On the Picket Line is a volume in communications studies that examines the rhetoric of working-class women in the Communist Party in taking action against gender and labour discrimination in the Great Depression of 1930s America. Combining critical analysis, Marxist theory, feminist theory and labour history, Mary Tierce examines the rhetorical strategies employed when these women challenged dominant ideologies surrounding separate spheres. Having established a theoretical and historical context she uses a combination of primary and secondary sources to suggest that working-class women were neither passive nor defensive about their lives. They were active agents who followed in the long tradition of female workers who had argued with the “establishment,” whether that was male-dominant unions, men with patriarchal views, employers or the government, about poor conditions and sexual and racial inequity and unfairness.

For gendered or women's labour historians or those more general readers who are familiar with the research output of these historians, the findings in this volume are not new. Working-class women have long been considered capable of fighting their corner both at home and on the shop floor. Their voices may well not have been the dominant voices of American labour history, but their presence and activities have certainly been documented, discussed and praised. What is new in this volume is the way in which its source materials have been combined to present a different way of communicating information. Combining the Communist publication Working Women, the column “Women's Angle” in the Daily Worker, archival materials on such prominent female Communist activists as Ella Reeve Bloor and Margaret Cowl and the socialist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who joined the party in 1937, with secondary sources on labour history and diverse theoretical frameworks, Mary Tierce has introduced historians to such concepts as justification through differentiation, justification through transcendence, and the rhetoric of possibility as explanatory tools demonstrating how women were able to break out of their traditional gendered roles. Whether historians need these tools for understanding confrontational protest tactics either in the 1930s or in more recent times is a moot point.