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The revolution affects women and girls. The industrial revolution also brought thousands of women and children into the workforce for the first time. In New England, businessmen built hundreds of textile mills that employed mainly women and some children. At first these factories employed the young, unmarried daughters of farmers; after the 1850's they began to hire immigrant women from countries such as Ireland and Canada. Many women also began to work for wages in their homes or in small shops called "slop-shops," sewing pre-cut cloth into finished clothing. In 1854, the New Haven Shirt Company employed almost 3,700 women who worked long hours for low wages sewing shirts in their homes. In the 1830's and 1840's, shoe manufacturers began to employ thousands of women who worked in their homes stitching the leather uppers of shoes. This growing class of wage earners had very little control over their work. Textile "mill girls" often worked 12 to 15 hours a day, lived in strictly supervised company boarding houses, had to be silent during work, and could be fired for using "profane or improper language." Journeymen craftsmen also lost control over their work during this period. Master craftsmen refused to let journeymen take breaks and increased their hours and workload. They divided and simplified journeymen's jobs. In artisan shoe workshops, for example, a journeyman no longer made a shoe from start to finish. Instead, his only job might be to cut the leather for the shoes or attach the bottom of the shoe. Women who stitched clothing and shoes in their homes faced long hours, fines for late and faulty work, and low piece rates. THE FIRST LABOR MOVEMENT Striking for the right to talk. Not all members of the country's new working class accepted their employers' authority and they organized to resist the growing power of master craftsmen and manufacturers. In 1824, women and men at a textile factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, led the country's first factory strike. The striking textile workers demanded that the owner reverse his decision to increase their workday by one hour and to cut their wages. Four years later, mill hands in Dover, New Hampshire, led the first all-women factory strike and demanded the elimination of new rules that banned talking at work and fined employees 12½ cents for being one minute late. Women who sewed clothing in their homes and in small workshops also organized. In 1831, 1,600 women tailors in the Union of Tailoresses' Society of New York struck for higher wages. Children on strike! Skilled white male journeymen weren't the only workers who took part in the labor movement of the 1830's. In 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts, ;over 899 women who operated the looms and spindles in the towns textile mills called a strike to protest a wage cut. The strike began after a mill agent fired a worker who told him that ". . . there was no cause for any reduction whatever." The other workers followed the fired woman out of the mill and marched from mill to mill urging others to join the strike. After threats and criticism from mill owners, ministers, and newspapers, the strikers accepted the wage cut. The same year, 800 women textile workers led an unsuccessful strike in Dover, New Hampshire, to protest a wage reduction. The following year in Paterson, New Jersey, 1500 girls and boys struck the city's mills and won a reduction of hours from 13½ to 12 hours per day. Women and African Americans: Not to be ignored. Many of these new members were women. At first, the Order [Knights of Labor] did not admit women, partly because many of its male leaders viewed women workers as competitors. The Order, however, could not afford to ignore the rapidly growing number of women in the workforce. In 1881, the Order admitted women into its ranks and by 1886, had nearly 50,000 women members. A workers named Rebecca joined the Knights to improve the conditions in the clothing factory where she earned $5 a week, worked for ten hours a day, and listened to the supervisor shout and call her a "liar," a "hussy," and a "lazy good-for-nothing." They called strikes and boycotts and formed strong shop committees that et with managers to resolve grievances, like the speed of work, firings, and fines. New Allies from Abroad Inspire New Struggles Many workers fought against these attacks from employers and kept the labor movement alive. Despite employer and government attacks, new immigrants initiated a number of massive strikes to improve their conditions and bring unions to their workplace. Between 1900 and 1920, over 14 million people, mostly from Italy and Slavic countries in southern and southeastern Europe, emigrated to the United States in search of work and opportunity. These new immigrants found employment in large factories that were now highly mechanized, in construction work, in coal mines, or on the docks as longshoremen. A number of these immigrants had been active in working-class political movements in Europe and brought to the United States a strong commitment to building unions. And even new immigrants, who had never worked in factories and had few industrial skills, organized against oppression in the workplace. Immigrant Italian and Jewish women and girls who made clothes in sweatshops and factories waged some of the most militant union drives and strikes during this time. These garment workers faced horrible conditions. Factory overseers frequently increased the number of pieces they had to sew each day, reduced their wages, charged tem for needles and thread, fired them for damaged cloth, harassed them, hired children as young as eight years old, and forced them to work as long as sixteen hours per day. Factory owners also ignored safety and fire hazards. On March 25, 1911, a deadly fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City and claimed the lives of 146 workers, mostly young women and girls, and became a symbol of the need for unions. A reporter from the New York Times witnessed the horrifying incident and wrote: "I could see smoke pouring from the eighth and ninth floors . . . The faces of young women pressed up against the windows--hundreds of screaming heads. At one window a young man helped a girl onto the sill and let her drop . . . That's when I heard my first thud . . . The girls had no way out. The management had locked all the doors to keep them from going to the bathroom . . . Thud . . . Another thud . . . The thuds of falling bodies grew so loud I thought they'd be heard all over the city." Between 1909 and 1915, clothing workers joined unions in growing numbers and led a series of massive strikes known as "uprisings" to gain a voice in the workplace and put an end to these kinds of working conditions. A 20-year old leads a walkout of thousands The garment workers' upsurge began in New York City in 1909 at a meeting of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL). Three thousand workers had gathered in an auditorium to decide whether to call a strike against the shirtwaist manufacturers in the city. After two hours of discussion, a twenty-year old clothing worker named Clara Lemlich stood up and declared, "I have listened to all the speakers and I have no further patience for talk. I move we go on a general strike." The crowd exploded into foot stomping, cheering, and shouting and voted to walk out of their shops. On the first day of the strike, 20,000 workers closed almost 500 shops. Within four days, almost half of the strikers returned to work after their employers signed union contracts. The owners agreed to hire only union workers, stop charging workers for needles and thread, cut back on mandatory overtime, and negotiated over wage rates. Many of the larger firms refused to settle with the garment workers and hired strikebreakers to end the strike. Strikers also faced daily attacks from police and private guards who charge picket lines and beat them until they were bruised and bloody. In court they often confronted judges who fined, jailed, and sentenced them to hard labor. Many middle class and upper class women were outraged by the treatment of the strikers, most of whom were young Russian and Italian women, and joined the Women's Trade Union League to support the strike. They joined picket lines, gave speeches at churches and to civic groups, helped publish a newsletter, and lobbied the Mayor to end police violence against pickets. Although the strike ended unsuccessfully on February 15, it inspired future strikes and union organizing among garment workers in other workplaces in cities like Chicago. "Sex discrimination's got to go!" A growing number of women union members also began to challenge sexism in the workplace and in the labor movement. During the war, millions of women entered previously all-male manufacturing jobs making battleships, guns, airplanes, and ammunition. Many of these women joined unions and organized committees in their unions that fought for equal pay with men, child care, and maternity leave. The leadership of some unions supported women's demands for equal treatment. In 1942, the United Electrical Workers and the UAW convinced the National War Labor Board to force companies to pay the same wages to women and men doing comparable jobs. After the war, employers replaced many women workers with returning soldiers. The experience of defense work and union activism, however, gave millions of women a new sense of confidence and willingness to challenge sexism and traditional gender roles. Over the next five decades, women would continue to enter into wage work, to join unions, and to demand equality. |
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