Beyond Norma Rae
How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class
By Aimee Loiselle

Approx. 320 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 31 halftones, 2 tables, notes, bibl., index
-
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7613-5
Published: November 2023 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7612-8
Published: November 2023
Gender and American Culture
Paperback Available November 2023, but pre-order your copy today!
Buy this Book
For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies
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.
About the Author
Aimee Loiselle is assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University.
For more information about Aimee Loiselle, visit
the
Author
Page.
Reviews
"Weaving together histories of capitalism, labor, and cultural production, Loiselle takes readers on a wide-ranging journey, from the textile and garment industries in Puerto Rico and the US South to picket lines, union halls, and Hollywood offices, where executives made consequential decisions about how to represent the American working class. In looking to the film representation of Norma Rae, Loiselle reveals that well-funded culture producers left audiences with a hollowed-out symbol of neoliberal individualism rather than the global working class fighting for collective rights. Loiselle reminds us that even our most beloved icons are complex historical and ideological constructions."—Jessica Wilkerson, author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice