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Women In Textiles The IWW had committed itself to equality for female workers from its very inception. Although only about a dozen delegates to the founding convention were women, a reflection of the attitudes in the established unions sending representatives, women were given considerable visibility. On the podium at the opening were Mother Jones, indefatigible advocate of miners' rights and foe of child labor, and Lucy Parsons, an anarchist orator and widow of one of the Haymarket martyrs. Luella Twining, later entrusted with managing HaywoodÕs 1908 national tour, was a voting delegate and chairperson of the ratification session. Shortly after its founding, the IWW would draw brilliant female organizers to its standard, the most notable being Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Matilda Rabinowitz. Such female IWWs spoke to, organized and led male workers as well as females. While the IWW became increasingly active in male-dominated industries after 1913, it never abandoned efforts to organize women. The IWW was the first American labor union to discuss the status of housework as a category of labor and the first to organize chambermaids and prostitutes. The major industry in the East earmarked for organization by the IWW was textile manufacturing. Approximately half of the textile workers were female, a large percentage under the age of twenty with many less than fourteen. Women played such a pivotal role in textiles that industrial unions without their full participation were inconceivable, just as industrial unions in Southern lumber had been inconceivable without the full participation of blacks. The IWW also understood that no textile strike would succeed if women who worked at home succumbed to the anti-union pressures generated by the employers and their allies in the press, public office, the school system, and the clergy. Women who did not themselves work in the mills had to be convinced that whatever the immediate hardships of a strike, there would be real long-term benefits for their families and community. The conditions faced by textile workers were grim. Wages for all but a few skilled workers were so low that most were in chronic debt, and work conditions, especially for women and children, were lethal. At a time when the national life expectancy was nearly fifty years, over a third of all mill workers died before the age of twenty~six. Substandard housing was the rule in mill towns, which were usually organized into de facto language ghettos with the most recent immigrants having the worst accommodations. When IWW organizers began to arrive at textile mills to proclaim the doctrine of industrial democracy, a substantial number of workers were interested. By 1908, after leading a number of minor strikes, the IWW could claim 5,000 members for its National Industrial Union of Textile Workers headed by James P, Thompson. The biggest textile challenge came four years later when pay cuts led to a groundswell of strike sentiment in Lawrence, Massachusetts. IWW Local 20 had been on the scene for more than four years, and its members had an excellent grasp of the conditions of the 60,000 Lawrence residents dependent on the mills for their livelihood. Prompted by local IWWs, the strikers sent for seasoned organizer Joe Ettor, an IWW orator who had already been in Lawrence, and Arturo Giovannitti, Secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation and editor of its organ, Il Proletario. Faced with having to organize workers from twenty-four major national groups speaking twenty-two different languages, the Lawrence leadership devised an organizational structure that became the standard IWW mode of operation. Each language group was given representatives on the strike committee, which numbered from 250 to 300 members. All decisions regarding tactics and settlements were democratically voted on by the committee, with the IWW organizers acting strictly as advisors. The Lawrence strikers realized that their battle went beyond wages and work conditions to address the question of the quality and purpose of life. Female strikers expressed their needs in an unforgettable phrase when they appeared on the picket line with a homemade placard declaring, "We Want Bread and Roses Too," a demand which became a fixture in the labor and ferninist movements. But neither roses nor bread were possible without the most militant kind of strike and innovative worker tactics. Women would show the way on both scores. More female pickets than males were to be arrested for intimidating strikebreakers, and rank and file women provided decisive leadership at key moments in the strike. Prohibited from massing before individual mills by law, the male and female strikers formed a moving picket line around the entire mill district! This human chain involving thousands of spirited workers moved twenty-four hours a day for the entire duration of the ten-week strike. Augmenting the awesome picket lines were frequent parades through town of from 3,000 to 6,000 strikers marching to militant labor songs. When a city ordinance was passed forbidding parades and mass meetings, the strikers improvised sidewalk parades in which twenty to fifty individuals locked arms and swept through the streets. They passed through department stores disrupting normal business and otherwise succeeded in bringing commerce to a halt. At night strikers serenaded the homes of scabs trying to get a good night's sleep, and in some cases the names of scabs were sent back to their native lands to shame their entire clan. When striker Annie Lo Pezzo was killed during one of the demonstrations, Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested on murder charges; they were said to have provoked workers to illegal acts which in turn resulted in the death. Their places were promptly taken by Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Trautman, and Carlo Resca. Haywood's arrival in Lawrence was tumultuous. Fifteen thousand strikers greeted him at the railroad station and 25,000 listened to him speak on the Lawrence Commons. During the course of the strike, there were dynamite schemes by employers, a proclamation of martial law, the death of a Syrian teenage boy from a militiaman's bayonet, and repeated physical confrontations between strikers and law enforcement groups. Women again played a critical role when it was decided to have the children of the strikers cared for by sympathizers in other cities. After some groups of children had left Lawrence, the army resolved to block further removals. In the ensuing physical confrontation, many women were beaten and two pregnant women miscarried, The brutal incident led to the national publicity and governmental hearings that resulted in victory for the strikers. In the wake of the Lawrence triumph came strikes in other textile centers under IWW leadership and a successful campaign to free Ettor and Giovannitti. Prominent women such as socialist humanitarian Helen Keller, birth control activist Margaret Sanger and AFL organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan enthusiastically supported various IWW initiatives. Textile owners not yet faced with strikes began to grant wage increases unilaterally in hopes of averting unionization. The Detroit News estimated that 438,000 textile workers received nearly fifteen million dollars in raises as an indirect consequence of the Lawrence strike, with the biggest gains scored by the 275,000 workers in New England. For a brief season, the IWW was on the threshold of unionizing textiles and redrawing the labor map of America. But the IWW victory never materialized. Among the IWW's problems was that the organization had not yet mastered the techniques of maintaining large locals on a permanent basis, once the pressure of a strike was over. A year after the strike in Lawrence, membership had fallen from ten thousand to under one thousand, as the union failed to counter new employer pressures. Of more immediate consequence was the eight-month strike which took place in Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson, the center of the nation's silk industry, employed 25,000 workers in dying and manufacturing. Late in 1912, the mill owners embarked on a policy of speedups and wage cuts. The result was a spontaneous strike and a call for IWW assistance. The tactics recently used elsewhere with such great success were again employed, and top IWW organizers led by William Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were constantly on the scene. Nonetheless the strike did not go well. One factor was an unprecedented rate of arrests, which created a chronic shortage of funds for strike benefits, legal fees, fines and bail. In May of 1913, John Reed, just beginning to achieve fame as a socialist journalist, proposed to solve the financial logjam and bring a national spotlight to the strike with a pageant to be staged in New York City's Madison Square Garden.3 The pageant was announced in red lights ten feet high spelling out "IWW" on the side of Madison Square Garden. Although a propagandistic knockout with fifteen thousand people in attendence, the pageant was a financial fizzle, barely covering its costs. The event also created petty jealousies among strikers over who would take part. The pageant seems to have drained energy and funds that might have been more usefully employed in Paterson itself, but the show established a precedent for fundraising and publicity that would be followed by other radical groups, especially by the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. The Paterson strikers operated under disadvantages that had not existed in other textile centers. The mill operators saw themselves as the last line of defense for the industry and were prepared to stand firm whatever the economic costs. Unlike Lawrence, where the American Woolen Company dominated the city, there was no one mill in Paterson that could be singled out as the major target. The Paterson silk manufacturers also 'had other plants in Pennsylvania, where the workers did not strike. Their production guaranteed income to the owners however long the Paterson strike might last. A self-inflicted weakness was that the strike committee often disregarded the advice of the IWW, particularly on issues of solidarity. Sensing this weakness, the owners eventually offered plant by plant settlements, a practice which pit some of the skilled against the unskilled, and some of the native born against the foreign born. The Paterson strike was officially terminated in August and marked the end of IWW momentum in textiles. Individual units in various locations remained active for years afterward, but the organization was never able to mount another offensive such as that of 1905 to 1913. The fragile alliance that had been developing with some feminists withered, and decades would pass before the needs of working women resurfaced as major items on labor's agenda. A defeat sometimes demonstrates an organization's characteristics even more vividly than victory. Such is the case with Paterson, where the IWW managed to implant visionary ideals in the midst of a brutal losing bid for immediate gains. Sophie Cohen and Irma Lombardi were among the Paterson workers who hurled themselves into self-generated, point-of-production activism. Cohen, who later became a nurse, retained her IWW membership, and her views reflect the thinking of rank and file Wobbly women. Lombardi, who continued to be a textile worker for forty years, is more representatives of the tens of thousands of women in the Northeast who responded to the talks of the Gurley Flynns. Although an enthusiastic striker, once the battle was over Lombardi lost contact with the IWW One can posit that there must have been many like her who had once embraced the IWW and would have done so again if presented the opportunity. Source: |