TOUCHED BY FIRE
ALTE FRIEND ELLEN CASSEDY, FOR LABOR DAY
Ellen Cassedy, www.ellencassedy.com
Fifty years ago, I was a founder of 9 to 5, the working women’s organization that took on the corporate titans, inspired Hollywood’s hit comedy and Dolly Parton’s toe-tapping anthem – and made bosses everywhere get their own coffee.
My memoir, Working 9 to 5: A women’s movement, a labor union, and the iconic movie, has just been published with a foreword by Jane Fonda. (Order from Chicago Review Press or wherever books are sold.)
I wrote the book remembering what I wanted to read when I was starting out as an activist and organizer. I was hungry for anything that reflected my daily reality. The long hours. The unshakeable belief that I was changing the world. The terror of making 100 phone calls in a row to people I didn’t know, or chairing a meeting, or sneaking into the ladies’ rooms in the big banks to post leaflets in the stalls. The love I felt for my colleagues, most of them exactly as young and green as I was.
As I read through old diaries and pawed through boxes of papers, I felt as if I was 23 again. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we sought out people who could advise us, listened intently to what our would-be recruits were saying, and followed our noses. We paid attention to the need to unite diverse races, classes, and ages. We never stopped thinking up new ways to get media coverage, light a fire under government enforcers, and make it possible for women to speak up. We kept our focus on the boss, linked arms, and went forward together.
We dreamed of unionizing the nation’s 20 million office workers. Thanks to the ferocious opposition of employers, that didn’t happen. But writing the book made me realize how much we did achieve. We charted new directions for worker power. We helped bring a new generation of women leaders into the labor movement. We helped change the offices of America and the lives of countless women.
Of course we didn’t win it all. You never do. As the song says, “every generation’s got to win it again.” Some of the exciting organizing happening today owes a debt to what we did.
In one of my boxes, I came across a little clipping I used to keep on my bulletin board at work. “In our youth,” it says, “our hearts were touched with fire.”
That’s what it was like for me.