In 1905, Lizzie Swank Holmes summed up her early work in an article for the AFL magazine, the American Federationist. She was proud and confident of the future of women in the labor movement.
Chicago is said to be the best organized city in the United States for women workers…. But that handful of humble, earnest, working women who laid the foundation of the present excellent organization, who “broke the ground,” as it were, who introduced the idea of solidarity to the indifferent, scoffing, or apathetic working women of thirty years ago, are never mentioned in the records of labor’s achievements. But they do not mind the neglect. They did not work for glory, but for the rights of poorly paid, toiling women and children, and they rejoice today to know that the class is recognized, and that the necessity of union and of mutual helpfulness is so well understood by working women in general.1
She had good reason to be proud of the work of the 1880s and 1890s, for the situation of women in Chicago’s labor movement was unique. Over thirty-seven thousand women were organized (as compared to five thousand in New York)2 in mixed and all-female locals. In 1903 Lou Grant, assistant secretary of the Illinois Bureau of Arbitration, found separate women’s locals among men’s clothing workers, paper box makers, school teachers, bindery girls, cracker packers, twine workers, rubber workers, shoe workers, can makers, telephone and switchboard operators, women’s clothing workers, knitters, janitresses, feather duster makers, woven wire mattress makers, picture frame makers, candy dippers, core makers, horse nail makers and novelty workers. Women were also in mixed locals of the printers, cigarmakers, commercial telegraphers, and post office clerks.3 It was an impressive achievement.
But it was short-lived. The industrial depression of 1907–1909 devastated these women’s unions, driving the women—the most marginal and lowest-paid workers at best—out of the labor force or forcing them to keep their jobs on their employers’ terms. By 1909 the results were clear; the president of the Women’s Trade Union League estimated that the number of women in Chicago unions was reduced to ten thousand, and there was not a single all-female local left.4
This decline in the number of female unionists was not matched by a similar decline in the number of men in unions, a number which remained constant throughout the period. Industrial cycles and employer persecution affected both sexes but affected them unevenly, because of women’s more insecure place in the work force and the fact that much of their value to the employer depended on their remaining marginal.
Employers were hostile to unions in general but found women’s unions intolerable—and not only because they were new. Industries that had not yet reached the monopoly stage, such as the garment industry with its thousands of small “cockroach” manufacturers, depended on the cheapness of female labor. If they had been compelled to pay women a living wage, many such manufacturers would have gone under. And the chief reason for the women’s cheapness was their lack of organization. Andrews and Bliss summed up the situation in their government report of 1911:
The low wages at which women will work form the chief reason for employing them at all. … A woman’s cheapness is, so to speak, her greatest economic asset. She can be used to keep down the cost of production where she is regularly employed. Where she has not been previously employed she can be introduced as a strike breaker to take the place of men seeking higher wages, or the threat of introducing her may be used to avert such a strike. But the moment she organizes a union and seeks by organization to secure better wages she diminishes or destroys what is to the employer her chief value.5
In times of depression when jobs were scarce, the argument that a woman’s place was in the home had considerable force among laboring men, who were often dubious at best about the need to organize women and did not recognize that women had joined the industrial work force to stay. The men had themselves only recently begun to form stable unions, and in many industries these were also hard pressed. The AFL was becoming increasingly conservative, and radical influence on its leadership was declining, particularly after a large part of its left wing seceded again in 1904 to form the Industrial Workers of the World, and began to build revolutionary industrial unions among the unskilled workers that the AFL had neglected. It is impossible to know whether or not the male unions could have sustained women’s locals if they had given them more assistance, since they barely tried. As Alice Kessler-Harris has noted, the end result of the AFL’s attitude was “to divide the working class firmly along gender lines and to confirm women’s position as a permanently threatening underclass of workers who finally resorted to the protection of middle-class reformers and legislators to ameliorate intolerable working conditions.”6
Other things changed with the turn of the century. The socialist and feminist movements became too divided to do consistent united front work. In 1901, disgusted with the sectarianism of the Socialist Labor Party, a number of influential radicals formed the Socialist Party. This in turn developed a gap between its left and right wings that by 1912 had become unbridgeable. The feminist movement was dominated by the mainstream National American Women’s Suffrage Association, and radical feminists from the Congressional Union (later called the National Woman’s Party) had split off to develop more militant tactics in the suffrage battle Another sector of the feminist movement, often called the social feminists, led by settlement workers like Jane Addams, remained concerned with working women and was instrumental in the formation of the Women’s Trade Union League. The League could occasionally muster support from the whole united front of women, as in the 1909 shirtwaist makers’ strike, but these moments became increasingly rare and fragile. Because of all these schisms, those who were trying to organize working women could no longer assume the kind of united support that had helped Elizabeth Morgan and Corinne Brown.
The following chapters examine the united front of women in this period of fragmentation, with particular emphasis on the Women’s Trade Union League, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Socialist Party as they dealt with the question of alliances across class lines or, in the case of the IWW, unity between housewives and working women.