Foreword
1.Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning, Oakland: PM Press, 2012, p 128, 212.
2.Sarah Jaffe, “Why Did a Majority of White Women Vote for Trump?” New Labor Forum, January 2018 https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2018/01/18/why-did-a-majority-of-white-women-vote-for-trump/.
3.Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic, London, Verso, 2021.
Introduction to the 2021 Verso Edition: Forty Years Later
1.Cedric Robinson, “Preface to the 2000 edition,” Black Marxism, London: Penguin, 2000, xlix.
2.In 2020, only 10.8 percent of the US workforce were unionized; most of these union members were government workers. “News Release,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 22, 2021, BLS.gov. In the same year, 23.7 percent of workers in the United Kingdom were union members. D. Clark, “Percentage of Employees That Are Members of a Trade Union in the United Kingdom from 1995 to 2020,” June 7, 2021, Statista.com.
3.In the end, my speech proved too heterodox to be published in Monthly Review and ended up in Dissent: “The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Women’s Liberation and the Left,” Dissent, Fall 1988, available at MeredithTax.org.
4.Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution, Cologne, Germany: International Initiative and Mesopotamian Publishers, 2013, 52, Freeocalan.org.
5.Linda Burnham is an American journalist and organizer in women’s rights movements, particularly those serving women of color. She was a co-founder of the Third World Women’s Alliance and founder of the Women of Color Research Center in Oakland, and is now research director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
6.Linda Burnham, “The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework in Social Justice Organizing,” Center for the Education of Women, University of Michigan, July 2008, CEW.UMich.edu.
7.Fran Beal, interview by Loretta Ross, March 18, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, p. 40, cited in Burnham, “The Absence of a Gender Justice Framework.”
Introduction to the 2001 Edition: Twenty Years Later
1.I have told this story in other places and there is no need to repeat it here. See “I Had Been Hungry All the Years,” in Carol Ascher, Sarah Ruddick, Louise DeSalvo, eds., Between Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984; 2d ed., 1993); reprinted in Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds., Unequl Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also “For the People Hear Us Singing, ‘Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!’” in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, eds.. The Feminist Memoir Projet (New York: Crown, 1998).
2.Ralph Nader, The Ralph Nader Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), p. 7.
3.Patricia McFadden, speech at the Scholar and the Feminist Conference, Barnard College, April, 2000; author’s notes.
4.Ellie Smeal, “Dear Colleague,” mailed invitation to organize a delegation to the Feminist Expo.
5.Phone interview by author, July 3, 2000.
Preface
1. Recent surveys include: Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Godon, and Susan Rever-by, eds., America’s Working Women (New York: Random House, 1976); Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (New York: Free Press, 1979); and Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Random House, 1977). Recent work on the Women’s Trade Union League includes: Nancy Schrom Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League of New York, 1903–20,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974; Nancy Schrom Dye, “Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in the New York Trade Union League,” Feminist Studies 2, no. 2/3 (1975); Nancy Schrom Dye, “Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women’s Trade Union League and the Labor Movement,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975); Robin Miller Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League and American Feminism,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975) ; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975); Alice Kessler-Harris, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,” Labor History 17, no. I (Winter 1976).
Part 1: The United Front of Women
1. Theresa Malkiel, Women and Freedom (New York: Socialist Literature Company, 1915), p. 4.
2. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The I.W.W. Call to Women,” Solidarity 31 July 1915.
3. Alice Henry, “Editorial,” Life and Labor 1, no. I (January 1911), inside cover.
4. See, for instance, Joan Kelly-Gadol, “The Social Relation of the Sexes; Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976), p. 817.
5. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), p. 43.
6. John B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions, Bureau of Labor, Report on Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), pp. 17–18.
7. Editorial, “Among Ourselves,” Progressive Woman 6, no. 64 (October 1912), p. 15.
8. Even after World War I, when there was no longer a substantial feminist movement to encourage attention to women in the community as well as the workplace, at least half of the active women socialists were still housewives. The Communist Party U.S.A. devoted more attention to workplace organizing than the Socialist Party and the percentage of working women in its ranks was higher than that of the Socialist Party in 1912. In 1933 the Communist Party U.S.A.’s membership was 19 percent female; slightly over half these women worked full time outside the home and a number of those who registered as housewives had part-time jobs as well. (Anna Damon, “Experience in Work Among Women,” Party Organizer 6, no. 8/9 [August-September 1933], p. 62). This percentage was twice that of women in the general population who worked full time. (William H. Chafe, The American Warrum: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972], p. 54 and note). This fact would seem to indicate some success in recruiting women at the workplace along the lines of classical Marxist theory. Still, half the women members remained housewives, indicating that many still came to Marxism, not through direct participation in workplace struggles, but through their family and friendship networks, through party work being done in their communities, or because of issues involving their oppression as women.
Part II: “Chicago Will Be Ours!”
Chapter 1. “There Must Be Something Wrong”
1. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Factory Girls (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 91. This was a favorite poem of Leonora O’Reilly’s.
2. Leo Huberman, We, The People (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1932), p. 217.
3. Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936), p. 13. This top I percent got nearly one quarter of the national income at this time, while the bottom half of the population got barely one fifth of it. Similarly, in 1953 the richest tenth of the nation got 27 percent of the national income, while the lowest half got only 23 percent. I am indebted to Hal Benenson for this statistic, which is from Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1968).
4. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morals, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, 1970), p. 222.
5. Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 19.
6. Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 212.
7. See Helen L. Sumner, History of Women in Industry in the United States, Bureau of Labor, Report on Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. 9 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), p. 246; and Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, The Occupational Progress of Women. Bulletin No. 27 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), p. 8.
8. Women’s Bureau, The Occupational Progress of Women, pp. 8, 26.
9. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 25.
10. U.S. Department of Labor, Summary of Report on Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners, Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, no. 175 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916).
11. The Women’s Trade Union League explained the “utter impossibility of living on $6 a week” in a pamphlet which gave a sample budget, drawn from thousands submitted to the New York Factory Investigating Commission, the National Consumers’ League, and the Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago:
Weekly Expenditure:
One half of furnished room |
$ 1.50 |
7 breakfasts, rolls and coffee, at 10¢ |
.70 |
7 dinners at 20¢ |
1.40 |
7 luncheons, coffee and sandwich, at 10¢ |
.70 |
Carfare |
.60 |
Clothes at $52 a year—weekly |
1.00 |
|
_________ |
|
Total $5.90 |
The remaining lO¢ to cover laundry, dentist, doctor, newspapers, church, and recreation. lO¢ a week for 52 weeks, makes $5.20. But the girl works only 40 weeks. She must live 52 weeks, how?
(Some Faeis Regarding Unorganized Working Women in the Sweated Industries [Chicago: National Women’s Trade Union League, 1914]: Leonora O’Reilly Papers, Box 8, File 374, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
12. Smuts, Women and Work in America, p. 19.
13. U.S. Department of Labor, Summary of Report, p, 28.
14. Preamble of the People’s Party, drafted by Ignatius Donnelly, quoted in Boyer and Morals, Labor’s Untold Story, pp. 111–112.
15. The AFL’s lack of enthusiasm for organizing women is discussed, among other places, in: Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vols. 2 and 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1955, 1964); Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1915); and Women and the Labor Movement (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1923); Theresa Wolfson, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions (New York: International Publishers, 1926); Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); and the material on the Women’s Trade Union League cited in footnote 1, preface. Useful documentary material can be found in Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women (New York: Random House, 1976).
16. For discussion of this period in Gomper’s development and in that of the labor movement see: Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York: Dutton, 1925); Charles McArthur Destler, American Radicalism 1865–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966); William A. Dick, Labor and Socialism in America: The Gompers Era (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972); Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 2; Gerald N. Grob, Workersand Utopia (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); and John Laslett, Labor and the Left (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
17. Dick, Labor and Socialism in America, p. 21.
18. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 2, p. 29. This was the preamble of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a group superseded by the AFL, which took over its constitution.
19. Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal versus Changing Realities (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1958), p. 280.
20. B’isno, Union Pioneer, pp. 154–155.
21. The most notable instance of this was the case of the Swedish Union of Special Order Workers, a federation of three largely female and woman-led garment workers in Chicago, which was destroyed by the United Garment Workers and the Teamsters in 1904–1905. See John B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions, Bureau of Labor, Report on Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), pp. 164–167; Margaret Hoblitt, “A Labor Tragedy,” The Commons 9 (1905), pp. 273–280; and the file entitled “Strikes” in the National Women’s Trade Union League papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
22. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 3, p. 224.
23. August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism, trans. Daniel De Leon (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 186–187.
Chapter 2. “Shouting Amazons”
1. Dorothy Richardson, “Trades Unions in Petticoats,” Leslie’s Monthly Magazine 57 (March 1904), pp. 489, 496.
2. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912), pp. 98–100.
3. Lizzie Swank Holmes, “Women Workers of Chicago,” American Federationist 12 (August 1905), p. 509.
4. Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1977), p. 154.
5. Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936), p. 57.
6. “Work of the Sex,” Chicago Times, 2 September 1894.
7. Ibid.
8. Holmes, “Women Workers of Chicago,” p. 508.
9. Ibid.
10. Lizzie J. Holmes [sic], “The Days of Our Infancy; A Reminisence,” Progressive Woman 5 (August 1911), p. 7.
11. Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976), pp. 13–29.
12. “Mrs. Rogers Replies,” Knights of Labor (Chicago), 5 March 1887, p. 2.
13. “Work of the Sex.”
14. Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 80.
15. “Work of the Sex.”
16. Allen F. Davis, “Alzina Parsons Stevens,” Notable American Women, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 368.
17. “Work of the Sex.”
18. Ibid. In the political jargon of the times, “independent political action” is a code phrase meaning revolution brought about by election.
19. Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, p. 34.
20. Ibid., p. 35.
21. Holmes, “Women Workers of Chicago,” p. 509.
22. “Work of the Sex.”
23. Quoted in Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 196.
24. “Mrs. Rogers Replies.”
25. Quoted in Philips. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1955), p. 190.
26. Eugene Staley, History of the Illinois State Federation of Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 95.
27. Ralph Scharman, “Elizabeth Morgan, Crusader for Labor Reform,” Labor History 14 (Summer 1973), p. 340.
28. “Work of the Sex.”
29. The most comprehensive account is David’s The History of the Haymarket Affair.
30. “Shouting Amazons,” Chicago Tribune, 3 May 1886.
31. Ibid.
32. David, Haymarket, p. 376.
33. Quoted in Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morals, Labor’s Untoold story (New York: United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, 1970), p. 101.
34. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 2, p. 76.
35. Holmes, “Women Workers of Chicago,” p. 510.
36. “Mrs. Rogers Replies.”
37. “Thanks ‘The Times,’” August 1888, unidentified clipping in Thomas J. Morgan Collection, Book 2, Illinois Historical Survey, Urbana, Illinois.
38. “To Help Working Women,” May 1889, unidentified clipping in Morgan Collection, Book 2. See also the article on Mrs. Rogers in Davis, Notable American Women.
39. Holmes, “Women Workers of Chicago,” p. 510.
Chapter 3. Mary Kenney and the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union
1. Unidentified clipping, 1897, Thomas J. Morgan Collection, Book 2, Illinois Historical Society, Urbana, Illinois. The Morgan papers consist of scrap books of newspaper clipping complied by Elizabeth Morgan, who identified some of the clippings by date but few by source. Book 2 of the collection is the principal source of information on the Illinois Woman’s Alliance.
2. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1955), p. 190.
3. Unidentified clipping, June 1888, Morgan Collection, Book 2. This clipping is signed Hannah M. Morgan, the name Foner attributes to her. Although the principal name she used was Elizabeth Morgan, she was on occasion referred to as Eliza or Hannah.
4. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 2, p. 190.
5. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, manuscript autobiography, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass., p. 16.
6. Ibid., p. 32.
7. Ibid., p. 42.
8. Ibid., p. 32.
9. Ibid., p. 34.
10. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, “Organization of Women,” Age of Labor, I January 1893. I am indebted for this reference to Rosemary Scherman.
11. O’Sullivan, manuscript autobiography, p. 38.
12. Ibid., p. 39.
13. Ibid., p. 37.
14. Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal Versus Changing Realities (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1958), p. 245.
15. O’Sullivan, manuscript autobiography, p. 62.
16. Ibid., p. 63.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 64. Abraham Bisno of the cloak makers union thought that the spirit of the women at Hull House was similar to that of the Narodniks in the Russian populist movement, despite their greater primness and gentility:
My acquaintance with the people at Hull House was an eye-opener for me. People who did not belong to our class took an interest in our lot in life. This was very new to me. I had heard of such people when lectures were held in our club on the subject of the Russian revolutionary movement. There, I was told, young members of the Russian nobility and rich members of the aristocracy, [the Narodniks] had thrown their lives in with those of the poor, and went around as crusaders for democracy and the abolition of private land-owning. They … were arrested, held in jail, exiled to Siberia, even killed in a great many cases, all on the altar of their missionary spirit to help the poor and abolish despotism, to overthrow the Czar, assault the authority of the army and give the people a voice in determining their political and economic status in life. … In this country, the venture on the part of Jane Addams and her colleagues was something new, and while I did not agree with their Anglo-Saxon estimate of the nature of the social movement, I appreciated cordially the nobility of their characters, the integrity of their effort.
(Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967], p. 119).
19. “Mary Kenney is Invited In,” in Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree, Eighty Years at Hull House (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 35. A number of radicals in this period, notably Ella Reeve Bloor, were involved in experiments in communal living—a natural outgrowth of their desire for a political family and their need as women activists to share housework.
20. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York: Dutton, 1925),p. 481.
21. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan to Alice Henry, no date, National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Box 28, Library of Congress.
22. O’Sullivan, manuscript autobiography, p. 81.
23. O’Sullivan, manuscript autobiography, p. 81–82. Gertrude Barnum, a judge’s daughter, later became active in the Women’s Trade Union League, where she got into similar confrontations. See Part III, Chapter 5.
24. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 2, p. 194.
25. Dorothy Richardson, “Trades-Unions in Petticoats,” Leslie’s Monthly Magazine 57 (March 1904), p. 491.
Chapter 4. The Illinois Woman’s Alliance
1. This poem is in a mimeographed sheaf of poems edited by Samuel Freedman for the Socialist Committee on Youth Education, no date, File D105, Tamiment Library, New York University.
2. Other books and articles that discuss the Illinois Woman’s Alliance are: Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United Stales, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1964); Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (New York: Free Press, 1979); Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Ralph Scharman, “Elizabeth Morgan, Crusader for Labor Reforms,” Labor History 14 (Summer 1973); and especially Ann Doubilet, “The Illinois Woman’s Alliance, 1888–1894,” M.A. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1973.
3. “To Help the Slave Girls,” unidentified clipping, 18 August 1888, Thomas J. Morgan Collection, Book 2, Illinois Historical Survey, Urbana, Illinois. Elizabeth Morgan kept scrapbooks of clippings on various subjects, most of those on the Alliance are unidentified except by date. Although I have footnoted only direct quotations, almost all my information about the Illinois Woman’s Alliance comes from Film 6 of clipping book 2, hereafter referred to as Morgan Collection, Book 2.
4. “Thanks ‘The Times,”’ Chicago Times, August 1888, unidentified clipping, Morgan Collection, Book 6.
5. “To Help the Slave Girls,” Morgan Collection, Book 2.
6. “Thanks ‘The Times’” Morgan Collection, Book 2.
7. Member organizations of the Illinois Woman’s Alliance included the Cook County Suffrage Society; the Miriam Chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star; the Sunshine Mission; the Presbyterian Ladies’ Aid; the Single Tax Club; the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union Local No. 2703; the Vincent Chatauqua Circle; the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly; the Hopkins Metaphysical Association; the Ladies’ Union of the Ethical Society; the Methodist Ladies’ Aid; the Woodlawn Reading Club; the Glencoe Library; the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic; the Woodlawn branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; the Women’s Physiological Society; the Anthony Club; the Knights of Labor Local Assembly No. 1789; Ryder Chapel; the South End Flower Mission; the Woman’s Press Association; the Illinois Women’s Medical Sanitary Association; the Working Women’s Protective Association; the Women’s Federation of Labor; the Moral Educational Society; the Lady Washington Masonic Chapter; the Glencoe Literary Club; Land and Labor Club No. I ; the Drexel Kindergarten Association; the Working Women’s Club; and the Women’s Homeopathic Medical Society.
8. “City Slave Girls,” 2 October 1888, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
9. H., “Chicago Letter,” Alarm, 11 August 1888. The “iron law” referred to is the Lassallean “iron law of wages,” an erroneous economic theory which was influential in this period. According to the iron law, workers could not improve their lot through trade unionism because any rise in wages would be immediately followed by an exactly corresponding rise in prices.
10. “Women’s Alliance Meeting,” October 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
11. “Numerous Reforms Suggested,” Chicago News, 4 April 1891, “The Woman’s Alliance,” 4 April 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
12. “Police Court Abuses,” June 1890, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
13. “After the Vampires,” July 1890; “Police Justice Fees,” May 1890, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
14. “Work of the Sex,” Chicago Times, 2 September 1894.
15. “Numerous Reforms Suggested,” Chicago News, 4 April 1891; “The Woman’s Alliance,” 4 April 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
16. “To Enforce the School Law,” 18 December 1888, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
17. “Woman Wit[h]in School,” 5 June 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
18. Ibid.
19. Gertrude Breslau-Hunt, Memorial—Corinne Stubbs Brown (pamphlet in Chicago Historical Society, no publisher, no date).
20. “The Women’s Alliance,” 28 January 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
21. “Report of Trade and Labor Assembly Delegates to the Woman’s Alliance,” 17 March 1889.
22. “End of a Big Splurge,” Chicago News, 2 May 1889.
23. “Report of Delegates to the Woman’s Alliance,” 13 July 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
24. “Women Wit[h]in School,” 5 June 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
25. “No Women Need Apply,” May 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
26. “Concerning Educational Matters,” 18 January 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
27. “Stewart’s Bad Break,” 13 January 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
28. “The Women Are Working,” May 1890, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
29. “Ladies Become Sarcastic,” May 1890, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
30. “Woman’s Alliance,” February 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
31. “Women As Inspectors,” 26 July 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
32. “Women Want War,” October 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
33. “The Woman’s Alliance,” 10 October 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
34. “In the ‘Sweat Shops,”’ Em. Journal [sic], 20 August 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
35. Ibid.
36. Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, The New Slavery; Investigation Into the Sweating System as Applied to the Manufacture of Wearing Apparel (Chicago: Detwiler Print, Rights of Labor Office, 1891). Morgan Collection, File 16.
37. Ibid., p. 20
38. Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 147–148.
39. “A Workingwoman’s Society of Philadelphia…” March 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
40. Dorothy Rose Blumberg, Florence Kelley: The Making of a Social Pioneer (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), p. 127. While the contributions of settlement workers and reformers to the struggle for protective legislation were extremely important, particularly on the federal level, the fact that they, rather than labor leaders, wrote books has tended to leave the impression that they were the only ones involved. Hull House was founded in 1889 and did not become involved in the sweatship issue or sponsor legislation on it until Florence Kelley came there late in 1891. The Illinois Women’s Alliance and the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly had by then done three years of work on the question. If one were forced to rely only on Jane Addams’ discussion of the campaign, however, one would not know that any groups beyond Hull House were involved. In a speech Addams made in 1892, for instance, she credited “a resident” with the work exposing the board of education and putting pressure on the city for more schools that was actually done by the Alliance. (See “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” The Social Thought of Jane Addams, Christopher Lasch, ed. [New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965], p. 57.)
41. “To Stop Sweating,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 20 February 1893, I am indebted to Rosemary Scherman for this reference.
42. “Illinois Woman’s Allaince,” May 1889, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
43. “Think They Are Unfairly Treated,” 5 November 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
44. “Fattening on Misery,” August 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
45. “Talked of Marriage and Divorce,” 1892, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
46. “Florence Kelley Comes to Stay,” in Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree, Eighty Years at Hull House (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 40.
47. “Think They Are Unfairly Treated,” 5 November 1891, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
48. “Illinois Woman’s Alliance,” 1894, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
49. “Talks to Toilers,” 22 March 1894, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
50. “Going to Pieces,” 1894, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
51. Ibid.
52. “Talks to Toilers,” 22 March 1894, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
53. “They Will Unite,” October 1894, Morgan Collection, Book 2.
54. The women unionists who remained with the AFL decided to form their own labor organization too. In November 1895 the American Federationist announced the formation in Chicago of the Dorcas Federal Labor Union, whose president was Alzina Stevens, then a resident at Hull House. The Dorcas Union met there twice a month and had a membership of perhaps fifty “working girls and the wives of trade unionists.” According to Jane Addams it was represented in the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly and later helped to found the Women’s Union Label League. The mainstream of the female labor movement had thus come to rest securely under the wing of Hull House, where it was to remain, ideologically at least, for many years, no longer disturbed by an excess of radicalism. As Jane Addams described this development:
In what we considered a praiseworthy effort to unite it [the Dorcas Union] with other organizations, the president of a leading Woman’s Club [Ellen Henrotin] applied for membership. We were so sure of her election that she stood just outside the drawing-room door…. To our chagrin she did not receive enough votes to secure her admission, not because the working girls, as they were careful to state, did not admire her, but because she “seemed to belong to the other side.” Fortunately, the big-minded woman so thoroughly understood the vote and her interest in working women was so genuine, that it was less than a decade afterward when she was elected to the presidency of the National Woman’s Trade Union League. The incident and the sequel registers, perhaps, the change in Chicago towards the labor movement, the recognition of the fact that it is a general social movement concerning all members of society and not merely a class struggle.
(“Chicago Labor Notes,” American Federationist 2, no. 9 [November 1895], p, 468; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912], p. 213).
Part III: Fragmentation
1. Lizzie Swank Holmes, “Women Workers of Chicago,” American Federationist 12 (August 1905), p. 509.
2. Dorothy Richardson, “Trades-Unions in Petticoats,” Leslie’s Monthly Magazine 57 (March 1904), pp. 489, 496.
3. John B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, History of Women in Trades Unions, Bureau of Labor, Report on Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), p. 148.
4. Ibid., p. 146.
5. Ibid., p. 150.
6. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975), p. 95.
Chapter 5. Leonora O’Reilly and the Women’s Trade Union League
1. Life and Labor 2, no. 5 (May 1912), p. 153.
2. The first officers were Mary Morton Kehew of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs as president; Jane Addams as vice-president; Mary Kenney O’Sullivan as secretary; and Mary Donovan of the Lynn, Massachusetts, Central Labor Union as treasurer.
3. Life and Labor 2, no. 3 (March 1912), back cover.
4. Mary Wolfe to Mary Dreier, no date, Leonora O’Reilly papers, Box I, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, (Cambridge, Mass.
5. Ibid.
6. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 207.
7. Ibid., p. 208.
8. O’Reilly Papers, Box 13, File 299.
9. The Society addressed a verse appeal, “Shop Early,” to shoppers in 1886: “O woman, tender hearted, / Who shared the negroes’ throes, / Whose gentle tears are started, / By dogs’ and horses’ woes; / Who feel a sister’s pity / For women far away / For slaves in your own city / We ask your help today / … The hearts of masters soften, / They see the havoc wrought, / But women will too often / Shop later than they ought / …” O’Reilly Papers (Microflim IV, 13, 1905).
10. See Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1915), pp. 43–4.
11. Maggie Finn to Leonora O’Reilly, 9 July 1912, O’Reilly Papers, Box 6, File 51.
12. Louisa Perkins to Leonora O’Reilly, 25 January [1895], O’Reilly Papers, Box 4, File 30.
13. Leonora O’Reilly to H. M., I January 1896, O’Reilly Papers (Microflim 1,2).
14. Louisa Perkins to Leonora O’Reilly, 28 January 1898, O’Reilly Papers (Microfilm 1,4).
15. R. L. Duffus, Lillian Wald, Neighbor and Crusader (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1938), p. 66.
16. 29 July 1894, O’Reilly Papers, Box 4, File 29.
17. Its record in New York is documented in Nancy Schrom Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League of New York, 1903–20, “Ph.D. dissertation. University of Wisconsin, 1974. For one example of UGW destruction of a female union. see Chapter 2, note 12.The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was born in 1915 out of the scandal of the UGW.
18. O’Reilly Papers (Microfilm 1,4).
19. Ibid.
20. Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League,” p. 34.
21. Typescript of proceedings of National Women’s Trade Union League Convention, 1915, p. 100, in the National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
22. Ibid., p. 113.
23. Women’s Trade Union League, Labor Songs, no date, O’Reilly Papers, Box 16, File 378.
24. Proceedings, League Convention, 1915, p. 108.
25. Alice Henry, Women in the Labor Movement (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1923), pp. 99–100.
26. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Women and Unionism,” Solidarity, 27 March 1911.
27. Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York: Dutton, 1925).
28. Examples include the Swedish Special Order Workers in Chicago, smashed by the United Garment Workers in 1904; the Illinois shoe workers who were not permitted to join the International in 1900; the candy workers organized in Philadelphia by Pauline Newman in 1918, who finally fell apart after repeated rejections by their International; and the women printers in New York in 1920. For further discussion, see Henry, Women in the Labor Movement; Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League”; and Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist Stiudies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975).
29. Jane Addams, “The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,” Hull House Maps and Papers (New York: T. Y. Crowell & Co., 1895), p. 202.
30. Working-class women in the early days of the League included Louisa Mittelstadt and Myrtle Whitehad of the Brewery Workers; Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and Fania Cohen of the ILGWU (all socialists); Josephine Casey of the Elevated Railroad Clerks; Agnes Nestor of the Glove Workers; Melinda Scott of the Hat Trimmers; Elizabeth Maloney of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees; Hilda Swenson of the Commercial Telegraphers; Nellie Quick of the Bindery Workers; Mary Anderson, Emma Steghagen, Mary McEnery and Mary Haney of the Boot and Shoe Workers; and Sarah Conboy of the United Garment Workers. Alice Bean, Mabel Gillespie, and Helen Marot were all members of the Bookkeepers, Stenographers, and Accountants Union, but the latter at least was a college graduate who joined only after she became staff at the League’s New York office.
31. Dye’s thesis has a detailed picture of this development; for a condensed version, see “Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women’s Trade Union League and the Labor Movement,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (Fall 1975).
32. Pauline Newman to Rose Schneiderman, no date, in the Rose Schneiderman papers, Tamiment Library, New York University.
33. Raymond Robins to Mary Dreier, 12 November 1913, in the Raymond Robins papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, Box 5, File 5.
34. In the first strike aided by the League, the 1905 strike of textile workers in Fall River, Massachusetts, Barnum developed the novel strategy of getting the strikers jobs as maids in Boston, thus attempting to solve at one blow the financial problems of the strikers and the servant problems of the Boston society women who were interested in the League. “The experiment was encouraged on the ground that housework, with all the valid objections to it, might prove better than mill-work under existing conditions.” Gertrude Barnum, “Fall River Mill Girls in Domestic Service,” Charities 12 (4 March 1904), p. 550.
35. Gertrude Barnum, “National Organizer’s Report,” 1905, National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress, Box 1, Vol. 1.
36. Mildred Moore, “A History of the Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago,” M.A. dissertation. University of Chicago, 1915, p. 22.
37. Life and Labor 2, no. 4 (April 1912), p. 99.
38. Laura Elliot to Leonora O’Reilly, no date [March 1911] O’Reilly papers, Box 5, File 47.
39. June 1908, O’Reilly papers, Box 4, File 43.
40. “To the Executive Board of the National Women’s Trade Union League,” no date, signed Agnes Burns, Leora Lipshitz, Lily Brzostek, May Gordon Thompson, Florence Adesska, and Julia S. O’Connor. National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress, Box 1, Vol. 2.
41. Helen Marot, American Labor Unions (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1914), p. 67.
42. Women’s Trade Union League of New York, Annual Report 1907–1908, in O’Reilly papers, Box 8, File 388.
43. One of the ways Mary Dreier supported the New York League was by settling an annuity-not included on the balance sheet-upon her close friend Leonora O’Reilly in 1908. This enabled O’Reilly to work full time for the League for some years. Dreier wrote Winifred O’Reilly, Leonora’s mother, at that time: “You know dear Mother O’Reilly how difficult it is to keep a free spirit under pressure—whether it is industrial, political, class—whatever it may be—and when you see one and know her for a friend, you know how you want to set her free—as far as our old civilization permits—free to live her life for the people as she wants to. And that is what I hope has come to Leonora—the freedom to use her gifts for the people in her own way…. Leonora and I will doubtless have different opinions frequently, that seems inevitable—and people never could agree on all things—but never could that make a particle of difference in our sense of freedom—nor in our love.” 16 January 1908, O’Reilly papers, Box 4, File 42.
44. Pauline Newman to Rose Schneiderman, 9 December 1911, Rose Schneiderman papers, Tamiment Library, New York University.
45. “Minutes of Executive Board of National Women’s Trade Union League,” 18 March 1909, typescript, O’Reilly papers, Box 16, File 364.
46. O’Reilly’s notes on the back of a letter from William English Walling, 17 December 1903, O’Reilly papers, Box 4, File 38.
47. Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League,” p. 93.
48. Gertrude Barnum to Leonora O’Reilly, 8 December 1905, O’Reilly papers, Box 4, File 41.
49. O’Reilly papers, no date, Box 10, File 168.
50. Gertrude Barnum to Leonora O’Reilly, 13 February 1906, O’Reilly papers, Box 4, File 41.
51. Margaret Dreier Robins to Leonora O’Reilly, 19 July 1914, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 57.
52. Mary Dreier to Leonora O’Reilly, 31 August 1915, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 57.
53. Theresa Wolfson, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions (New York: International Publishers, 1926), pp. 13, 123.
54. “National Work,” January 1912, National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress, Box I, Vol. 2. Forming cooperatives was a rather frequent response to lockouts and lost strikes in the early U.S. labor movement, and one especially favored by the Knights of Labor. These cooperatives seldom lasted long, being unsuited to survival in a capitalist system of production and distribution.
55. Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League,” p. 424.
56. William O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1969), p. 220.
57. National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress, Box 26.
58. Leonora O’Reilly to Mary Dreier, 6 September 1915, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 57.
59. Margaret Dreier Robins to Leonora O’Reilly, 27 July 1915, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 57.
60. Mary Wolfe to Mary Dreier, no date, O’Reilly papers, Box 1.
Chapter 6. Rebel Girls and the IWW
1. Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 145. This is one ofa number of invaluable background sources on the IWW which I used in preparing this book. See also Paul F. Brissenden, The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919); Joseph Conlin, Bread and Roses Too (New York: Greenwood Publishers, 1969); Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1967); Fred Thompson, The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years (Chicago: I.W.W., 1955); Robert Tyler, Rebels of the Woods (Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon Press, 1967).
2. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 12–13.
3. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 176.
4. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 4, p. 127.
5. “All Along the Coast,” Solidarity, 25 June 1910.
6. See William E. Trautmann, “Hammond Strike Won,” Industrial Worker, 5 February 1910; “Women Active in Lumber Strike,” Industrial Worker, 18 April 1912; “California Fishermen Strike and Win,” Solidarity, 14 October 1916; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 4, pp. 223, 297.
7. Rheta Childe Dorr, “As a Woman Sees It,” Solidarity, 23 September 1916.
8. “California Fishermen Strike and Win,” Solidarity, 14 October 1916.
9. “Problems in Organizing Women,” Solidarity, 15 July 1916.
10. Sophie Beldner, “Work for Women in Industrial Unionism,” Industrial Union Bulletin, 3 August 1907.
11. “Cheerful Note from Joe Hill,” Solidarity, 19 December 1914.
12. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Anna Strunsky Walling, no date, William English Walling papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, Box 1, File 1.
13. “Tenth I.W.W. Convention,” Solidarity, 16 December 1916.
14. Sophie [Beldner] Vasilio, “Women in the I.W.W.,” Industrial Union Bulletin, 25 April 1908.
15. Ibid.
16. “From a Woman Toiler,” Solidarity, 25 June 1910.
17. Charles Ashleigh, “The Floater,” in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 80–81.
18. Frank S. Hamilton, “A Screed and a Suggestion,” Solidarity, 21 November 1914.
19. Sin Bad, “Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly,” Solidarity, 16 January 1915.
20. Frank Jakel, “Wanted Women Organizers on Pacific Coast,” Solidarity, 9 December 1916.
21. Jane Street, “Denver’s Rebel Housemaids,” Solidarity, I April 1916.
22. “‘We Have Got Results’: A Document on the Organization of Domestics in the Progressive Era,” Daniel T. Hobby, ed., Labor History 17, no. I (Winter 1976), p. 104. This document is a letter from Jane Street to Mrs. Elmer F. Buse of Tulsa, Oklahoma, written in 1917 and intercepted by the U.S. Post Office, which forwarded it to the Justice Department to help its campaign of repression against the IWW. It is cited as Department of Justice Record Group 60, File 18701–28, in the National Archives.
23. “Housemaids From Union in Denver,” Solidarity, I April 1916.
24. Ibid.
25. Mildred Morris, “Housemaids’ Union Plots Revenge,” reprinted in Solidarity, 29July 1916.
26. “The Maids’ Defiance,” Solidarity, 6 May 1916.
27. C. W. Sellars, “The Domestic Workers’ Union,” Solidarity, 11 November 1916.
28. Press Committee, Local 614, “Rebel Girl Defenders,” Solidarity, 26 November 1913.
29. “Denver Housemaids’ List Stolen,” Solidarity, 11 November 1916.
30. “We Have Got Results,” pp. 106–107.
31. “Song Makes Hit,” Solidarity, I July 1916; Mildred Morris, “Housemaids’ Union Plots Revenge”; Mort E. Warshavsky, “The Domestics’ Industrial Union,” Solidarity, 15 November 1916; “In Other Women’s Homes,” Solidarity, I July 1916; “Seattle Houseworkers Organize,” Solidarity, 28 October 1916.
32. “We Have Got Results,” pp. 106–107.
33. For a thorough and illuminating discussion of the left and “the sex question,” see chapter 9 of Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976).
34. Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 224–226.
35. Harriet Knowles Snowden, “The Socialist Girl and ‘Advanced Theories,’” New York Sunday Call, 5 November 1911.
36. Floyd Dell, Homecoming (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933), pp. 288–289.
37. “Men and Women,” 1915 manuscript notes in the Flynn papers in the American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
38. Mrs. Floyd Hyde, “Is There a Woman’s Question in the Revolutionary Movement?” Solidarity, 28 December 1912.
39. Ibid.
40. Mrs. Floyd Hyde, “The Woman Question Again,” Solidarity, 25 January 1913.
41. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Men and Women.” American Institute for Marxist Studies.
42. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, / Speak My Own Piece (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955), pp. 271. Unless otherwise cited, the biographical information in this section comes from Flynn’s autobiography, which has been republished under the title The Rebel Girl (New York: International Publishers, 1978). For other biographical information, see also Rosalyn Baxandall, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Early Years,” Radical America 9, no. I (January-February 1975).
43. Inez Haynes Irwin, manuscript autobiography, pp. 414–415, Inez Haynes Irwin papers, Box 3, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. See also “Marriage Customs and Taboos Among the Early Heterodites,” a parody of the anthropological work of fellow-member Elsie Clews Parsons, Irwin papers, Box 2. The Irwin papers also contain a photograph album presented to Marie Jenney Howe in 1920, with pictures and autographs of all the members of the Heterodoxy Club. These include Stella Comen, Mary Ware Dennet, Agnes DeMille, Crystal Eastman, Zona Gale, Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Fannie Hurst, Elizabeth Irwin, Paula Jacobi, Gertrude B. Kelley, Fola LaFollette, Inez Milholland, Alice Duer Miller, Elsie Clews Parsons, Grace Potter, Ida Rauh, Doris Stevens, Rose Pastor Stokes, Rose Strunsky, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Gertrude Marvin Williams.
44. Gladys Vera Lamb, “Prayer of a Tired Housewife,” scrapbook, Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
45. Matilda Robbins’ autobiographical papers contain the following anecdote about a woman apparently modeled on Margaret Prevey, an Ohio socialist:
Monday morning always found her over two wooden washtubs on a bench near the kitchen sink. The breakfast dishes were washed, the kitchen clean and warmed by the coal stove black and shiny with its nickel trim. Here Tess would stand and rub clothes on a washboard and drop them into the steaming wash boiler on the stove and lift them out with a smooth round stick and rinse and dip the soap water out of the tub into the sink and then lift the tub with the remainder of the water and pour it out. Back breaking work. Thousands of workers’ wives were doing the same thing all over this happy land.
The clothes were on the line before noon. There was the midday dinner to be gotten for Dan and the boys and after that more dishes, cleaning, mending, in the winter keeping fires going, sifting ashes to retrieve every bit of coal; innumerable household chores. Dan went to meetings perhaps four nights a week, or else meetings were held at the house. Always it meant that supper had to be on time and early, dishes washed, the boys’ clothes looked after; there was mending and sewing….
One morning we sat in the kitchen folding leaflets and talking…. Tess dwelt at some length on E. F.’s stay with them; the fine speeches she made; the enthusiasm she aroused. And then surprisingly she said, “But you know, I’m sorry for her.”
I was rather startled. “Sorry, sorry for E. F.?”
“Yes. You see she is so dependent for everything. She can’t do a thing for herself. So helpless. She can’t make a bed, nor wash a pair of stockings, nor mend a rip, nor make a cup of coffee—nothing. Oh, sure, she’s a wonderful speaker and all that. If I had a girl I would be very proud to have her do the work E. F. does. Still I would want her to know how to take care of herself. I would want her to know some other kind of work besides organizing and speaking. It seems somehow more in keeping with the things we believe in that those who talk to workers should know how to work”
(Matilda Robbins, “These I Have Known,” pp. 4–5, Robbins papers, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan).
46. Flynn, I Speak, pp. 41–2.
47. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a utopian novel describing a future after a socialist (which he called Nationalist) revolution; it was one of the sacred texts of the populist movement. Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle was a sensational—and socialist—expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of modern feminism. August Bebel was a leader in the German socialist party; his Woman and Socialism was, with Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, one of the two major theoretical books on the oppression of women produced by the socialist movement of this period.
48. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Men and Women” manuscript, Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
49. Scrapbook, Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
50. Flynn, I Speak, p. 176.
51. Ibid., pp. 76–77.
52. Ibid., pp. 94–95.
53. James Wilson, “Modern Slave Traders,” Industrial Union Bulletin, 24 October 1908.
54. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 176.
55. Flynn, I Speak, p. 97.
56. Ibid., p. 98.
57. “Miss Flynn Tells of Jail Experiences,” New York Call, 13 December 1909.
58. Flynn, I Speak, p. 103.
59. Ibid., p. 113.
60. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Problems Organizing Women,” manuscript draft in. Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, of the article that appeared in a somewhat altered form in Solidarity, 15 July 1916.
61. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Women and Unionism,” Solidarity, 27 May 1911.
62. Ibid.
63. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, manuscript outline, no date, Flynn papers, File 5, American Institute for Marxist Studies.
64. Flynn, “Problems.”
65. Kate O’Hare, “Birth Control and Pellagra,” National Ripsaw 12, no. 10 (December 1915), p. 6.
66. Gordon, Woman’s Body, p. 238.
67. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The Case of Margaret Sanger,” Solidarity, 22 January 1916.
68. Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1938), p. 96.
69. Eliza Burt Gamble, “Race Suicide in France,” International Socialist Review 9, no. 7 (January 1909); Caroline Nelson, “Neo-Malthusianism,” international Socialist Review 14, no. 4 (October 1913).
70. Sanger, Autobiography, p. 108.
71. David S. Kennedy, Birth Control in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 22.
72. The Woman Rebel 1, no. I (March 1914), p. 1.
73. Margaret Sanger, “The Militants in England,” The Woman Rebel 1, no. 4 (June 1914), p. 25.
74. Margaret Sanger, “To My Friends and Colleagues,” 5 January 1915, Margaret Sanger papers, Library of Congress.
75. Margaret Sanger, “Suppression,” The Woman Rebel 1. no. 4 (June 1914), p. 25.
76. Margaret Sanger, Family Limitation (5th edition. New York 1916), Margaret Sanger papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
77. Sanger, Autobiography, p. 117.
78. Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1913), p. 127.
79. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Margaret Sanger, no date, Sanger papers, Library of Congress.
80. Flynn, “Problems.”
81. Robert Tyler, Rebels of the Woods (Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon Press, 1967), p. 139.
Chapter 7. Socialists and Suffragists
1. Crystal Eastman, “Feminism,” in On Woman and Revolution, Blanch Wiesen Cook. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 51.
2. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 17–18.
3. Ibid., pp. 174–175.
4. Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, eds.. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 29–30.
5. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 217–218.
6. Quoted in William L. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 36.
7. Editorial, June 1917, in William O’Neill, ed., The Woman Movement, pp. 188–189.
8. Aileen Kraditor, ed., Up From the Pedestal (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p, 260.
9. Ibid., p. 170.
10. Quoted in Flexner, Century of Struggle, p. 250.
11. Ibid., p. 251.
12. Ibid., p. 52.
13. Quoted in Ronald Schoffer, “The New York City Woman Suffrage Party, 1909–19,” New York History 43 (July 1962), p. 275.
14. Ibid.
15. Leonora O’Reilly wrote Mary Hay of the Woman Suffrage Party in 1913: “The little Wage Earners group, such as it is, remembers very distinctly that it was through the activity of Mary Beard and the Woman’s Suffrage Party that they were brought into being, at all.” 13 May 1913,O’Reilly papers (Microflim 1,18) Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
16. Unidentified clipping, 11 April 1911, O’Reilly papers, Box 15, File 357.
17. Monday, 13 November 1911, O’Reilly papers (Microfilm 1, 18).
18. O’Reilly to A. F. Brody, 13 January 1914, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 54.
19. Mary Beard to O’Reilly, no date, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 50 ( 1912).
20. LeaHet, O’Reilly papers, Box 15, File 357.
21. O’Reilly to Brody, no date, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 50 (1912).
22. LeaHet, O’Reilly papers, Box 15, File 357.
23. Ibid.
24. Leonora O’Reilly, introduction to Margaret Hinchey, “Thirty Days,” Life and Labor 3, no. 9 (September 1913), p. 264.
25. “Suffrage in Bowery Hotel,’New York Times, 5 May 1915.
26. Maggie Hinchey to Leonora O’Reilly, ‘Thursday, 29th,” no date, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 52.
27. Maggie Hinchey to Leonora O’Reilly, no date, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 51.
28. Maggie Hinchey to Leonora O’Reilly, no date [1918], O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 52.
29. Paula Scheier, “Clara Lemlich Shavelson,” Jewish Life 8, no. 95 (November 1954), p. 10.
30. Mary Beard to O’Reilly, I January 1912, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 51.
31. Beard to O’Reilly, 21 July 1912, O’Reilly papers, Box 6, File 51.
32. Rose Wortis to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 6 June 1951, Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
33. Scheier, p. 11.
34. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Women,” manuscript dated 21 December 1909, Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
35. Anna Tewksbury, “Woman and Industrial Unionism,” Solidarity, 12 February 1910.
36. Ben Williams. “Votes’and ‘Women’s Wages,’” Solidarity, 22 February 1913.
37. Charles Ashleigh, “Women in the I.W.W.,” Industrial Union Bulletin, 25 April 1908.
38. J. E. [Justus Ebert], “Women and Labor,” Solidarity, I July 1916.
39. Flynn, “The I.W.W. Call to Women,” Solidarity, 31 July 1915.
40. Flynn, “Men and Women,” unpublished 1915 speech, Flynn papers, American Institute for Marxist Studies, New York.
41. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Problems Organizing Women,” Solidarity, 15 June 1916.
42. Marie Equi to Margaret Sanger. 20 October 1916, Margaret Sanger papers, Library of Congress, Box 2.
43. Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement 1897–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 247.
44. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Socialist and the Suffragist,” The Forerunner 1, no. 12 (October 1910), p. 25.
45. Marijo Buhle, “Women and the Socialist Party, 1909–1914,” Radical America 4, no. 2 (February 1970), p. 38. See also Bruce Dancis, “Socialism and Women in the United States, 1900–1917,” Socialist Revolution 6, no. I (January-March 1976).
46. Marijo Buhle, “Women and the Socialist Party,” p. 41.
47. Hebe [Meta Stern], “The Socialist Party and Women,” Socialist Woman 2, no. 14 (June 1908), p. 9.
48. Articles on women by Clara Zetkin which have been translated into English include “Lenin on the Women Question,” in V.I. Lenin, The Emancipation of Women (New York: International Publishers, 1966); “Surrender of the Second International in the Emancipation of Women,” Communist International 6, no. 9–10 (April 1929); “Some Critical Remarks on the Draft Programme,” Communist International 5, no. 15 (1 August 1928). Recent work discussing Zetkin’s organizing career include Jean H. Quataert, ‘Unequal Partners in an Uneasy Alliance: Women and the Working Class in Imperial Germany, “in Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, eds., Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Elsevier North-Holland, Inc., 1978); Karen Honeycutt, “Clara Zetkin: A Socialist Approach to the Problem of Woman’s Oppression,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 3/4 (Spring 1976); Werner Thönnessen, The Emancipation of Women: The Rise and Decline of the Women’s Movement in German Social Democracy 1863–1933, trans, by Joris de Bres (London; Pluto Press, 1973).
49. Josephine C. Kaneko, “Are the Interests of Men and Women Identical?” Socialist Woman 1, no. 12 (May 1908), p. 5.
50. “The National Convention on the Woman Question,” Socialist Woman 2, no. 12 (June 1908), p. 3.
51. May Wood Simons, “Work in Chicago After the Convention,” Chicago Daily Socialist, 13 June 1908.
52. Mila Tupper Maynard, “Women in the Locals,” New York Call, 15 March 1909.
53. Proceedings of the National Convention (Chicago: Socialist Party, 1912), pp. 205, 207; “Among Ourselves,” Progressive Woman 6, no. 64 (October 1912), p. 15.
54. Proceedings of the National Convention, 1912, p. 207.
55. Clara Zetkin, “The Limited Woman Suffrage Fight in England,” Socialist Woman 2, no. 15 (August 1908), p. 6.
56. Anita C. Block, “Socialism and the Suffrage Movement Once More,” New York Sunday Call, 2 January 1910.
57. Anita C. Block, “The Conference and Its Significance,” New York Sunday Call, 19 December 1909.
58. See Part IV, Chapter 8, “The Uprising of the Thirty Thousand.”
59. Proceedings of the National Congress of the Socialist Party, (Chicago: Socialist Party, 1910), p. 180.
60. Ibid., p. 181.
61. Ibid., p. 185.
62. Ibid., p. 186.
63. Ibid., p. 191.
64. Ibid., p. 192.
65. Victor Berger, “Let Us Not Sidestep Too Much,” Social-Democratic Herald (Milwaukee), 17 July 1909. In 1912 Pauline Newman made some bitter observations about the strength of the Socialist party’s committment to woman suffrage:
Surely the Socialist Party stands for woman suffrage, it has always stood—still. It has not done much in that direction.
It is one thing to have a plank in a platform and another thing to advocate it. Don’t you know, brother Socialist, that with the exception of one or two speakers of the Socialist party all the rest ignore that plank…. Only recently a Philadelphia revolutionist was speaking on the contemporary social revolution to a large open air meeting, and when asked by a woman passerby as to what the Socialist party’s stand was on woman suffrage, answered: “We don’t bother with such nonsensical questions!” (“A Task for Women of the Socialist Party,” New York Call, 1 November 1912.)
66. “To the Local Secretaries of the Socialist Party,” no date. Socialist Party papers, Milwaukee Historical Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
67. Janet Korngold, “Work for Women,” American Socialist, 19 Jnly 1915.
68. Letter from May Wood Simons, American Socialist, 9 January 1915.
69. Theresa Malkiel, “More Serious Than Funny,” American Socialist, 24 April 1915.
70. Josephine C. Kaneko, “Abolishing the Woman’s Department,” American Socialist, 10 July 1915.
71. Kate Richards O’Hare, “The Eternal Feminine,’ New York Call, 7 June 1915.
72. “Report of the Women’s National Committee, Majority Report,” National Committee Session of May, 1915 (Chicago: Socialist Party, 1915), p. 1.
73. Agnes H. Downing, “Votes for Women,” New York Call, 13 May 1915.
74. Mary S. Oppenheimer, “The Suffrage Movement and the Socialist Party,” New Review 3, no. 9 (December 1915), p. 359.
75. Julius Gerber to Jessie Ashley, 23 April 1912, 4 May 1912; Jessie Ashley to Julius Gerber, 11 February 1912, 25 April 1912; Anita Block to Julius Gerber, 28 February 1914, New York Socialist Party papers, Microfilm 2, Tamiment Library, New York University.
76. William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 66.
77. Eastman, “Alice Paul’s Convention,” in Cook, On Woman and Revolution, p. 63.
78. Sherna Gluck, “Socialist Feminism Between the Two World Wars: Insights from Oral History,” paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, August 1978, p. 18.
79. In the 1920s lawyers believed that the courts would use the ERA to void all protective legislation that did not cover men as well as women and children. Today most believe that the precedents set under Title Vll could be used to extend protective legislation to men if the ERA were passed, except in cases where its effects are clearly discriminatory against women; such laws would be made void.
Part IV: Case Studies
Chapter 8. The Uprising of the Thirty Thousand
1. The Voice of Labor, Women’s Trade Union League songbook, Leonora O’Reilly papers, Box 15. File 349, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
2. As quoted in the New York Call, 28 November 1909.
3. Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, Souvenir History of the Strike (New York: Ladies’ Waistmakers’ Union, 1910), pp. 11–12.
4. Paula Scheier, “Clara Lemlich Shavelson,” Jewish Life 8, no. 95 (November 1954), p. 8.
5. Ibid., p. 9.
6. M. B. Sumner, “Spirit of the Strikers,” Survey 23 (22 January 1910), p. 554.
7. Scheier, “Clara Lemlich Shavelson,” p. 9.
8. Ibid.
9. Louis Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, A History of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (New York: B. W. Heubsch, Inc., 1924), pp. 146–147.
10. The cutters were not members of Local 25, the shirtwaist makers’ local, but of Local 30. They generally had higher wages and worked shorter hours than the women. Two days after the general strike began, 500 members of Local 30 struck in solidarity.
11. Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, Souvenir History, pp. 2–3.
12. Woods Hutchinson, M.D., “The Hygienic Aspects of the Shirtwaist Strike,” Survey 23 (22 January 1910), p. 545.
13. Ibid.
14. The number of working women who were hired as organizers or union staff in this period could be easily counted on one person’s fingers. Among them were Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Gertrude Barnum, and Josephine Casey.
15. Helen Marot, “A Woman’s Strike—An Appreciation of the Shirtwaist Makers of New York,” in Proceedings of the American Academy of Political Science, City of New York I (1910),p. 122. Out of the thirty thousand strikers, Marot estimates that six thousand were Russian men, two thousand Italian women, one thousand American women, and twenty-one thousand Russian women.
16. Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, Souvenir History, p. 4.
17. Quoted in Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 148.
18. Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, Souvenir History, p. 2.
19. Sumner, “Spirit of the Strikers,” p. 554.
20. New York Call, 28 September 1909.
21. New York Call, 5 October 1909.
22. Marot, “A Woman’s Strike,” p. 120.
23. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 152.
24. New York Call, 23 October 1909.
25. New York Call, 5 November 1909.
26. Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, “Working Girls’ Budgets: The Shirtwaist Makers and Their Strike,” McClure’s Magazine 36 (November 1910), p. 81.
27. Marot, “A Woman’s Strike,” p. 135.
28. Woods Hutchinson, “The Hygienic Aspects,” p. 545.
29. Marot, “A Woman’s Strike,” p. 126.
30. Ibid, p. 124.
31. Clark and Wyatt, “Working Girls’ Budgets,” p. 82.
32. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 159.
33. Rose Schneiderman, with Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One (New York: Paul S. Ericksson, Inc., 1967), p. 93.
34. New York Call, 4 December 1909.
35. William Mailly, “How Girls Can Strike,”Progressive Woman 3, no. 33 (February 1910), p. 6.
36. Grace Potter, “Women Shirt-Waist Strikers Command Sympathy of Public,” New York Call, 12 December 1909.
37. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 166.
38. Marot, “A Woman’s Strike,” pp. 123–124.
39. Ibid., pp. 122–123.
40. National Women’s Trade Union League, Proceedings of the Third Biennial Convention ( 1911 ), p. 19.
41. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1911), pp. 144, 150.
42. Ibid., pp. 161–163.
43. Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 339–340.
44. Mary White Ovington, The Walls Come Tumbling Down (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 43.
45. “Woman’s Sphere,” New York Call, 4 January 1910.
46. Alfred T. White, “Shirtwaist Makers’ Union,” Survey 23 (29 January 1910), p. 588.
47. Margaret Dreier Robins, “Shirtwaist Makers’ Union,“ Survey 23 (19 February 1910), p. 788.
48. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p, 341.
49. New York Call, 22 December 1909.
50. Minutes, Executive Board, 21 May 1910, National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress.
51. The lingerie manufacturers in the white goods shops tried to use black workers as strikebreakers as they had used them in the white goods general strike of 1913. This failed partly because the strikers threw “missiles” at them, and partly because they were unskilled at the trade. Hyman Berman, “The Era of the Protocol,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1956, p. 189.
52. See the National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress and Mildred Rankin’s letters to Margaret Dreier Robins, Robins papers, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
53. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 165.
54. Ibid., p. 163.
55. New York Call, 28 December 1909.
56. Marot, “A Woman’s Strike,” p. 29.
57. Proceedings of the… Convention (1911), p. 18.
58. “The League and the Strike of the Thirty Thousand,” Annual Report of the Women’s Trade Union League of New York, 1909–1910, p. 3.
59. New York Call, 20 December 1909.
60. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), p. 225.
61. New York Call, 21 December 1909.
62. New York American, 29 December 1909.
63. Theresa Serber Malkiel, Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (New York: Cooperative Press, 1910), pp. 40–41.
64. New York Call, 4 January 1910.
65. Minutes, National Executive Board Meeting, National Women’s Trade Union League, 20 May 1910, National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress.
66. New York Daily Tribune, 22 January 1910.
67. Raymond Robins to Margaret Dreier Robins, 5 February 1910, Raymond Robins papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Box 1, File 1.
68. Raymond Robins to Margaret Dreier Robins, 3 February 1910, Raymond Robins papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Box 1, File 1.
69. Theresa Malkiel, Metal Stern, and Antoinette Konikow, “Socialist Women and the Shirtwaist Strike,” New York Call, 8 February 1910.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Levine, The Women’sGarment Workers, p. 165; New York Call, 15 February 1910.
73. Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1962), p. 168.
74. Martha Bensley Bruere, “The Triangle Fire,” Life and Labor 1, no. 5 (May 1911), p. 137.
75. Schneiderman, AllforOne, p. 100.
76. Solidarity, 15 April 1911.
77. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 218.
78. Proceedings of the… Convention p. 18.
79. 13 May 1911; quoted by Nancy Schrom Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League of New York, 1903–1920,” Ph.D. dissertation. University of Wisconsin, 1974, p. 182. As the ILGWU continued to call general strikes to organize various branches of the garment industry, the League lost patience, particularly when the strikers included “American girls.” Mary Dreier wrote Margaret Dreier Robins on the occasion of the lingerie workers’ strike in 1912:
This strike seems to be as unorganized as the shirtwaist workers—there are some American girls out, very promising material for organization, but the Union has not yet asked our help, though we tooted up to see if we cd help. … I wish we had the authority to go straight into any strike situation and make them obey us—I mean of course in these unorganized strikes. It wd be much better all around. (4 January 1912, Margaret Dreier Robins papers, University of Florida, Gainesville).
80. Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League,” p. 205. It appears that Leonora O’Reilly, Mollie Schepps, Helen Marot, Melinda Scott, and Maggie Hinchey were against the protocol. Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman were presumably for it.
81. Levine, The Women’s Garment Workers, p. 224.
82. Ibid., pp. 224–225.
83. Ibid., p. 301.
84. Ibid., p. 313.
85. Ibid., pp. 315–316.
86. Ibid., p. 301.
87. Ibid., p. 303.
88. Quoted in Dye, “The Women’s Trade Union League,” p. 234.
89. Helen Marot, American Labor Unions (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1914), p. 75.
90. Solidarity, 26 February 1916.
91. Berman, “The Era of the Protocol,” p. 370.
92. The same discrimination against women exists today in the ILGWU, complicated by racial and ethnic factors. In 1970 one-third at the very least of the union’s membership were black, Latin, or Asian, but there was only one minority member on the executive board. Women made up 80 percent of the union membership and in 1970 they too had only one member on the executive board. The union’s president, Louis Stolberg, told the Wall Street Journal, “Women are very peculiar. I once tried to promote one. She went off and married a man. What the hell can I do?” Wall Street journal, 30 December 1970.
93. Scheier, “Clara Lemlich Shavelson,” p. 8.
Chapter 9. Lawrence, 1912
1. Joyce Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), p. 196.
2. The Strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, Hearings Before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives, 1912, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, House Document 671 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), p. 32. Hereafter cited as Hearings.
3. Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), p. 313.
4. Solidarity, 19 October 1912.
5. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 4, p. 308.
6. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices, p. 181.
7. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955), pp. 124–125.
8. Ibid., p. 117.
9. Elizabeth Shapleigh, “Occupational Diseases in the Textile Industry,” New York Call, 29 December 1912.
10. William D. Haywood, “On Ettor and Giovannitti” (speech made at Cooper Union, New York, 21 May 1912), (n.p.: IWW, n.d.), in IWW papers, Wayne State University, Detroit, p. 5.
11. Ibid.
12. Solidarity, 18 March 1911; “James P. Thompson’s Report,” Solidarity, 19 October 1912.
13. Solidarity, 18 March 1911.
14. “James P. Thompson’s Report,” Solidarity, 19 October 1912.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices, p. 159.
18. Haywood, “Ettor,” p. 4.
19. Fred Beal, “Strike!”, in Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices, p. 178.
20. Haywood, “Ettor,” pp. 6–7.
21. Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 245.
22. Mary Heaton Vorse, A Footnote to Folly (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1935), p. 7.
23. Flynn, I Speak, p. 125.
24. Ibid., p. 126.
25. Boston Evening Transcript, quoted in Donald Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 182.
26. Hearings, pp. 112–113.
27. This refers to an alleged attack by strikers on the trolley line, which derailed two cars on Jan. 16. The IWW claimed this was done by two detectives dressed as workers. Hearings, p. 292.
28. Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone, all active in the Western Federation of Miners, were kidnapped in Denver in February 1906 by the Idaho State Police to be framed for the murder of Idaho’s Governor Stuenenberg. Clarence Darrow defended them in a celebrated trial. They were acquitted.
29. Flynn, I Speak, p. 121.
30. Vorse interview in the Columbia Oral History Collection, Columbia University, New York, April 1957, p. 2. Copyright 1975 by The Trustees of Columbia University and used with permission.
31. Flynn, I Speak, p. 126.
32. Vorse, Footnote, pp. 13–14.
33. Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, Senate Document 870 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), p. 12.
34. “U.S.A. vs. William Haywood, et al,” stenographic record of testimony 5 August 1918. There is a transcript of the trial in the IWW papers at Wayne State University, Detroit.
35. Haywood, “Ettor,” pp. 11–12.
36. “Statement on behalf of the Lawrence Textile Workers’ Strike Committee, issued on March 24, the day on which it went out of existence,” Survey 28 (6 April 1912), pp. 79–60.
37. Vorse, footnote, p. 14.
38. William D. Haywood, “The Battle of Butte,” International Socialist Review 15, no. 4 (October 1914), p. 225.
39. Solidarity, 2 March 1912.
40. Fred Beal, Proletarian Journey (New York: Hillman-Curl, Inc., 1937), p. 44.
41. Flynn, I Speak, p. 122.
42. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The I.W.W. Call to Women,” Solidarity, 31 July 1915.
43. H. E. Fosdick, “After the Strike in Lawrence,” Outlook, 15 June 1912; reprinted in Solidarity, 6 July 1912.
44. Flynn, I Speak, pp. 125–126.
45. Hearings, p. 32.
46. Other IWW strikes had used this tactic before on a smaller scale, such as the strike in the Irwin coal fields in December 1910. Solidarity, 4 December 1910.
47. Before she became a birth control militant, Sanger was active in the Socialist Party in New York City and was at this time head of its women’s committee. She was also an IWW sympathizer.
48. 12 February 1912; Mary Heaton Vorse papers, Wayne State University, Detroit.
49. Hearings, pp. 227–228.
50. Hearings, p. 46.
51. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 4, p. 326.
52. Solidarity, 2 March 1912.
53. Leslie Marcy and Frederick Sumner Boyd, “One Big Union Wins,” International Socialist Review 12, no. 10 (April 1912), p. 625.
54. Ibid.
55. Hearings, p. 302.
56. Solidarity, 16 March 1912.
57. Vorse, Footnote, pp. 13–14.
58. Marcy and Boyd, “One Big Union Wins,” p. 629.
59. Ibid., p. 630.
60. Hearings, p. 89.
61. “James P. Thompson’s Report,” Solidarity, 19 October 1912.
62. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, “The Labor War in Lawrence, Survey 28 (6 April 1912), p. 74.
63. Elizabeth Glendower Evans to Margaret Dreier Robins, 25 March 1912, Elizabeth Glendower Evans papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.
64. Ibid.
65. Sue Ainslie Clark to Margaret Dreier Robins, no date, Rose Schneiderman papers, Tamiment Library, New York University.
66. See, for instance, Robert Dvorak, “The Garment Workers Strike Lost: Who Was To Blame,” International Socialist Review 11, no. 9 (9 March 1911).
67. Minutes, Executive Board, 19 April 1912, National Women’s Trade Union League papers, Library of Congress, Box 25.
68. Elizabeth Glendower Evans to Margaret Dreier Robins, 25 March 1912.
69. Haywood, “Ettor,” p. 2.
70. William Haywood, “Socialism, the Hope of the Workers,” International Socialist Review 12, no. 8 (February 1912), pp. 467–469.
71. Unidentified clipping. Socialist Party papers, Milwaukee Historical Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In March 1912 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn made a fundraising tour for the strike and stopped in Milwaukee, where she had high hopes of a warm reception since Milwaukee was a stronghold of conservative socialism, with a socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, and a socialist congressional representative, Victor Berger. She was disappointed. Seidel told her that he was a candidate for re-election and that he could lose his candidacy if he broke state electoral rules by making a contribution. Even worse, he could never run for office again; all this if he as much as slipped me one little lonesome dime for the starving women and children of Lawrence!… He went on to say that traps of this sort had been laid for him before and he had to be very careful. The insinuation that I was simply [trying] to lay a trap for him is indeed worth of the type who look upon the world movement for emancipation as a job-[getting] institution for themselves. … I was mad clear through. I didn’t say much. What could I say to this complacent, self-satisfied individual, who read me laws for a half hour, as to why he couldn’t help workers! Who never asked, “How is the strike? What are its prospects? Are you successful in your efforts? …” I had all the “comradeship” I could stand for one day. It’s a brand that will make Milwaukee famous, alright. (Solidarity, 16 May 1912.)
72. “The National Convention,” International Socialist Review 12, no. 12 (June 1912), p. 826.
73. James Conlin, Bread and Roses Too (New York: Greenwood, 1970), p. 125.
74. Quoted in Ben Williams, “Strike Tactics,” Solidarity, 2 August 1913.
75. Ibid.
76. Samuel Lipson to Victor Berger, 29 April 1912, Socialist Party papers, Milwaukee County Historical Society, Box 5.
77. Industrial Worker, 10 October 1912.
78. Flynn, I Speak, p. 139.
79. Solidarity, 2 November 1912.
80. Ibid.
81. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 259.
82. Industrial Worker, 10 October 1912.
83. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, p. 257.
84. Solidarity, 15 February 1913.
85. Solidarity, 9January 1915.
86. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 4, pp. 347–348.
87. Phillips Russell, “Cells of a New Society,” International Review 13, no. 10 (April 1913), p. 725.
Part V: Practical Conclusions
1. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. I (Peking; Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 304–305.
2. “Some Critical Remarks on the Draft Programme,” Communist International 5, no. 15 (August 1928), p. 374.
3. American Trade Unionism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 66.
4. I would consider the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) both, like NAWSA, bourgeois women’s organizations in that their program for women could be comfortably assimilated by either of the bourgeois political parties. Indeed, this is their goal. This does not mean these organizations, both of which are large, are made up only of ruling-class people and politicians; NOW, at least, has a heterogeneous membership and some of its local chapters are quite different in both composition and politics from the national leadership. They have little effect on the organization’s policy, however, which is set with an increasingly firm hand from Washington.
Minority women’s organizations have, on the national scale, included the National Organization of Black Feminists, Women of All Red Nations, and the Third World Women’s Alliance; most minority women’s groups, however, have been local ones comprised of Afro-American, Chicana, Puerto Rican, Asian-American, and Native American women. Left-wing feminist organizations have all been local and most have lasted only a few years; examples would include Bread and Roses in Boston, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, the New Haven Feminist Union, and a host of socialist- feminist groups.
5. As this is being written, the main social-democratic organization is the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC); the old Socialist Party still exists as well, and some would include the New American Movement (NAM) among these groups. Social-democratic politics are frequently represented in the newspaper In These Times. Then there is the Communist Party U.S.A. and the various Trotskyist splits from it and from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP); these include International Socialists (IS), International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Spartacist League, Workers World Party and its youth affiliate. Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), as well as many others. Progressive Labor (PL), which split from the CPUSA at the time of the Sino-Soviet rift, has grown increasingly to resemble its predecessors.
There is a large and ever-growing number of new Marxist-Leninist groups (as self defined), most of which are oriented towards China or Albania, though a few look more to Cuba. A fairly up-to-date list would include the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists (COUSML), the Communist Labor Party, the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (CPML), the Communist Workers Party, El Comite (MINP), the League of Revolutionary Struggle, the National Network of Marxist-Leninist Clubs, the Proletarian Unity League (PUL), the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) and its Organizational Committee for an Ideological Center (OCIC), the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWH). Revolutionary organizations that are predominantly Third World include the All-African Peoples Party, the Republic of New Africa (RNA), and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). A number of organizations that were previously only Third World have merged with others to become multinational, while some have been destroyed by police repression.
6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Socialist and the Sist,” The Forerunner 1, no. 12 (October 1910), p. 25.
7. Langston Hughes, “Frosting,” The Panther and the Lash (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1974), p. 84.