Dishing It Out

About the Book

Back when SOS or Adam and Eve on a raft were things to order if youwere hungry but a little short on time and money, nearly one-fourth of all waitresses belonged to unions. By the time their movement peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, the women had developed a distinctive form of working-class feminism, simultaneously pushing for equal rights and pay and affirming their need for special protections.

Dorothy Sue Cobble shows how sexual and racial segregation persistedin wait work, but she rejects the idea that this was caused byemployers' actions or the exclusionary policies of male trade unionists.Dishing It Out contends that the success of waitress unionism wasdue to several factors: waitresses, for the most part, had nontraditionalfamily backgrounds, and most were primary wage-earners. Theirclose-knit occupational community and sex-separate union encouragedfemale assertiveness and a decidedly unromantic view of men andmarriage. Cobble skillfully combines oral interviews and extensivearchival records to show how waitresses adopted the basic tenets ofmale-dominated craft unions but rejected other aspects of male unionculture. The result is a book that will expand our understanding offeminism and unionism by including the gender consciousperspectives of working women.