Capitalist Family Values

CAPITALIST FAMILY VALUES CAPITALIST FAMILY VALUES GENDER, WORK, AND CORPORATE CULTURE AT BOEING Polly Reed Myers UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS | LINCOLN AND LONDON © 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Portions of chapter 2 appeared in “Boeing Aircraft Company’s ‘Manpower Campaign’ during World War II,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 98, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 183– 95. Portions of chapter 4 appeared in “Jane Doe v. Boeing Company: Transsexuality and Compulsory Gendering in Corporate Capitalism,” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 493– 517. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Myers, Polly Reed. Capitalist family values: gender, work, and corporate culture at Boeing / Polly Reed Myers. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 8032- 7869- 1 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978- 0- 8032- 8080- 9 (epub) ISBN 978- 0- 8032- 8081- 6 (mobi) ISBN 978- 0- 8032- 8082- 3 (pdf) 1. Boeing Company— History. 2. Corporate culture— United States— History. 3. Work environment— United States— History. 4. Capitalism— Social aspects— United States— History. I. Title. TL686.B65M84 2015 338.7'62910973— dc23 2015013917 Set in Lyon by L. Auten. Designed by N. Putens. For Agnes Elvebak Trulson, Julia Olsen Elvebak, and Regin Hanson Elvebak Tusen Takk CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix PREFACE Finding Women at Boeing xi Acknowledgments xvii INTRODUCTION The Boeing Family 1 CHAPTER 1 Fraternalism and the Boeing News in the 1930s 27 CHAPTER 2 Manpower versus Womanpower during World War II 57 CHAPTER 3 Women’s Place in Equal Opportunity Employment 95 CHAPTER 4 Jane Doe v. Boeing Company 129 CHAPTER 5 Employing Teamwork 153 CONCLUSION Corporate Capitalism in the Twenty- First Century 183 Notes 191 Bibliography 237 Index 251 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. The wing room at Boeing, 1922 10 2. Men work on B- 17F patterns, 1942 12 3. Women work on B- 17F plane parts, 1942 62 4. Women hand out production materials, 1942 65 5. African American food servers at Boeing’s Kansas plant 81 6. District Lodge 751, IAM, union meeting, 1965 101 7. Boeing workers, 1963 102 8. A Boeing employee works on the 707, 1984 108 9. SPEEA poster from the 2000 strike 162 PREFACE Finding Women at Boeing This book began with a single box at the Boeing Historical Archives that was marked “Women at Boeing.” In 2000 I had the truly wonderful opportunity to work for a year as an intern at the Boeing Historical Archives. Most visi- tors to the archives wanted to know about technology and airplane parts, but I was intrigued by the social and cultural history contained in that box, tucked away in other areas of the archives, and embedded in Boeing’s history. At the time of my internship, my knowledge of women’s employment at Boeing was limited to some rudimentary ideas about Rosie the Riveter, derived mostly from the popular poster and its attendant story. I assumed women had flocked to Boeing during World War II, had patriotically done their duty, and then retreated back to the home. But, as I read through the newspaper articles, company meeting minutes, and oral history interviews contained in the “Women at Boeing” box, this story became more com- plicated. I found that women had not simply retreated to the home at the war’s end, and, rather than serving as a “stop- gap” labor force, women were integral to developments and shifts in company culture during and long after World War II. Yet, as the “Women at Boeing” box revealed, women’s stories were not widely or deeply known or fully integrated into the company history contained in the thousands of other archival docu- ments that have preserved company history. I wanted to know more about women’s work lives at Boeing. What did it mean to be a woman at Boeing, a company known for male expertise and technology? This book is the rather unexpected result of my effort to answer that question. xi Preface Traditionally, women have been positioned apart from technology, both rhetorically and structurally. The historian David Noble argues that technology was “defined from the outset as masculine” and that “the idea of technology became the modern measure of elite masculine identity.”1 Women have been described in both popular culture and in engineering and scientific workforces as “the antithesis of the scientist.” Noble describes an ethos of “masculine millenarianism” that was “all at once militaristic, misogynist, monkish, apocalyptic, and transcendent.”2 Certainly Boeing’s identity is tied in with images of masculinity and technology. The company’s name is synonymous with airplanes, aerospace and military technology, male Boeing CEOs, and Seattle. My focus, however, is on the role of gender in workplace culture at Boeing: the people, work rules, and negotiated and imposed expectations that have shaped both men’s and women’s experiences. In aviation and aerospace histories corporate culture is regularly defined as the business decisions of CEOs while technology is posited as the driving force behind company decisions. However, that perspective often conflates corporate culture with the leadership of a few select men and leaves out the experiences of women and the role of gender.3 Scholars have shown how corporate cultures are a negotiated process that involves more than just technology.4 Studies of gender and sexuality in particular have shown how social and cultural considerations order the workplace.5 My archival sources have shown me that Boeing’s history has as much to reveal about gender and workplace culture as it does economic currents and technological developments. In this book I seek to show how all these things are linked. When we place women at the center of Boeing’s history, it becomes clear how concerns over gender shaped the company’s culture and history, as well as the experiences of the employees. Women’s history as a field has flourished in recent decades, and recovering women’s stories from the archives has revealed how gender has shaped power relations, politics, and work. Yet, as Susan Armitage notes, “The topic of women’s work in the Pacific Northwest has yet to be investigated in a systemic way.”6 The Pacific Northwest is a vastly understudied region that deserves more atten- tion than scholars have paid to it, particularly in women’s and business history.7 Similarly, scholars will need to examine the region more fully to xii Preface gain a better understanding of how gender has shaped women’s work in the West. As Susan Lee Johnson notes, after the wave of scholarship on women’s and gender history in recent decades, gender should be fully integrated into western history but is not.8 While this book does not com- prehensively address women’s work in the West, I take seriously Johnson’s call to western historians to “get with the program” and take gender history into full account.9 Margaret Jacobs concurs and argues that “the field of western women’s and gender history has made little impact on the larger field of western history.”10 It is my hope that this work contributes to the larger conversations going on about women’s place in the history of work in the West.11 Beyond the American West, I also seek to engage labor history and studies of workplace organization more broadly. Studying Boeing’s corporate culture, as well as women’s and gender history, opened up new questions for me about the relationship between gender and sexuality in corporate capitalism. Boeing’s corporate culture relied on heteronormativity, whereby heterosexual norms are assumed to be “normal” and thus taken for granted, which has enforced social hierarchies and an unwritten code of conduct. As Michael Warner notes, heterosexism is so deeply embedded in social institutions and relations that it is rendered invisible: “So much privilege lies in heterosexual culture’s exclusive ability to interpret itself as society.”12 Jonathan Ned Katz similarly points out that studying heterosexuality challenges the dominance of heterosexual norms: “We discover that the heterosexual, the normal, and the natural have a history of changing definitions. Studying the history of the term challenges its power.”13 While the concept of heteronormativity has influenced scholars to examine the social, cultural, and political constructions of sexuality, its links to capitalism are less clear. Rosemary Hennessy critiques this “well established convention of segregating the history of sexuality from the history of capitalism.”14 Chrys Ingraham calls on scholars to think more carefully about the ways in which heterosexuality is constructed and empowered and to analyze links between heteronormativity, gender, and capitalist relations; as Ingraham argues, “institutionalized heterosexuality” needs to be understood in connection with the “gender division of labor and the patriarchal relations of production.” Ingraham also argues that the “material conditions of capitalist patriarchal societies are more xiii Preface centrally linked to institutionalized heterosexuality than to gender and, moreover, that gender (under the patriarchal arrangements prevailing now) is inextricably bound up with heterosexuality.”15 At Boeing, as at many corporate workplaces, the power of heterosexuality was tied directly to ideas of the patriarchal family, with assumptions that primarily white heterosexual men would assume the status of “head of household,” with women assuming lower- paid and supportive roles, much like the assumptions of private family roles.16 Although others, particularly those with ties to or investments in Boeing, might disagree, this study is not an effort to portray Boeing, Boeing leaders, or Boeing workers in a negative light or to vilify anyone. I am trying, rather, to understand the larger social processes at play in how ideas about workers’ identities shaped workplace relations.

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