Strikes and Sensibility
The right to live and the right to earn a living are indistinguishable terms. - Mrs. Raymond Robins, WTUL president, 1913
Just the Facts: The Emergence of Modern America - The Progressive Era
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Striving for similar concessions were countless working class women. Although females had toiled in factories since the 1830's Lowell Mills, never had machinery been so potent. Fruit canning, garment sewing, and box-making were low-paying jobs incessantly overshadowed by threats of harassment.
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"The bosses in the shops are hardly what you would call educated men. They yell at the girls and they "call them down" even worse than I would imagine slaves were in the South. They don't use very nice language. They swear at us and sometimes they do worse." - Clara Lemlich, veteran strike leader
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A "Living Wage"Even when women did have work, the wages often kept them at the edge of starvation. Earning four or five dollars a week, a girl could just afford food, clothing, and carfare. There was nothing left for medical care, savings, or recreation. If she worked in the garment trades, she also had to buy her own needles and to pay for the power used by her sewing machine... Men -even unskilled men- earned nearly twice as much. - Rosie's Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War |
Uprising of 20,000 (1909-10)
"It was like the uprising of a foreign people, oppressed and despised. It was the tragedy of the immigrant, his high hopes of liberty and prosperity in the new land blighted..." -Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman, 1915
The quest for industrial democracy is what they were really hoping for -for greater control and input on their jobs. -Interview with Dr. Elizabeth McKillen