Is there a way to access individual bits with a union?

I am writing a C program. I want a variable that I can access as a char but I can also access the specific bits of. I was thinking I could use a union like this...

typedef union 
{
    unsigned char status;
    bit bits[8];
}DeviceStatus;

but the compiler doesn't like this. Apparently you can't use bits in a structure. So what can I do instead?