September 11, 1970
August 26 was truly an historic day. The Women's Strike for Equality demonstrations marked a qualitatively new stage in the development of the women's liberation struggle and it signified the addition of a powerful new layer to the process of radicalization now occurring in this country. August 26 will be seen as marking the emergence of women's liberation as a mass force, one that takes America a step closer to the socialist revolution.
The impact of the demonstrations reached into every nook and cranny of the country. Even someone like New York Post columnist Pete Hamill, who has previously used his column to mock and sneer at the women's liberation movement was moved to second thoughts. The day after the huge New York demonstrations he wrote, "Well, the laughing and the snickering are now officially over."
Almost awestruck, Hamill described the impact of seeing a demonstration of some 35-40,000 march down Fifth Avenue - "that line of women, filling the width of the avenue, shouting for equal jobs, free abortion on demand, and 24- hour day-care centers."
The demonstrations definitively refuted the charge that the women's liberation movement is limited to educated and well-to-do women and has nothing to do with working class, poor and Black women. Even the jaundiced New York Times reported, "Every kind of woman you ever see in New York was there."
August 25, 1945
One million automobile and aircraft workers in more than
1,000 locals of the CIO United Automobile Workers in this
country and Canada were informed last week by telegrams
from the union's international executive board that "our no-
strike pledge came to an end at the moment President Truman
announced the surrender of Japan..."
This is the first formal action by any leading international union, CIO or AFL, to scrap the policy imposed on the union ranks right after Pearl Harbor, which throughout the war kept labor helplessly shackled before the onslaughts of Big Business and its government.
UAW President R.J. Thomas accompanied his announcement of the termination of the no-strike pledge with his own fearful admonition against any "rash of strikes." He emphasized a clause in the UAW constitution forbidding local strikes "without the authorization of the international president and executive board."
t., NW, Washington, D.C. 20045.