Olga Madar came of age in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The labor movement was on the rise and seeking to harness recreation, especially sports leagues, as a form of union building. Before the Depression, early U.S. corporations used that same practice to build company cohesion, but abandoned it during the Depression Era. In the late 1930s through the early 1950s, leftist organizers responded to worker demand where corporations wouldn’t by providing access to cheap recreational programs. As labor won more leisure time and shorter hours with no corresponding reduced pay, organizers reasoned that the bosses would fill those hours themselves unless the union could seize the opportunity and provide recreational activity. 

Workers wanted to play baseball, softball, bowling, and basketball, so labor unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) developed teams and leagues. These sports became so popular that the UAW local newspapers even included a sports section. Madar, who would become one of the most important leaders of the UAW, was the long-time director of the UAW recreational programs from the late 1940s into the 1970s, and she affixed particular focus on labor union sports. 

Madar was the first woman on the International Executive Board of the UAW and one of the founders and the first president of Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW). Using her work in union sports, she challenged prevalent ideas of women’s athletics and physicality and used her position to carve out spaces within union leadership, the workplace, and recreation for women. Madar’s was the working-class labor feminism of the mid-20th century that laid the groundwork for later Second Wave feminism movements. 

“Madar’s was the working-class labor feminism of the mid-20th century that laid the groundwork for later Second Wave feminism movements.”

Madar was herself a gifted athlete, partially as a result of her tumultuous childhood. In 1930, at the age of 15, her parents uprooted her and her nine brothers and two sisters from Pittsburgh to Detroit after the Depression caused the demise of the family butcher shop. In a new environment and unsure of her surroundings, Madar turned to sports. At Northeastern High School, she stood out in basketball and field hockey. She became a crack athlete with a reputation as a menace to other teams in athletics, noting in her high school yearbook that she had “an ability to get something for nothing. (usually trouble).” After her graduation in 1933, during an era when fast pitch softball exploded in popularity as a sport for the working classes, she became a sought after softball catcher all across Detroit.

Madar’s reputation as a softball player took her on a circuit throughout Detroit’s auto industry, which was experiencing massive labor upheavals in the 1930s. Starting as a ringer on the company softball team placed her in the perfect position to use her expertise to further the labor movement in the auto industry. 

After a season playing for the Kelly Cleaner’s team, Madar spent 1934 and 35, playing for the Chrysler team, with the company giving her a job because of her softball skills on the diamond, not on the assembly line. She would later remark that she learned about the need for a union there: “There was no union in the plant then, and the fact that they would hire me when other workers were laid off, just because I could play softball – was incredible.” 

As a noted troublemaker, she didn’t take long before becoming involved in labor organizing, refusing to be used solely for the company’s softball glories. Madar had exposure to all areas of the auto industry; all of her 11 siblings worked in the Detroit auto industry and all of them were involved with the rising UAW union. Thus, it became important for her to make a difference as a working class woman and not just as a star athlete.

The next year she played on the Bower Roller Bearing team (a plant owned by Chrysler) for the 1936-37 seasons as well as the Rayl company team for the 1936-38 seasons. During this time, she also played on softball teams representing Detroit in American Softball Association national tournaments. Madar’s athletic pursuits and just about the entirety of her large family working in the auto industry with strong union loyalties placed her at the heart of the of 1930s union-sponsored sports recreation. 

Meanwhile, Madar became the first in her family to earn a college degree in 1938 when she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Physical Education from Michigan Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University). The combination of a degree and her softball skills took her into even more unionizing areas. Around 1938 or 1939, Madar became active in organizing and playing on union teams, catching for the UAW Local 400 Ford team as well as playing for the Roman Cleanser team in the 1939 and 1940 seasons. For Madar, it was much more comfortable for her to play on squads put together by her fellow workers instead of management. Madar would devote herself to building labor sports in the UAW as part of a larger anti-racist, anti-fascist working class culture being fostered by labor organizers.

Madar’s career as an organizer was deeply influenced by her education and work as a physical educator. Women physical educators, as Beth Linker argues in War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America, developed in the U.S. a generation before Madar, during the First World War. Nurses rehabilitated wounded and disabled veterans with drills and sports, and the nurses’ activities helped normalize women as sports organizers and athletes in mainstream life, preceding the explosion of women’s athletics in the 1930s. Madar used that same scientific approach to bridge the gap for working class women, who faced the double stigmas of women’s perceived physical inferiority and the working class people’s lack of access to collegiate or exclusive clubs. With her degree in physical education and athletic talent, Madar presented herself as a perfect example of why working class women shouldn’t only participate in labor sports but what they could accomplish in the leadership as well. 

Women physical educators argued that working-class women as well as men should have both a healthy body and mind. In her book, Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America, Martha H. Verbrugge argues that most physical educators took a middle view between the theoretical binaries about sexual difference of the time: The first view held that men and women were total polar opposites and needed specific physical activities tailored to their gender, and the second purported that men and women were more similar than different in their physical needs and demands. At first, Madar generally took a middle view, though she moved more towards the second view over the course of her life. 

Madar helped form women’s teams in her local union in the war years, when the “Rosie the Riveter” phenomenon brought women into auto factories converted to war production, and she continued to push for recreational athletics that included women and the expansion of recreation to include families in the post-war baby boom of working-class auto worker families. Using her knowledge of the human body gained in her athletic career and her physical education degree, she built a more cohesive union for all its members. And with background in science, she argued for a physical recreation accessible to working-class people, especially women. 

In 1941, Madar began at Ford’s Willow Run plant in West Detroit. Here, she became involved in UAW Local 50 and came in contact with the nearby West-side Local 174 and its strong Socialist Party leadership headed by Walter Reuther. She quickly was hired to become Local 50’s Recreational Director, and she, of course, also played catcher for the union team, the Bomberettes, during for the 1941-43 seasons. Madar built a thriving sports program for men and women workers, in addition to other recreation programs including theater and music. 

Of her experience organizing labor sports in the 1930s, Madar noted later that few people had money to go to professional baseball games, so both men and women made their own teams and own leagues, using union organized squads to do so. Union organizers, too, gladly embraced and put money towards labor sports leagues since it helped build comradery of both players and supporters. “Before the UAW was organized, management used to try to kid the workers they were doing something for them by having semi-pros represent the plant in sports. This was good advertising for the plant but didn’t mean much for the workers,” Madar explained in an interview with a union newspaper. “When the union came into being, it soon found out the pros weren’t very popular and cost a lot of money besides. So now we are out for recreation in which the majority of our people can join and have fun.” 

Madar sought to build a more participatory and democratic society, and in 1946, Madar received an opportunity to put those ideals into practice when she was promoted to Director of the International Union’s Recreation Department, where she used her experience to grow the union’s burgeoning sports programs.

In the years that followed, Madar’s leadership expanded as the UAW rapidly grew, and ultimately, she became the first woman to rise to a Vice-President position in the UAW. She was a key organizer in the Fair Play In Bowling campaign to end segregation in bowling facilities. Remembered for her career as a pioneering labor feminist, Mardar was deeply committed to elevating working-class women working in labor through her involvement with CLUW; building access to recreation and parks for all working-class people in Michigan; and advocating for Civil Rights and early environmental causes. Her social justice activities came chiefly through her work for the UAW. Of the 1,350,000 UAW members, 600,000 used the recreational programs by 1950, with the vast majority being sports, which suggested that UAW was one of the largest single athletic organizations of its day.

Olga Madar’s educational attainment and physical prowess helped her build a career in union sports that ultimately worked to bring scientific physical education and recreation to thousands of auto workers. From her early life as a star player, through her work in labor sports leadership and advocating for working-class women, Madar never forgot the power of both sport and unions to transform the lives of working people—women in particular—through athletics and a scientific approach to physical education.

In 1996, Madar died of a heart attack at the age of 80. Madar, forever the “troublemaker,” had been planning on being arrested in her wheelchair while supporting striking Detroit newspaper workers. 

*Author’s note: All primary source material found in the Olga Madar Papers, LP000203, and the UAW Recreation Department Collection, LP000188, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan. Access July 2nd, 2018.

Image credit: Olga Madar, UAW Executive Board Member, supporting Farah boycott pickets around Hudson’s in Detroit. Photograph by Fred Berk, 1973. Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.