4
The Illinois Woman’s Alliance

Who bids for the little children—
Body and soul and brain?

Who bids for the little children—
Young and without a stain?

“Will no one bid,” said England,
“For their souls so pure and white,

And fit for all good or evil
The world on their page may write?”

“We bid,” said Pest and Famine;
“We bid for life and limb;

Fever and pain and squalor,
Their bright young eyes shall dim.

When the children grow too many,
We’ll nurse them as our own,

And hide them in secret places,
Where none may hear their moan.”

“I bid,” said Beggary, howling;
“I bid for them one and all!

I’ll teach them a thousand lessons—
To lie, to skulk, to crawl!

They shall sleep in my lair like maggots,
They shall rot in the fair sunshine:

And if they serve my purpose
I hope they’ll answer thine.”

“I’ll bid you higher and higher,”
Said Crime with a wolfish grin;

“For I love to lead the children
Through the pleasant paths of sin.

They shall swarm the streets to pilfer,
They shall plague the broad highway,

They shall grow too old for pity
But ripe for the law to slay.

“Give me the little children,
Ye good, ye rich, ye wise,

And let the busy world spin round
While ye shut your idle eyes;

And your judges shall have work,
And your lawyers wag the tongue,

And the jailers and policemen
Shall be fathers to the young!”

Charles MacKay
“The Children’s Auction”¹

During the six years of its existence, the Illinois Woman’s Alliance accomplished more in the way of practical reform and political education than many organizations that have lasted five times as long. Although it was founded and led by trade unionists and avowed socialists like Elizabeth Morgan and Corinne Brown, the Alliance drew in virtually every woman’s organization in Chicago. Each of the thirty organizations that belonged sent three delegates to Alliance meetings, but press reports—the only record we have of the organization’s work—make it clear that the left and labor delegates led the coalition: they headed the most active committees, were among the hardest workers, and were the source of most of the Alliance’s programs. For this reason, the Alliance is a key example of the merging of the labor movement and the broad women’s movement under socialist leadership. Perhaps because of its close connection with the labor and socialist movements, its work is seldom mentioned in history books.² It deserves to be remembered because it shows what a united front can achieve, even in such a nonrevolutionary situation as prevailed in Chicago’s Gilded Age, where public policy was openly made by the corporations and implemented by one of the earliest and most highly developed big-city political machines. The Alliance bucked both in its campaigns for factory inspection, new schools, compulsory education, sweatshop regulation, public baths, an end to child labor, and no more police victimization of prostitutes.

The stimulus for the formation of the Alliance was a series of investigative reports entitled “City Slave Girls,” published in the Chicago Times in the summer of 1888. At the August 18 meeting of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union, the members discussed little else. Lizzie Swank Holmes recalled her difficulties in organizing garment workers: “It is a hard point to get the girls to admit the exact conditions they are in, as they are proud and sensitive about letting anyone know how little they really earn and how wretched their lives are. They struggle on to the fainting point to keep up appearances.” Elizabeth Morgan told how her sister had tried to live on the $2 a week she got making men’s ties in a sweatshop; she had then worked around the clock in a succession of small tailor shops, only to find herself cheated out of her wage packet in five different places. “Until the Times took up the cause of working girls,” she said, “not a hand was raised in their defense.” Corinne Brown agreed: “We are in a position to know and the exposure of these truths touches us, members of women’s organizations as we are, much closer than any others.”³

They drew up a plan of action to take to various organizations and agencies, beginning with the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly. The plan focused on three demands:

1. The enforcement of existing factory and inspection ordinances. Tommy Morgan had introduced such legislation ten years previously, but the labor men appointed to the inspectors’ posts were paid $l,000 a year. Consequently, as the press pointed out, they never inspected anything except the salary attached to their office and their chances of holding onto it as long as possible; they spent their time doing electoral canvasing instead.⁴

2. The enforcement of compulsory education laws.

3. The appointment of women factory inspectors, “responsible to women’s organizations.”⁵

The CT&LA was enthusiastic and accepted a resolution that called for the formation of a united front against sweated labor, saying, that “inasmuch as the working classes are as yet too ignorant to use their numerical and political power for their own protection, therefore we respectfully request the humane element of the great middle class to lend their social and political influence to the agitation commenced by the Times for the protection of these poor, blind slaves of the industrial system.”⁶

By October 6 the women had managed to convene a meeting at the Palmer House which was attended by delegates of twenty-five women’s organizations. At this meeting was born the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, a broad coalition united front of forces, including church groups, professional women’s organizations, the labor movement, and the suffragists.⁷ Its first coordinating committee consisted of Corinne Brown as chairman, representing the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union; Caroline Hurling of the Cook County Suffrage Association; Annie H. White of the Woodlawn Reading Club; Elizabeth Morgan, representing the CT&LA; Jennie Howison of the Miriam Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic organization; Dr. Harriet Fox of the Women’s Physiological Society; Frances N. Owen of the Woodlawn Presbyterian Ladies’ Aid; and Alva Perry of the South End Flower Mission.

The Alliance’s manifesto, which it mailed out to 150 organizations with requests for help and endorsements, reflected the diversity of its members, combining an emphasis on social purity with a concern for sweated labor. “The sanitary conditions surrounding our working girls,” the manifesto read, “are a blot upon the nineteenth-century civilization, are destructive to womanly purity, are dwarfing the physique, starving the intellect, and weakening the morality of our children, thus sapping the very life-blood of our nation by destroying the manly and womanly virtues on which our country was founded.”⁸

Although Lizzie Swank Holmes was at early meetings of the Alliance, she soon dropped out. Her paper the Alarm was scornful of this motley united front: “The Alliance is composed of women delegates from twenty-six societies, Christians of all shades of orthodoxy, dress-reformers, women suffrage agitators, spiritualists, radicals and societies for almost every conceivable purpose.” Equally ridiculous to the anarchists was the idea that any significant reforms were possible under capitalism: “I supose they imagine they can regulate the laws of supply and demand, nullify the baleful result of ‘protected’ competition and the iron law, and compel capitalists to pay living wages by this sort of agitation.”⁹

Undeterred by such criticisms from the left, Alliance members developed innovative and sophisticated tactics for making their points. They picked up muckraking techniques developed by the progressives and successfully used both the labor and “capitalist” press. They sat in on meetings of the city council and the board of education, and haunted the police courts, issuing forth to deliver stinging denunciations. They took a leaf out of the ward bosses’ book and, led by Dr. Fanny Dickinson, established their own precinct committees. They refused to disclose these committees’ purposes but hinted darkly that they would spy upon the city’s sanitary machinery, reporting gross misconduct to the Alliance.

The work of the Alliance fell into four main areas: its campaign against sweatshops; its efforts to protect children, including legislation against child labor and for a compulsory education bill; its inspection tours of state institutions ranging from asylums to police courts, in order to expose their abuses; and its drive to get public baths in the working-class districts of Chicago.

While the Alliance’s inspection tours of public institutions carried on the charitable tradition of ladies visiting the poor, its campaign exposing abuses in the police courts had a different and more modern muckraking character. By focusing on police treatment of prostitutes, the Alliance could make both feminist and socialist points about the treatment of women, using every occasion to point out the discrimination against women inherent in the law. One member, for instance, told the press after visiting the Erring Woman’s Refuge:

The public, it appears, has not deemed it necessary to build a refuge to reform men who have betrayed these girls. … As the most of them are married men, it is presumed, I suppose, that within the sacredness of their homes the reform is to be accomplished by the pure and refining influence of their wives, whom they honor and cherish, and their little ones, whom they would shield from harm.¹⁰

The Alliance demanded that women no longer be convicted of prostitution unless the men involved were willing to come forward and bear witness against them, and that men as well as women be arrested for soliciting on the streets regardless “of the reputation of the woman solicited.”¹¹

Police abuses were flagrant in Gilded Age Chicago. The prime mover of the Alliance’s police committee, Fanny Kavanaugh, decided to observe the police courts personally and what she witnessed made her blood run cold. Women of the working-class districts were randomly rounded up and arrested as prostitutes on no evidence. These women were then fined or charged bail by the court bail bondsmen and released, only to be rounded up again within a few days or weeks. The bail bondsmen would persecute those released—or blackmail them—until they got their money back. These bail bondsmen were often saloonkeepers from the area around the precinct station, appointed on the basis of their political ties; Judge Tuley, a reformer, called them “vampires.” In one year, 1889, the police arrested and held over fifty thousand people, one-third of whom were “bailed out” the next morning and sent home without being charged. As Fanny Kavanaugh noted: “[The women] are arrested in droves and fined only according to their ability to earn, so that the bailer is sure of his fees, the shyster of his, and even the judge receives a small fee for signing the bond. After all the trouble of arrest and fleecing, the city usually gets about $1.”¹²

She observed other abuses as well. One woman was jailed overnight when she went to buy medicine for her sick child—apparently any woman out alone was fair game for the police. Eight children were arrested for sleeping under the sidewalk, even though they had nowhere else to go. A woman came to the precinct to find her husband, who had been held all night; when she asked why he had not been booked, she was arrested and fined $1 for impertinence.¹³

The Alliance’s revelations got sensational publicity and Fanny Kavanaugh was barred from the Harrison Street police station. With help from reformers like Judge Tuley and Judge John Altgeld (soon to be governor), she directed the press toward the fact that the constitutional rights of Americans—particularly that of habeus corpus, or the right to a trial—were being denied to those who were poor and female. A worker herself, a member of the LFLU Local No. 2703 and the first woman to be appointed to the executive board of the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, Fanny Kavanaugh was “very emphatic” in her belief that such matters as prostitution were the proper province of the labor movement. As she told a reporter:

First, as far as the women themselves are concerned, the public should remember that our terrible economic conditions, tending ever to lower women’s wages, even to the starvation point, drive women and young girls rendered desperate by destitution annually by countless thousands into a life of shame. It is therefore the imperative duty of organized labor, until such time as our industrial conditions shall be readjusted upon a more equitable basis, to extend to these unfortunates the protection and assistance denied them elsewhere, and to see that in the police courts, to which for the purposes of plunder they are periodically and systematically dragged, they obtain at least the modicum of Justice to which they are entitled.¹⁴

She was opposed to the Samuel Gompers type of pure-and-simple trade unionism, believing that unions should be the organized arm of the working class as a whole, responsible for guarding its economic, social, and political interests. This broad approach to class interests, combined with feelings of feminist solidarity and a concern for children, led the Alliance in 1891 to formulate its fundamental principles as follows;

1. The actual status of the poorest and most unfortunate woman in society determines the possible status of every woman.

2. The civilization of the future depends upon the present condition of the children.

3. Public money and public officials must serve public ends.¹⁵

One of the Alliance’s most successful campaigns, begun in 1889, was for an improved compulsory education system, which it saw as the best way of dealing with, the evils of child labor. The Alliance estimated that there were at least fifty thousand children between the ages of seven and fourteen in Chicago “who were unaccounted for, who did not go to school or work.”¹⁶ That meant that they were working in sweatshops or wandering about the streets. Upon investigation the Alliance found further horrors; at least ten thousand children were sleeping in the streets because they had no other home.¹⁷ Furthermore, although the school board had $2 million in unspent money, it had built no new school buildings, while the existing schools were so dilapidated and the number of places in them so inadequate that thousands of children were on half-days.¹⁸ To the women of the Alliance the need for both stricter enforcement and stronger laws was undeniable; public education was in a state of emergency.

But the issue was complex in ways the women of the Alliance did not fully take into account. To them the choices were clear; child labor or education, ignorance or literacy, the streets or the schools. Opposition to public education, however, came not only from those who employed children, but also from the parents of working children, who feared that the loss of their wages would mean starvation for the entire family. Concerned about the short- run effects of reform, some parents did not realize that child labor depressed adult wages; in the long run the standard of living of families with working children would be improved if they stopped. Other parents feared the “Americanization” programs in the schools; Why should their children learn to speak English instead of their parents’ language? Why should they be taught different customs and beliefs than those of the old country? Why should they learn all kinds of highfalutin, impractical things rather than a trade? Still other parents preferred parochial schools for religious and cultural reasons, and although the campaign for public education was not aimed at children who were already in parochial schools, the Catholic and Missouri Synod Lutheran hierarchies opposed public education laws, fearing the imposition of secular standards—such as an English language requirement—on their own institutions.

Despite this disquiet among some working-class parents, public education was supported by most organized workers. They detested child labor. They wanted their children to be able to read, to do sums, to speak the language of the country they lived in, and to make a better future for themselves than their parents had. Public education was a thing to fight for.

The fight focused on two issues; the hiring of female school inspectors and graft at the board of education. Corinne Brown, head of the Alliance’s education committee, led the campaign. A single-taxer turned socialist and a veteran of the city’s school system, she had been a teacher for thirteen years and a principal for six, after which she married a broad-minded banker and retired to Woodlawn, spending her time in the feminist and socialist movements. She had been radicalized by the Haymarketaffair, and was one of the founders of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union. Fellow socialist Gertrude Breslau-Hunt, a longtime friend, described her in a memorial tribute:

Mrs. Brown was intellectually adventurous, afraid of nothing, “trying all things,” discarding superstitions, speculations and conventional lies for science and practical sociology. She was keen and logical, warm-hearted and sympathetic, which fact was often hidden from the unobserving by her quick, sometimes abrupt manner and merciless stripping off of merely conventional husks of sentiment not backed up by serious effort to remove causes of suffering.¹⁹

Her vitriolic style was one of the things that endeared her to the press and gave the campaign for pubic education such panache.

The demand for inspectors who would represent the movement and not owe their jobs to the Democratic patronage system was part of the Alliance’s strategy for uncovering abuses. They wanted female inspectors in both sweatshops and schools, and school inspectors with police powers in each ward. In response, two women, one a member of the Alliance and the other a member of the Chicago Women’s Club, were actually appointed school inspectors, but the fact that they were given salaries raised a problem in the relations between the Alliance and the CT&LA.

Many of the middle-class women in the Alliance saw factory and school inspector jobs as ideal, since they combined financial independence with social service, and felt they had a right to them once they had called them into existence. The CT&LA, on the other hand, had had ten years of experience with paid inspectors chosen from their own ranks and was convinced that such workers inevitably became part of the political machine that ran the city. As the CT&LA secretary noted: “Union after union was brought under [the machine’s] control…. All the important offices in the labor organizations were filled by office holders or their friends…. The factory, workshop and tenement house ordinance was dead, and every pretense of inspection made in its name was farce…”²⁰ The CT&LA had passed a rule excluding any paid officeholders from membership; it urged the Alliance to do the same and also to forbid anyone running for office to use the name of the Alliance or its officers in any electoral petition.

The Alliance gave in, passing an amendment to its constitution that said no one could retain her membership while holding a public office, though she could regain it afterward. Reporting back to the CT&LA, Elizabeth Morgan noted with some annoyance that the Alliance also gave a vote of thanks to all those who had signed the electoral petition asking that two of its members be made school inspectors:

This illogical action was due to the fact that, though the women insist upon political and social equality, they refuse to patiently listen to criticism or receive advice, claiming exemption because they are women and have a right to do as they please anyhow.²¹

The two new female school inspectors set to work energetically to uncover abuses. They did such a good job, in fact, that the board of education soon Bred them. The Chicago News reported:

Truant officers, under orders from the Board of Education, have stopped work. They were forbidden to pick up any more children from the street, to make house-to-house visits, or to threaten any with the reform school. Their efforts were to be confined to looking after truant children reported by principals of schools. Strange to say, these lists soon became so scant that truant officers found their work almost gone—a condition of affairs but one step removed from the present, when they are finally laid off duty altogether.²²

The Alliance concluded that the inspectors were fired for doing their jobs, and when one was reappointed a few months later, Elizabeth Morgan noted, “We fear that the reappointed inspector will (after this course of discipline) have a clearer official comprehension of the value of official inactivity.”²³

As a result of the firings, the Alliance decided that one of its priorities would be to get more than one woman on the board of education so that they could at least know what was going on. They laid out their arguments in a letter to the mayor:

The greatest responsibility of the domestic life is the training of children, for upon that depends the full development of that individual character which is the bulwark of the nation. When it was brought to our notice…. that there were many children of tender age being deprived of an education and forced to work in shops and stores, we became convinced that woman’s whole duty could not be performed when confined within home walls.

For thirty-three years men alone have served on the Board of Education, appointed especially for their financial ability, and it may be well to look at the condition of the schools at the end of that time. To begin with, the whole school property was valued at $12,000,000 and there was to the credit of the board nearly two millions in available cash, and despite this there were 60,000 children on the streets, in shops and stores, who, according to law, should have been in school. Notwithstanding the ample funds, children were crowded into damp and dark basement rooms, as in the Franklin school, many even waiting their turn to claim a seat in the lower division…. There were more than two hundred half-day divisions….

We do not want to be understood as censuring the men who have managed the schools. They have done the best they could. But as we cannot expect to find the best example of domestic discipline in a home solely under a father’s care, neither do we expect to find it in schools managed by men alone.²⁴

This argument represents a combination of feminism and social uplift that became standard among that part of the feminist movement most influenced by the settlement houses. It is an interesting contrast to the kind of argument that was used by Elizabeth Morgan and Fanny Kavanaugh in the sweatshop and police court campaigns where feminist thinking was combined with a much stronger class orientation.

The mayor disregarded the Alliance’s petition and the women decided to appoint their own watchdog committee to report on board of education meetings. To the press, at any rate, the reason for the mayor’s recalcitrance was clear: protection of graft. “Certain male members of the Board of Education of Chicago and Cook County claim that the reason they are opposed to having women on the Board is because they cannot understand the intricacies and mysteries of the morals involved in the financial matters that the Board has to deal with, and their presence makes them very uneasy when financial affairs are under consideration.²⁵

The Alliance did, in fact, continually uncover graft. On one occasion the women petitioned the city council to ask the board to answer the following questions:

1. Why does the board during each of six months of the school year defer for one week payment of the teachers’ salaries?

2. Where is the money deposited?

3. Why does the board during the months of January, February, and March withhold until the last of April 25 percent of the teachers’ salaries?

4. Does the money thus kept back from the teachers’ salaries draw interest and for whose benefit?

5. Why is no mention made of this practice in the annual report?²⁶

The board declared itself extremely insulted that it had not been addressed directly, but did not deign to answer the questions, its main line of defense being, “Who are these people who are asking these questions? … Never heard of them before!” One reporter declared that, from the look on the women’s faces, board members would be lucky if they didn’t hear of them again?²⁷

The women continued to press their demands for more school buildings, the enforcement of the truancy law, equal pay for women teachers and inspectors, and the appointment of three women to the board. The board reacted to this pressure with temper tantrums and by breaking all the appointments it made with Alliance members. It told the press that “the Alliance is possessed of a curious idea that it can fully grasp the subject [of schools] by an attendance of its agents for two hours every two weeks at the formal meetings of the board.”²⁸ Corinne Brown responded in her most acid tone:

No, gentlemen; inexperienced and credulous we may be, but we have never been so void of ordinary intelligence as to expect to learn from the board anything of the public schools. We have attended your meetings to become acquainted with you and to find out how you succeed in doing so little. Our interest is centered upon the children, the moral protection and the methods of teaching afforded them, subjects which you severely let alone.²⁹

One of the women’s most substantial victories in the campaign for public education came early, when a bill they sponsored in the state legislature passed with surprisingly little opposition and was signed into law in May 1889. It provided for a twelve- to twenty- four-week school year for children between seven and fourteen (the variation being due to the different conditions on farms and in the city), though it had many loopholes for child labor with parental consent. In March of the following year the Alliancenoted with satisfaction that at least sixteen hundred more children were in Chicago schools than had been there the year before. And by February 1891, when Elizabeth Morgan summed up the work of the Alliance, the record was undeniably impressive;

In regard to education and child labor the Woman’s Alliance has proved itself far more active and effective than the trade and labor unions. Through the efforts of the Alliance the educational laws of the state have been improved and the laws more strictly enforced. Truant officers have taken thousands of children from the streets and placed them in the schools.

Female factory inspectors have been appointed at the request of the Alliance, and their work promises to bring about valuable and permanent improvements in the environment of the wage-workers of Chicago, and tends to render the employment of children under 14 years of age unprofitable, if not wholly impossible. Moreover, through the organization and activity of the Alliance, a more intimate knowledge of the conditions under which females and children are forced to work in the industrial and commercial hives of the city has not only been obtained by its members, but through them the organizations they represent and the general public have derived a clearer comprehension of that greatest of all questions: the labor question.

The investigations of the Alliance have also added further proof that low wages and the general unfavorable conditions of employment are the primal cause of prostitution and crime.³⁰

When Corinne Brown, Elizabeth Morgan, and others had organized the LFLU Local No. 2703 in 1888, they had immediately come up against the increasing problem of sweatshops; this was the impetus for the formation of the Illinois Woman’s Alliance. How could women workers so concentrated in the “sweated industries” be unionized, while whole families were forced to labor twelve and fourteen hours a day for less than a living wage in tenement house workshops, spread out in a vast number of scattered buildings? Not only were the workers difficult to find, they lived so near the margin of starvation and were so dependent on each small fluctuation in the industry that it was nearly impossible for them to maintain an organization.

The conclusion was inescapable: before women could be organized into stable trade unions, child labor and sweatshops hadto be eliminated. The sweatshops must be brought under one roof; employment must become yearlong, not seasonal; and the children must go to school, not work.

The Alliance’s first approach to both child labor and sweatshops was their campaign for factory inspectors. In May 1889 the Alliance committee, with support from the CT&LA, asked the city council for five inspection badges; it further requested that an equal number of men and women be appointed as volunteer inspectors. The mayor did not respond. After a month, a committee of thirteen women from the Alliance invaded a city council health committee meeting. The health committee passed the issue to the legal committee, which brought it up at the next city Council meeting, where a spirited debate broke out on the issue of inspectors serving without pay. Some aldermen were for this, on the ground that the need for reform was great and there was no money for salaries. Alderman Cullerton, noted for his opposition to the eight-hour legislation that had just been extended to public works programs, tried to get the matter sent back into committee; when this failed, he successfully proposed that the inspectors should be paid $50 a month out of health committee money.³¹ Many Alliance members were pleased; they were glad to get badges for women and hopeful that the mayor would choose from their list of nominations, thus nţaking clear his support for their work. The CT&LA held to its antisalary position and noted that the object of getting volunteer inspectors was to pressure those who were already paid to do their duty; the new measure would only create more professional officeholders.

In fact, the mayor was in no hurry to appoint either paid or volunteer women. By the following October he had chosen only one inspector. He then asked the Alliance to provide him with new names, preferably those of widows, so that the city could help them support their children. The Alliance indignantly responded that they would stick by the names they had already submitted, and that while they regretted that any woman should be bereaved, they did “not think it right to use a public office as a means of relief.”³² One newspaper accused the Alliance of “extraordinary heartlessfiess” and “inexcusable snobbery,” sarcastically remarking that “only ladies needing no salary may make application. Ladies with carriages and footmen are preferred.”³³ Alliance members replied that their object was to clean up the sweatshops, and women with no patronage ties would do that most relentlessly.

It was for one of these jobs that Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, busy writing letters to the board of health about dirty restrooms, was only briefly considered because she had no friends with influence. Of course, she was not a widow either. Only one of the Alliance’s nominees, Dr. Rachel Hickey, was ever appointed; though it was an achievement to have won women the right to be factory inspectors at all. But it soon became clear that two or three factory inspectors could do little, particularly when they were chosen by the Democratic machine. In the end, the exposures of sweatshop conditions that led to change did not come from city inspectors, but from the labor movement itself, at first alone and then with the added help of the social workers and progressives around Hull House.

In August 1891, in response to a request from Abraham Bisno’s striking cloakmakers, the CT&LA decided to make its own investigation of sweated labor in the garment industry. A committee composed of labor racketeer Skinny Madden, CT&LA secretary Mark Mitchell, and Elizabeth Morgan set out, followed by a crowd of newspapermen and journalistic artists with sketchbooks. Although some of the “sweaters” had been warned of the invasion and had closed up shop, others were taken by surprise. In one shop, a journalist interviewed the child workers:

“How old are you, Ida?”

“Eleven years.”

“How many hours do you work?”

“From 7 until 9.”

“How much do they give you?”

“One dollar a week. I only work half a day on Saturday, though. Yes, of course I work on Sunday. Fourteen hours is a day’s work in this shop. No, I don’t get any board. I live with mother. I have a brother who earns a little money. They put me to work when I was 9 years old. I am three years in this country and have been working ever since. I get 10 cents a dozen for making knee pants.”³⁴

Other children were afraid to speak up—one girl of thirteen trembled uncontrollably and said, “For God’s sake don’t put my name in the paper. They will kill me. It is worse than slavery.”

The worst shops were those subcontracted by philanthropist J. V. Farwell, known as a pillar of the church. One was a tiny 10-foot-square basement room where ten men and thirteen young girls worked. Some of the girls earned only $3 for a sixty- to seventy-hour week making velvet cloaks for the luxury trade. It was at this shop that Mark Mitchell of the CT&LA burst out: “They are Jews. The thing that cuts me is that they are all my people, and I love my people. They talk of bringing millions of Jews here from Russia to avoid the persecution of the Czar. Is this what they propose to bring them to? The tyranny of the Russian administrative system is preferable to their condition here. They are simply slaves—these my poor countrymen and women.”³⁵

The committee visited thirty sweatshops and its findings were widely circulated in the press and in a CT&LA pamphlet entitled The New Slavery: Investigation into the Sweating System …. published with a special vote of thanks to Elizabeth Morgan.³⁶ Many of the leaders of the Chicago labor movement had, like the Morgans, been child laborers in the British Isles. They were horrified to see the sweatshop system that had stolen their childhood, and had then been brought under control by the British ten-hours bill and the inspection acts of 1847, being introduced into the United States. After describing the indignities of the sweating system and referring to the example of Britain, the CT&LA pamphlet went on:

The sweat shop may now be found only here and there, hid away from public view on only an occasional block, but the system is developing rapidly, and unless stamped out it will extend until whole sections of this city will be swallowed up by it, and the degradation of labor will then be complete.³⁷

The CT&LA pamphlet appealed to the community’s sense of human decency, as well as to its fear of contagion: the glaucoma, scarlet fever, diptheria, and smallpox that infested the sweatshops would inevitably spread throughout the community on the clothes made there. Settlement workers like Florence Kelley who were concerned with public health used this argument repeatedly, especially after the smallpox epidemic of 1894. Abraham Bisno of the cloakmakers’ union found other arguments more pressing but recognized that different emphases were the basis of a united front:

The assault we made on home work, too, was inspired by different motives. The public sought to guard itself against contagious disease, normally prevalent in the homes of the poor families doing the work. In our case, we wished to abolish home work because it was possible for us to organize our people much more efficiently when large numbers of them were working in the larger shops. So while the newspapers and churches were agitating for one set of motives, the unions who supported the bill were mainly inspired by the economic motive.³⁸

In January 1892 Florence Kelley, a socialist, a friend of Friedrich Engels, and the translator of his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, moved to Chicago in order to get a divorce—the Illinois law was more permissive about women retaining custody of their children than that of her native Pennsylvania. While working in Philadelphia Florence Kelley had become familiar with the work of the Illinois Woman’s Alliance and had formed a similar but smaller organization, the Workingwomen’s Society of Philadelphia, in March 1889. Its object was to help women form organizations for

self-protection, enlightenment, mutual aid and benefit, and for obtaining and enforcing legislation in the interest of the working class, by ( I ) gathering into a central society all those devoted to the cause of organization among wage-earning women; adopting a label, collecting statistics, publishing facts, furnishing information and advice; (2) founding organizations in trades in which they do not already exist, and cooperating with existing societies to the end of raising wages, shortening hours, and improving conditions of labor.³⁹

Florence Kelley moved into Hull House and had a major role in turning the settlement away from its purely social service and cultural uplift orientation to one embracing social action as well. She was aided by Alzina Stevens, who had returned to Chicago and also lived in Hull House. The two plunged into the sweatshop campaign, and in April Florence Kelley wrote Engels in great excitement:

We have a colony of efficient and intelligent women living in a workingmen’s quarter, with the house used for all sorts of purposes by about a thousand persons a week. The last form of its activity is the formation of unions of which we have three, the cloakmakers, the shirtmakers and the bookbinders. Next week we are to take the initiative in the systematic endeavor to clear out the sweating dens. There is a fever heat of interest in that phase of the movement just at present. Senator Sherman Hoar is travelling about the country looking into the dens at night and unattended. The Trades Assembly is paying the expenses of weekly mass meetings, and the sanitary authorities are emphasizing the impossibility of their coping, unaided, with the task allotted to them. So we may expect some of the palliative measures pretty soon.⁴⁰

A three-pronged legislative strategy was developed. It included enforcing existing sanitary ordinances; strengthening and enforcing child labor, truancy, and compulsory education laws; and passing an eight-hour bill for women. The first two demands came from the labor and women’s movements; the last came primarily from the legislature, with heavy support from Hull House. Although the Chicago labor movement had been agitating for an eight-hour day for many years, notably in 1886, it had not envisioned that it would come about through state legislation: many trade unionists and radicals thought they would win the eight-hour day through large-scale social agitation combined with a general strike, while a few thought revolution would be necessary. (Indeed it should be noted that the eight-hour day is more a fiction than a reality even today, when compulsory overtime prevails in heavy industry, and many workers would question whether time-and-a-half compensates for a sixty- or seventy-hour week and its effect on family life.)

Senator Hoar’s visit to Chicago in April 1892, his sweatshop tours, led by Elizabeth Morgan and Florence Kelley, and their testimony before his committee all caused a furor in the press and focused the national spotlight on conditions in Chicago. Such publicity could not escape the notice of the state legislature, which proceeded to climb on the bandwagon. In February several state legislators came to Chicago for the famous tour and one told the press he was preparing legislation on the eight-hour day. Covernor Altgeld had just been elected, and a reforming spirit was in the air. Anything seemed possible.

Considering that labor had been virtually unregulated until this time, the bill that was introduced contained a number of startling provisions. All of them would make sweated labor far less profitable than it had been: children under the age of fourteen could not be employed in manufacturing; women and children could only work an eight-hour day; employers were required to have on file a physician’s certificate of health and an affidavit of age for all children between fourteen and sixteen; the board of health was empowered to search and confiscate goods found in tenement workshops that violated the sanitary code. And finally, manufacturers were required to furnish the names and addresses of their subcontractors and workers, thus enabling unions to find and organize them.

The CT&LA, the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, and Hull House joined to lobby for the bill, holding countless meetings and sending delegation after delegation of workers and reformers to Springfield. One Chicago mass meeting drew twenty-five hundred people; on the stage next to the union banners hung a man’s shirt with a placard showing the effects of sweated labor: “Paid for making, per dozen: in 1890, $1.55. In 1893, 90 cents.” A large and varied group sat near the podium, including labor racketeers Skinny Madden and Billy Pomeroy; Senators Hoar and Noonan; Tommy and Elizabeth Morgan; reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd; Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr of Hull House; and a large number of clergymen. Mary Kenney chaired the meeting.

The speeches reflected the varied composition of this united front. Reverend V. P. Gifford gave the keynote speech. After discussing the dangers of contagion and the need for good Samaritans, he ended: “The man should make the money and the woman remain at home to care for it. Work should not be added to her burden of childbearing”—a statement that any number of the women present must have resented. Henry Demarest Lloyd, on the radical end of the spectrum, presented a large number of resolutions on sweated labor and tenement housing, and went on to say that if these evils were not cured, the garment industry should be nationalized. He called for pressure on the legislature and the formation of consumers’ leagues.⁴¹

Much to the surprise of all concerned, particularly the manufacturers of Illinois, the eight-hour bill passed the state assembly with little opposition. Outraged at this invasion of their prerogatives, the employers quickly formed a manufacturers’ association to agitate against the bill and have it proven unconstitutional in court. Under this pressure the united front of women and labor began to disintegrate. The damage was particularly marked in the Illinois Woman’s Alliance.

There had been struggles between the labor delegates and the middle-class reform elements in the Alliance before—over the question of payment for city inspectors and the issue of charity work. Some of the wealthier members of the Alliance saw both labor reform and orphanage visits as part of the same tradition of “friendly visiting” and philanthropic service. In the heat of the campaign for improved public school facilities, for instance, the Women’s Club, some of whose members also belonged to the Alliance, devoted most of its energy to a drive to collect clothing for poor school children. While this was a worthwhile endeavor, it was quite different from the political exposures and agitation favored by Corinne Brown, Elizabeth Morgan, and Fanny Kavanaugh.

Although the Alliance did not try to prevent its member organizations from doing such work, in May 1889 it voted not to engage in fundraising or other charity work. Caroline Hurling of the Cook County Suffrage Society, then president of the Alliance, argued that the Alliance had been formed to change the laws and win practical reforms rather than to do philanthropic or service work:

We want to put ourselves on record concerning this charity matter right now. Why should private charities do, and continue forever to do, what rightfully should be done by the State? The City has money, and so has the State, to do these things and they ought to do them. Let us get at the source of the evil rather than palliate its results.⁴²

As the Alliance’s work developed, contradictions in members’ goals and outlook came increasingly to the surface. In November 1891 there was a fierce struggle over whether to support the women shoemakers who were on strike at Selz Schwab. Corinne Brown offered a resolution in support of the strike which passed only after much debate and by a small majority. Those opposed felt the resolution was “an endorsement of strikes generally and hence contrary to the spirit of the Alliance.”⁴³ This was a slap in the face for both Elizabeth Morgan and Mary Kenney, who had organized the union at Selz Schwab, the former as a member of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union, the latter during her tenure as AFL organizer.

Corinne Brown then declined to serve as president of the Alliance again, and Elizabeth Morgan resigned from the board. Fanny Kavanaugh had nearly resigned from the police committee a few months before when she was told that “the Alliance no longer believed her reports on police matters.”⁴⁴ Some members apparently felt her work was being treated sensationally in the press while other Alliance work was ignored. The tide was clearly changing. The labor members had stressed economic questions and structural remedies for social wrongs, but many of them were missing Alliance meetings in order to work for the eight-hour law. In their absence, a shift in tone became apparent in reports of Alliance meetings, and factional activity and backbiting increased.

At one meeting in 1892, for instance, the main topic of discussion was the liberalization of the divorce laws, a subject of general interest. This was, however, followed by a discussion of a resolution “that some of the present cooking utensils are unfit for use and should be replaced by new ones better adapted to cook fruit than the tin vessels heretofore used” presumably on the grounds of health. After this came a debate on whether female nurses should be expected as part of their duties to bathe helpless male patients, and another on the overcrowded state of the streetcars, which was making rush hour hard for working women and children; the Alliance decided to try to get women shoppers to travel at off-hours.⁴⁵

The manufacturers’ campaign against the eight-hour law intensified existing differences among Alliance members. A number of people who had been involved in the sweatshop campaign began to work on enforcing the new law; Governor Altgeld appointed Florence Kelley chief factory inspector, and she hired Abraham Bisno, Alzina Stevens, and Mary Kenney as deputies. They all did an enormous amount of work seeking out and publicizing illegal working conditions, but they soon found their efforts undermined; they could not get the city to take action against the offenders. Florence Kelley took the district attorney a case involving an eleven-year-old child who had been employed gilding picture frames and had lost an arm because of the poisonous fluid he used at work. The district attorney rebuffed her: “You bring me this evidence this week against some little two-by- six picture-frame maker, and how do I know you won’t bring me a suit against Marshall Field next week? I’m overloaded. I wouldn’t reach this case inside two years.”⁴⁶

In an effort to combat this subversion of the new law, members of the Women’s Shoemakers’ Union introduced a resolution at an Alliance meeting in February 1894, “strongly condemning the manufacturers of this city for combining to nullify the State laws.” They stated that, as women workers, they unanimously approved of the law and “pleaded for its maintenance and enforcement.”⁴⁷ The Alliance voted not to support the resolution.

We can only speculate as to why this happened. Perhaps the Alliance had been taken over by an antilabor clique. Maybe it had been less solidly prolabor from the beginning than it appeared, and had merely been drawn into doing good things by the charisma of Elizabeth Morgan and others, who had now turned their attention to other matters. Perhaps members of the Manufacturers’ Association had bribed, blandished, terrified, or used husbandly influence to make Alliance members take their side. There are no answers in the record.

It is clear, however, that at least one new officer of the Alliance, a Mrs. Fixen who was serving as corresponding secretary, had ties to the Manufacturers’ Association. At the meeting after the unfortunate vote against the eight-hour law, Elizabeth Morgan stormed in and asked, on behalf of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union, to see the minutes; she demanded that the Alliance reconsider its position. This was done, and a new pro-eight-hour resolution was passed without much open opposition. But instead of officially informing the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union of thisdevelopment as she was supposed to, Mrs. Fixen “by some mistake addressed her communications to the Secretary of the Manufacturers’ Association,”⁴⁸ who wrote and asked the Alliance to give him equal time to present the manufacturers’ side. When the Alliance agreed, it became clear to some of its members that it was no longer the prolabor force it was intended to be, but had become a neutral body which was planning to coolly consider each side of the case and judge between them.

In an ineffectual attempt to wipe the slate clean, the Alliance then challenged the Manufacturers’ Association to a public debate on the eight-hour law. The meeting was held in April, and more than a thousand people attended. Elizabeth Morgan chaired the meeting, and speakers included Henry Demarest Lloyd; Ellen Henrotin of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, a devoted advocate of the bill; Dr. Bayard Holmes; and Tommy Morgan. The representatives of the Manufacturers’ Association failed to show up, however. Instead, they sent a letter explaining that they opposed the eight-hour law because Illinois industry would be put at a disadvantage and would leave the state, and because the law would “supplant female with male labor,” robbing women of one-fifth of their earnings and all their freedom of contract.⁴⁹

Soon after this meeting, the factory legislation the Alliance was trying to support perished, struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court in the spring of 1894. The Illinois Woman’s Alliance did not long outlive the eight-hour bill. Many labor organizations had already withdrawn from it because of “petty differences and personal spites…. Strongminded females with axes to grind [were in control of the organization and] the results are chaos and failure.”⁵⁰

The final episode in the Alliance’s demise seems to have been its opposition to Kate Bradley’s candidacy for the board of education. She was an Alliance member who was strongly supported by the CT&LA, which had gathered 40,000 petition signatures on her behalf. The Alliance opposed her, according to the labor press, “for the ridiculous reason that she had been reared in a convent.”⁵¹ After this final affront, the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union withdrew from the Alliance, charging that it had “publicly and unnecessarily antagonized the organized labor movement” and that their objective in founding the Alliance, “the protection of women and children … now appears to have [been] entirely forgotten.”⁵²

There seems to have been little disposition on the part of labor and socialist forces to stay and fight for leadership of the organization, although only two years earlier it had been the major reform voice in the city on issues concerning women and children. When serious contradictions arose within the united front of women, its labor and socialist members, feeling disappointed and betrayed, turned away in disgust. In October 1894, the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union called a meeting of delegates from “every union organization in the city composed wholly or in part of women,” as well as the few Working Girls Clubs. They wished to form an organization to replace the Alliance, but this time there would be no middle-class members; the working class would go it alone:

The object of the council is to concentrate action for the improvement of the condition of women, girls, and children. The prime movers in the plan were at one time members of the Woman’s Alliance, but on the control of that organization passing into the hands of a class not interested in the betterment of conditions for members of their own sex, the delegates from trades’ unions withdrew … [and] a small clique of the members reigned supreme.⁵³

Elizabeth Morgan announced that the new organization would be at work by the following legislative session, but her prediction proved overly optimistic. Other splits in the labor movement intervened and prevented the new coalition from coming into existence. At the December 1894 AFL convention, the Morgans and other radicals suffered a severe defeat; they had come close to getting a socialist program passed but were outmaneuvered by Gompers, whose brand of pure-and-simple trade unionism was consolidated in the AFL from that time forward. Furiously disappointed, Tommy Morgan joined other members of the Socialist Labor Party in forming a dual union, the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, to be made up only of revolutionary workers. This move effectively isolated the left wing of the labor movement from the masses of workers within it. After such a split the idea of a broad federation of women workers in Chicago could be only a dream. When the labor movement as a whole was divided, the female workers could hardly be united.⁵⁴

At its peak, the Illinois Woman’s Alliance demonstrated the strengths of a united front of women. It brought together most of Chicago’s women’s organizations under the leadership of working- class and socialist women, with strong support from the labor movement, and it worked to improve the general conditions of working-class women and children. But its very success provoked the opposition of the manufacturing class, and this in turn brought the class contradiction within the Alliance to the surface. The charity-mindedness of many middle-class members and their failure to show solidarity with the women of the labor movement at a moment of crisis made a struggle for leadership of the movement necessary, but rather than engage in that struggle, the socialist and labor women withdrew from the Alliance, just as their male counterparts were to withdraw from the AFL when their program was defeated. The Alliance could not exist without them and soon disappeared from history.

A united front, with its internal contradictions, always contains the possibility of betrayal, and struggle within it is inevitable. While it may be human to react to this by leaving, much is sacrificed by those who do so without a fight. It may be that even if the trade union and socialist women had stayed and fought for hegemony over the Alliance they would have lost. But one thing is certain: where there is no battle, there can be no victory; and when leadership of the whole women’s movement is voluntarily turned over to its bourgeois members, they will certainly take it.