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Goldman 29

The 1953 film [[underline]]Salt of the Earth[[/underline]] dramatizes a case in which women's domestic grievances became an issue in union organizing. An important dynamic in the film's plot concerns the men's slowly growing awareness of the importance of women's labor in the home, which the men tended to trivialize. A dramatic moment of the film shows the women silhouetted against the sky with a picket sign reading, "We want sanitation, not discrimination." After the strike was won, hot water was piped into the homes for the first time in this company town.[[superscript]]47[[/superscript]]
Among the images of women workers made by Chicano artists is Judithe Hernández's mural [[underline]]La mujer[[/underline]] (mid-1970s) in a low-rent Los Angeles Chicano neighborhood. Only in the modern period are women shown as workers. Hernández pictures female presences in Mexican/Chicano history: The Aztec moon goodess, the Virgin of Guadalupe, [[underline]]soldaderas[[/underline]] (soldiers) of the Mexican Revolution; then sewing machine operators and farm workers on strike. The whole is dominated by a large archetypal figure of Woman. In 1976, a group called Las Chicanas, including painters Hernández, Judy Baca, Olga Muñiz, Josefina Quesada and photographer Isabel Castro opened the multi-media exhibit "Las venas de la mujer" (Veins of the Woman) in the Los Angeles Woman's Building. Tracing the history of the Chicana, the five utilized paintings, [[left-margin]](Fig.17)[[/left-margin]] a mural, performance and an environment built as a sweatshop. Muñiz's environment included a tiny window opening into a garment factory, a sewing machine, bins of cloth, racks of finished garments, and the black silhouette of a woman, the operator, painted on the wall. A sign on the sewing machine listed the wages paid per piece.
The history of Mexicans in the United States includes a number of women who were leading figures in political and labor organizations. One of the first national figures was Lucy Eldine Gonzales from Texas who married Albert Parsons, executed as a conspirator in the Haymarket Riot of 1886. She was an anarchist, writer, lecturer, and charter member of the Chicago Working Women's Union in the 1870s, as well as a founding member of the IWW in 1905. However, to my knowledge, no image of her