Beyond Norma Rae

“Beyond Norma Rae is an ambitious book. . . . The stories of Puerto Rican needlewomen within a North American transnational context provides a valuable contribution to US women’s labor history. . . . The comparative design of this book greatly enhances our understanding of twentieth century North American women’s textile work and workers. Understanding the cultural and economic appropriation that surrounded the creation of the film Norma Rae as well as its enduring, iconic influence is also a major contribution to late twentieth-century labor and cultural history.”—American Historical Review

“Beyond Norma Rae is thorough and theoretically sophisticated, bringing together economic policy, union work, the production of media culture, and public history to create a complex whole. Loiselle is to be commended for her breadth of vision and her effort to contrast the damage done when cultural producers twist stories for their own ends with the good done by historians working with care.”—Journal of American 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

“Carefully researched and engagingly written, Loiselle’s book restores to history the workers who fell outside the cinematic frame [of Norma Rae]. In doing so, she challenges familiar assumptions about who constitutes the American working class and demonstrates how readily collective movements can become individual hero stories for the sake of entertainment. The book is at once a women’s labor history, a Hollywood history, and a media critique. I highly recommend it.”–Clio Dialogues

“Through Loiselle’s engaging and thoughtful storytelling, [Gloria Maldonado and Crystal Lee Sutton’s] histories come to life in ways that illuminate the often overlooked narratives of collective and intersectional labor organizing. . . . [A] captivating and excellently written look at the cultural production of working-class identities . . . [and] a vital and rich addition to the historiographies of cultural history and labor history.”—Contingent Magazine

“Engaging. . . . [W]ell researched. . . . [T]he book succeeds in challenging social categorizations that have ‘segmented workers’ in ‘mainstream representations of work and meanings’. Thought-provoking and accessible, this is a welcome addition to recent labor history that should interest a wide variety of readers.”—Labor

“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

“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

“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

“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