae's discovery of her own inner resources through her deepening commitment to social justice as expressed in trade unionism.
The use of the political theme as a backdrop for exploring Norma Rae's evolution from victim to "free woman" is an implicit attack on "me decade" feminism which poses introspection, subjectivity and therapy as the road to liberation. So far so good. The problem is that wherever the film touches politics, the politics are fundamentally false. The filmmakers have worked hard to achieve a documentary effect in the in-plant photography, but the political world of the plant is a liberal fiction. The bosses (and cops) in this Southern company town have profound respect for the law and never overstep its bounds; nothing worse than a traffic ticket ever happens to Reuben Warshovsky. But the central problem is the film's view of trade unionism as a kind of liberal ideology divorced from any hint of class struggle. There is no need for picket lines involved in the building of unions, only legal briefs because behind the union stands that well-known "friend of the working man," the federal government.
Norma Rae is an engaging character. Bright, pretty, spirited, she is also deeply frustrated, lacking an outlet for her energy and her anger. Since the death of her husband in a barroom brawl some years before, she has lived with her parents and her children (one of whom is illegitimate). Her sex life is a series of unsatisfying affairs with casual lovers who use and abuse her. At her job, her friends view her promiscuity with envious disapproval while the company calls her "the largest mouth" because of her complaints about working conditions. In an effort to buy her off, the bosses promote her to "spot-checker," which means following the other workers around with a stopwatch. Despite the pay raise, Norma Rae gives up "spot-checking" after her friends stop speaking to her.
Meanwhile, Reuben Warshovsky has arrived in town. Norma Rae meets him when he comes to the door of her house and tells her father, "I'd like to get me a room with a mill family.... I want to get to know some mill hands close up." Rebuffed, he sets up shop at the Golden Cherry Motel, where he encounters Norma Rae en route to an assignation with her current boyfriend.
The latter is your classic male chauvinist pig. She tells him not to expect her next time he is passing through. He calls her names, demands, "What the hell are you good for anyway?" and slaps her. As she hurries past Reuben's door with a bloody nose, he befriends her with a kind word and an icepack. Norma Rae's platonic friendship with Reuben is to become the catalyst for her transformation. They meet again at the local Softball game, where Norma Rae is hassling with another former lover (and Reuben is spitting out his hot dog with the remark that it's "not Nathan's"). She asks him what he thinks of her and he replies, "I think you're too smart for what's happening to you."
How you respond to Reuben Warshovsky probably will depend on your tolerance for the self-mocking Jewish intellectual stereotype. Reuben is a self-avowed hypochondriac who talks about his mother more than about his girlfriend (a "lefto labor lawyer") and consumes club soda at the local bar. When Reuben and Norma Rae take to the back roads one Saturday to proselytize for the union, Reuben trips and falls in cow dung; later, making conversation with a group of old men whittling on the porch, he cuts his finger.
Like the socialist professor hero of "The Organizer," Reuben Warshovsky is a culturally alien "outside agitator" whose success depends on channeling the class instinct of a local militant to create a workers' leader. Yet in transforming Norma Rae into "our own Mother Jones," Reuben never talks politics to her; of his massive pile of books, he lends her only some Dylan Thomas poetry. She becomes a class-struggle heroine without ever articulating more than the liberal rhetoric of democracy and self-help: "The union's the only way we're gonna get our own voice and make ourselves any better."
At the first union organizing meeting, held at the local black church and attended by a racially mixed audience of about 30 mill workers, Reuben comes on more like a liberal-integrationist preacher from the old civil rights movement than a union organizer. He begins:
"On October 8, 1970, my grandfather, Isaac Abraham Warshovsky, died in his sleep in New York. The following Friday his funeral was held. My mother and father attended. My two uncles from Brooklyn were there. And my Aunl Minnie came up from Florida. Also present were 852 members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers...also members of his family. They had fought battles with him and bound up the wounds of battle. They had earned bread together and had broken it together. When they spoke, they spoke with one voice, and they were heard. And they were black and they were white. And they were Irish and they were Polish. And they were Catholics and they were Jews. And they were one. That's what a union is: one."
He goes on to tell the workers that textile is the only unorganized industry in the country and therefore the company can deny "your health, a decent wage, a fit company. The first day that he turns up at the plant gate to give out leaflets, he has no real conversation with any of the workers (except to ask Norma Rae if her nose is better), but when the company guards bait him, Reuben is ready with a snappy answer: "We already got six of you boss men in civil contempt. Would you care to make it seven?" In the filmmakers' view, union organizing is clearly seen as an adjunct of the legal profession.
In his first confrontation with the company, Reuben arrives at the mill one morning to inspect the employees' bulletin boards. However bumbling he may be in private life, he is in his element now:
"The federal government of the United States in federal court order No. 7778 states the following: The union has the right to inspect the bulletin boards once a week to verify in person that its notices "are not being ripped down."
Gloating that "no union organizer or known union member has been inside the fences of this plant for more than ten years," he proceeds through the plant escorted by management. When the bosses refuse to move the union notice to eye-level, Reuben aggressively responds: "Why do you guys pull this horseshit? Now I got to go to the phone, call my lawyer and get him on your ass." The bosses, seething with rage but trembling at the prospect of a lawsuit, back down.
Norma Rae hesitates before joining the union; she is afraid she may lose her job. "No way," says Reuben. "You can wear a union button as big as a frisbee when you go to work.... There's not a goddamn thing they can do to touch you." Subsequently, when she has been fired and dragged screaming to the police station, he tells her:
"It goes with the job. I saw a pregnant woman get punched in the stomach on a picket line. I saw a boy of 16 get shot in the back.... And you just got your feet wet."
She quickly becomes the spearhead of the organizing. When the local minister refuses to let her use his church for an integrated union meeting, she holds it in her home. She organizes with energy and characteristic personalism: "Will you read one of these for me please," she entreats one man; "Now Doris/' she says, "I want you to come on down to Golden Cherry and bring your peanut butter pie." Putting in long hours on clerical work in Warshovsky's motel room, she jeopardizes her relationship with her new husband (Beau Bridges).
Finally the company hits back, posting a racially provocative notice:"You black employees are being told that by going into this union en masse you can dominate it and control it as you may see fit—"
Reuben is ecstatic: "I love it when these pricks get mean. We can take legal action." He insists that if Norma Rae cannot steal the notice, she copy it down word-for word. The company orders her to stop and finally demands she leave the plant. She refuses. When the security guards arrive, she scrawls the word "UNION" on a piece of cardboard and stands up on a table in the middle of the weaving room. The scene is charged with extraordinary power as the workers, one by one, turn off their machines in a spontaneous work action. The silence in the usually deafening factory when the last machine is down is the film's only hint that unions can be built through the concerted militant action of the workers.
But the movie can do nothing with it. Norma Rae, fired, leaves the mill. The film attempts to defuse the tension of the work stoppage with a scene of her struggling against the burly cops as they stuff her into the patrol car and haul her off to the station.
The film's climax, as befits its view of unionism, is the bargaining election. The workers wait anxiously in the heat as the ballots are counted. When the vote is announced—373 for the company, 425 for the union— pandemonium breaks loose. Outside the gate, Reuben and Norma Rae hear the triumphant chant of "Union, Union." Reuben knows his job is done. He bids Norma Rae a fond farewell ("Be happy. Be well."), gets in his car and drives away. At the point that a real struggle over wages and conditions should begin, the movie ends.
The ending, though unsatisfying, is not so unrealistic. In 1963 the Textile Workers Union embarked on a drive to organize J.P. Stevens, the country's second largest textile firm. In August 1974 the union won its first bargaining election, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. But the workers there are still working without a contract.
"Norma Rae" is most engaging as a portrait of a very appealing working woman of character and courage. As a film it has its flaws, most notably its sentimentality, some idiocies of dialogue and an old-fashioned sharp separation between sexual relationships and "pure" friendship. Politically it is a cruel joke, presenting the government rather than class struggle as the mechanism for trade-union organizing. To its credit, it treats the working people with sympathy and it presents social involvement rather than self-absorption (a la "An Unmarried Woman") as the means whereby the heroine discovers strength and purpose."
