She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class, and reported the following:
An illustration fills over half of page 99. It’s the June 1974 cover for Image, membership magazine of the New York metro-area PBS affiliate, WNET 13. A subtitle announces, “‘Woman Alive!’: A Portrait of Feminists in Action,” and the layout foregrounds a photograph of Gloria Steinem standing close to another white woman with long hair. The photograph is set on top of a used script on a film cannister labeled Woman Alive!, which highlights the many ways women contributed to the feminist documentary as participants, producers, writers, and editors. The caption under the illustration lets readers know the woman with Steinem is Crystal Lee.Visit Aimee Loiselle's website.
The remainder of page 99 is a paragraph that summarizes the beginning of the Woman Alive! pilot episode. It starts, “The first segment follows a married couple in western Massachusetts who reversed gender roles after the wife took a job in the Everywoman Center at the University of Massachusetts, but the husband is ambivalent.” The text, however, just starts to describe why Crystal Lee is in the photograph: “The show transitions to the Crystal Lee segment via [Ms. staff members’] conversation, in which they discuss her as a ‘new’ blue-collar woman and not as one of many southern women and men who challenged mill owners and managers for decades.”
In the caption, I also discovered the first (and hopefully last) typo. Before I published Beyond Norma Rae, I used to wonder how such blips ended up in lovely finished books. Now I understand the quantity of material an author manages and the intricate steps and multiple files throughout the publication process, particularly regarding images. This was the last image for which I could track down the copyright holder, gain permission, receive a high-resolution digital file, and negotiate a license. For months, I had a placeholder in case WNET 13’s lawyers didn’t grant my license criteria, which arrived just before the manuscript went to copyediting. But I’m surprised the assistant managing editor, copyeditor, and I all missed this one: the magazine cover says June 1974, but the caption says 1975 – a reminder that humans and all they create have flaws.
Readers who jump to page 99 get an intriguing essence of Beyond Norma Rae. The combined illustration and text capture the book’s focus on the 1970s, women’s labor history, and popular culture, even if they say little about the overall argument. The single page is like a teeny spoonful of ice cream out of an extra-large container.
As a teaser, the page is effective. The illustration prompts people to ask, who is that woman with Steinem? But page 99 readers don’t learn that Crystal Lee Jordan Sutton was a North Carolina mill hand and member of Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) who became the basis of a “Crystal Lee” screenplay, which became the blockbuster movie Norma Rae. But they see that she was a worker who received popular attention. The page also hints at my argument about the inadequacies of mainstream media in representing blue-collar women and longer histories of poor working people’s activisms.
For general readers, Beyond Norma Rae challenges any romanticization of the celebrated movie and Sally Field’s participation in it. And it tells a good story about a working-class woman standing up to Hollywood professionals and jamming their plans. For scholarly readers, the book brings together women’s labor history and cultural history with tools from history of capitalism (1) to analyze the larger context of manufacturing that led to the contested production of Norma Rae and (2) to understand the cultural work the movie did to reconstitute a narrow notion of the white American working class and individualist defiance. By employing a transnational framework and cross-disciplinary lens, it questions the centrality of white southern mill workers in labor histories, emphasizes the significance of migrating women of color in a long history of global supply chains, and interrogates how culture shapes neoliberal political economy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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