Aimee Loiselle. Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. 320 pp. Paperback $29.95.
After the 2024 United States presidential election, I listened to political pundits debate the key factors that influenced the outcome. All over television and social media were discussions about the last decade of neoliberalist policies, immigration, unions, gender rights, and citizenship.1 At the heart of these discussions is an ongoing struggle over who is included in and who defines the identity of the American working class. A clear illustration of this struggle emerged right before Election Day after the delivery of an offensive joke about Puerto Rico, which sparked broader conversations about decades of American imperialism and the complex citizenship status of Puerto Ricans.2 Historian Aimee Loiselle perfectly captures many of these discussions happening decades earlier and the aforementioned struggle to define working class identity in her 2023 book Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class. The book begins at the turn of the twentieth century following the changing landscape of textile production across the American Atlantic and carries the story up to the 1970s where Loiselle analyzes how popular culture and media worked to diminish and often disarm working-class struggles against global capital. At the center of the book are the captivating stories of two main union labor activists, Gloria Maldonado and Crystal Lee Sutton. Through Loiselle’s engaging and thoughtful storytelling, their histories come to life in ways that illuminate the often overlooked narratives of collective and intersectional labor organizing.
Loiselle draws on an impressive range of sources to carefully examine how media production is shaped by the intersections of gender, race, class, status, and citizenship.(p. 4) By integrating union archives, specifically from the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) alongside newspapers, interviews, memoirs, and television and media archives, she constructs a richly layered and persuasive analysis of cultural production within popular media. One of the book’s greatest strengths is how convincingly it demonstrates the active role working-class women played in shaping their own representation, rather than being passive subjects of media portrayals. As the title suggests the primary piece of media examined in the book is the 1979 film Norma Rae, whose story was inspired by the life of American union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton. Loiselle’s close reading of the film and its production is a powerful lens for exploring how working-class women engaged with and challenged dominant narratives. Her analysis is especially compelling because it does not stop at the film itself; it extends to the broader cultural, political, and economic conditions surrounding its creation and reception, and in doing so, she reveals how labor activists understood the stakes of media representation and strategically sought to influence it.
Loiselle’s use of theory is also highly effective. Drawing on “Pierre Bourdieu’s model of field of cultural production and Raymonds William’s propositions regarding cultural formations and structures of feeling,”(p. 9) she frames popular culture as a dynamic, contested space with real political and economic consequences. The book’s theoretical foundation strengthens her argument that culture is not merely reflective but actively shapes and is shaped by economic relations.(p. 6) What makes this particularly persuasive is how clear Loiselle shows these abstract ideas at work in the concrete case of Norma Rae. Her skills connecting theory to real-world examples makes the book’s argument both intellectually rigorous and accessible.
Beyond Norma Rae is organized into six main chapters split into three parts, with each section focusing on a different stage of cultural production in telling the story of working-class women. The first part of the book, to paraphrase the title of chapter one, examines the “raw material before cultural production,” where the reader is introduced to the history of Puerto Rican needleworkers and US southern textile mill workers going back to the early 1900s where Loiselle traces this history within the context of a rapidly changing global market.(p. 15) She argues that “having multiple labor markets, segmented by gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and geography to play off one another enhanced the power of political authority and capital.”(p. 17) An impressive example, chronicled in the book, is how labor protection in the US was depicted as restricting development in Puerto Rico and how this dynamic helped create a push to cut costs by undercutting unions.
Tadeáš Bednarz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The second part of the book carries the story to the 1970s where Loiselle analyzes how the history of Crystal Lee Sutton’s union work is then put through several systemic processes in the production of Norma Rae. The reader also receives an intricate look into Hollywood’s response to Sutton’s demand for a “…a role in the production as a creative contributor who had provided value and assets to the movie-her experiences, her ‘life story.’” The book investigates the relentless efforts by the Hollywood film industry to keep Sutton out of the production process. Loiselle argues that this search for “commercial success” and “the highest return on investment” is a consequence of the capitalist system within which the film is produced and ultimately shaped by.(p.140-141) The book’s first two parts provide an in-depth account of how working class women used unions and organizing to challenge gendered and racial structures, paving the way for the third and last part of the book.
Part three illustrates the effects Norma Rae had in shaping American public perceptions of working-class women and labor organizers. Loiselle consistently references a central moment in the film, in which actress Sally Field, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the title character Norma Rae Wilson, holds over her head a piece of cardboard with only one word on it: “union.” The scene is the climax of the film, where after getting into a heated argument with management Norma Rae defiantly remains on the factory floor, around her the garment machines loudly whirr and steam hisses overhead. Norma holds the piece of cardboard over her head and one by one the other workers turn off their machines and the factory comes to a standstill. Loiselle argues that this singular moment captures the ideology of individual neoliberalism; the nuanced and complex narratives of activism and organizing across gender and race is reduced to and simplified to a single individual in a singular moment in time. Furthermore, this depiction minimizes and individualizes acts of resistance against the intertwined systems of racial and gendered capital relations. Loiselle supports this argument by effectively contrasting the production and reception of the film Norma Rae with that of Gloria Maldonado’s interview in scholar Rina Benmayor’s oral history, “Nosotras Trabajamos en la Costura.” (We work in the Garment Industry).3 The project, while not garnering a wide audience like Norma Rae, “…offered another narrative for the American working class, one in which women of color worked and migrated as part of the US colonial labor force in a vibrant union movement.”(p. 141) Loiselle presents two different avenues by which women’s working-class stories are told. In the oral history project, Maldonado retains substantial control over her narrative whereas for Sutton’s case the film Norma Rae heavily departs from the vision Sutton had for it. Nevertheless, Loiselle shows that both projects are influenced, to different degrees, by capitalist structures. Loiselle also highlights Sutton’s continued efforts for control over what she argued was a story of collective effort and not an individual act of defiance.
Beyond Norma Rae is a captivating and excellently written look at the cultural production of working-class identities for two reasons. First it is a crucial read for all who seek to make art that depicts social issues or tell the stories of marginalized communities. Loiselle gives a compelling critique of the ways in which “even producers and directors with a humanistic or left-leaning point of view must operate within the capitalist nexus that sifts access, ranks contributor’s value, demands revenues for investors, and directs the distribution of billions of dollars.”(p. 219) Second, Loiselle’s book is a vital and rich addition to the historiographies of cultural history and labor history. Loiselle’s interdisciplinary approach provides a persuasive argument for a continued interrogation of the American working-class identity.
The book concludes with a powerful “preview” section that draws a striking comparison between Crystal Lee Sutton and Christian Smalls, the Amazon worker who founded the Amazon Labor Union and led the 2022 drive to unionize a Staten Island warehouse. Loiselle highlights how, like Sutton, Smalls has emerged as a public figure who challenges dominant narratives about who the working class is and what labor organizing looks like. In many ways Smalls does not fit the traditional media image of a union leader. This is precisely Loiselle’s argument—working-class identity is not fixed; it is continually being contested and redefined. Thus, in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, where narratives about the “working class” were once again mobilized and manipulated across the political spectrum, Beyond Norma Rae feels especially relevant. Loiselle reminds the reader that cultural production, from media to political discourse, has an important role in shaping how we see labor and activist organizing and demonstrates the importance of paying attention to who gets to represent the working class and why. Ultimately Beyond Norma Rae offers both insight and inspiration for reimagining solidarity across lines of class, race, and gender.
Harriet Cotton Mills No. 1 in Henderson, North Carolina. Massengill Postcard Collection, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC, via Wikimedia Commons.
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- Neoliberal economic policies promote free-market capitalism, limited state intervention in the economy, and often consist of increased austerity for social programs. These policies are further characterized by deregulation of businesses and industry, privatization of public services, weakening of labor rights, and minimal taxes for high-income earners.
- At a late October 2024 New York City rally for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”
- Benmayor to Maldonado, May 18, 1987, Hunter College Box 158, folder “NTC: PR Women, 1985-89,” series XII “Research Task Forces, 1950-2001,” El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Collection, Centro.
