The ideology of women's innate characteristics makes little sense except in comparative perspective. The construct of the docile, physically weak, nimble-fingered, and presumably nonunion woman worker simultaneously raised an equally mythological opposite: the clumsy, strong, aggressive, prounion male employee. Rather than reflecting actual biological or social attributes of either sex, these images spoke of the ideal type of workforce that management desired for its assembly lines. The stereotype of the female worker had less to do with any traits inherent in women than with the type of workers the company sought for the manufacture of particularly competitive goods. In a move unpredicted by anybody and unfathomable by most, however, the RCA employees were about to betray their reputation for tranquillity in what one writer called "labor's giant step" into mass-production unionism.