Until the development of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, the most diligent searcher for women in the pages of U.S. labor history could find them only sporadically. They would suddenly appear, only to disappear again like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, leaving just a smile behind. In recent years more attention has been paid to the history of working-class women. At this stage much of the work is still in survey form (necessary when the ground is so unknown) or is focused on particular organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League.1 Not enough detailed research has yet been done to enable us to develop a solid theoretical understanding of the problems involved in connecting women’s history and labor history. Still less do we have a body of elegant theory on the relationship of the working- class struggle to women’s liberation. This book is an initial attempt to study that relationship at one moment in our history.
It is based on certain presumptions: the labor movement is not the same as the working-class movement as a whole, nor can the history of working-class women be restricted to the history of women in unions. Much work remains before we can develop an accurate sense of the intricate relations between workplace and home, union and community organization, socialist and feminist group, street and kitchen and school and bedroom, as these have occurred in history. The web of connections that bind all these together in the life of one woman can be like a spiderweb, preventing her from moving. Yet when a strong enough wind is blowing, the whole web and all the women in it can be seen to move together, and this is a new kind of movement, a new source of power and connectedness. For women, labor history comes attached to community history and family history and the history of reproduction. It involves not only class consciousness and the consciousness of national oppression, but also sex consciousness.
Unearthing and understanding such a complex history is a collective project, of which this book is only a tiny piece. I am confident that its limitations and omissions, as well as the errors it may contain, will be corrected by others; and if this work provokes such efforts it will have achieved its purpose. Its scope is limited, focusing mainly on organizations in two industrial cities, New York and Chicago, and dealing primarily with questions of political strategy as these were explored by socialists and feminists between the 1880s and World War I. Because black migration from the South did not really get underway on a large scale until after World War I, black women played little part in the organizing discussed here and are therefore underrepresented in this book. Nor was I able to do much more than touch on the personal and sexual concerns of the organizers I dealt with, despite the obvious ways these affect political work. In spite of these limitations, this book will make some of the political practice and strategic questions in our history accessible to those addressing similar problems today, in the hope that past concerns will enliven and broaden present ones.
I worked on this book for ten lean years, between 1969 and 1979, while holding a variety of jobs, doing political organizing, and raising a child. I could never have completed it without the help of a number of people who got me over the hard places in what seemed an endless journey. Sarah Eisenstein, to whom this book is dedicated, played a special role in the evolution of the thinking in it. She shared her own research with me, went over numerous drafts unstintingly, and was invariably precise in her criticisms, refusing to let me get away with sloppiness in thinking or formulation, and preventing me from getting so involved with the activists I was discussing that I forgot the level of consciousness and lack of organization of most women in this period. What rigor of thought there is here owes a lot to Sarah; it would be a better book if she had lived to see it finished, just as the world would be a different place if she were still in it.
Myra Rubin Murray helped me at a stage when I could not see how to move forward; she went over the manuscript in detail, encouraging me to make it true to my own ideas and intelligible to those who do not share them. She and Ann Snitow were its most enthusiastic critics from the first, steadfast in their belief in the usefulness of the project and in my ability to finish it. I could not have done so without them and their sustaining support.
Nor could I have gotten through the numerous rewrites of the book after its first publisher had rejected it without the encouragement of Kris Glen, Ginger Goldner, Ros Petchevsky, Elsa Rassback, and Ellen Ross. The final draft got a thorough going- over and minutely detailed criticisms from Elizabeth Ewen, Ann Snitow, and Sharon Thompson, each of whom spent a great deal of time helping me; their advice was invaluable. Support and practical assistance of various kinds along the way came from Hal Benenson, Temma Kaplan, and Diane Ostrofsky, as well as from my editor Susan Lowes.
In my early years of doing research and discussing women’s history, a number of historians were wonderfully generous in sharing their own research and thinking. Among them were Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, Ellen DuBois, Linda Gordon, Priscilla Long Irons, Robin Jacoby, and Susan Reverby. Rosalyn Baxandall in particular was unfailingly supportive over many years, consistently giving of both her time and her source materials, helping me keep abreast of current work in women’s history at moments when I was spending most of my time on other pursuits.
I used manuscript and research collections at a number of libraries, which are listed in the footnotes. Two librarians were especially helpful: Barbara Haber of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, and Dorothy Swanson of the Tamiment Library, now located at New York University.
To the women’s liberation movement and to the working women of Chicago and New York, past and present, I owe more than I can describe or repay. This book contains only the shadow of what I have learned from them.
—Meredith Tax