Dreamers of a New Day (33 page)

When in 1912 immigrant textile workers rebelled in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Flynn and the IWW struggled to organize 30,000 workers of around forty nationalities. Flynn was inspired by the solidarity of the unskilled immigrant strikers. She envisaged a unionism without boundaries in which ‘the Polack and the Jew and the Turk . . . forgot their religious and national differences . . . and felt that an injury to one is an injury to all’. She recounted an incident at Lawrence when a young woman was stopped on the picket line by an Italian boy of about sixteen. ‘You go to work? No! Nice girls no go to works. Nice girl go ahome and sleeps’.
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Flynn was conscious of the need to reach women in the home, and community support proved extremely important in the Lawrence strike. The IWW was able to build on networks which already existed among women, thus linking the dispute with discontent in the community. The strikers themselves noted the lived connection between producers and consumers.
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Community participation also served to broaden the impact of the strike. Middle-class supporters such as the socialist Mary Heaton Vorse were moved not only by the refusal of the strikers to be provoked into violence, and by the solidarity between ethnic groups, but also by this activism within the community which involved women and children.
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When Margaret Sanger was forcibly stopped by railroad authorities at the station with a group of children who were to be cared for temporarily by well-wishers, the Lawrence strikers’ cause became a humanitarian issue.
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Lawrence acquired a symbolic significance, epitomizing a stark clash of opinion about how America was to define itself as a society in the early twentieth century.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (Tamiment Library)

Community involvement and the appeal to public opinion became a broadly accepted strategy against the intransigence of employers and the violence of the police. The American working-class movement would be particularly creative in bridging the gap between workplace and neighbourhood, and women played a vital role in developing these links, especially
in close-knit mining areas. During the 1913–14 miners’ strike in Colorado, co-ordinated by the veteran organizer ‘Mother Jones’, then in her eighties, families as well as workers confronted the coal company. Women emerged out of this bitter strike and lockout with a class consciousness which was marked by their specifically female experiences.
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The outbreak of World War One changed the whole context of organizing, straining long-standing loyalties and friendships among campaigners. Reformers, socialists, anarchists and feminists divided among themselves on the war, which became the overriding political issue. Repression against those who opposed the war was particularly harsh in the United States: thousands of IWW members received long jail sentences, and Emma Goldman was deported. Yet, paradoxically, the upheaval the war caused in daily living meant that ideas of equality, previously seen as utopian, came to seem credible. In both countries, as women found themselves doing work which was comparable to men’s, they questioned gender inequality and trade union resistance to their entry into ‘male’ jobs. Equal pay was no longer a wild wish; it appeared decisively on the agenda of women’s demands. It was supported by members of the American Women’s Trade Union League, and was one of Sylvia Pankhurst’s campaign issues in East London. By 1918 it was being claimed as a right in Britain by striking women transport workers, who told passengers they wanted the same money as men for doing the same job.
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The need for women’s labour during the war had fostered a new confidence and brought equal pay out on to the streets.

Male trade union opposition was somewhat muted by wartime exigencies, but when the war ended conflict erupted because the soldiers were returning. Immediately after the war the WTUL joined with suffrage women in America to protest the block on women transport workers becoming conductors. In 1919 the women’s supporters made their case both in terms of equal rights and through a concept of social reciprocity in relation to the state. ‘A government that demands universal service from its citizens in time of war should provide universal employment at a living wage for its citizens in time of peace.’
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The war years had encouraged not only ideas of gender equality, but a tacit social contract between individuals and the state which transcended the right to profit.

The wartime extension of the state into wider aspects of daily life meant that women reformers and investigators had gained experience serving
on committees, surveying women’s working conditions, or introducing welfare provision for women workers. These top-down interventions connected women’s position at work with life outside work, but they did so in an authoritarian fashion. In response British labour women created a coalition which attempted to negotiate a greater degree of democratic control. The Federation of Women Workers, along with the Women’s Co-operative Guild, the Women’s Labour League and the Railway Women’s Guild, combined to form the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organizations (SJCIWO). In 1917 it called a conference which examined the impact of welfare supervision in industry. While in favour of an increase in women factory inspectors, the women who attended were wary of the employers’ welfare workers, protesting against ‘any extension of control over the private lives of workers’ and insisting that ‘the welfare – social and physical – of the workers is best looked after by themselves’.
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The SJCIWO argued instead for trade union committees to negotiate not simply over wages and conditions at work but also around workers’ wider social needs, proposing hostels which would be funded by local authorities and jointly controlled by them and by the trade unions. The interconnection of areas of life in wartime led to ideas of how democratic organization could extend beyond the workplace. This was accompanied by a rudimentary critique of the terms on which individuals could access state resources, which in turn suggested the need to rebalance the inequitable power relations between state and society.

Commentators were struck by the new-found confidence of well-paid women munitions workers. During the war, hitherto unorganizable groups of workers also discovered that they enjoyed a new bargaining power; a domestic workers’ union in Birmingham was able to secure minimum wage rates for servants at the age of twenty-four, paid holidays and comfortable working and living conditions.
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Moreover in both Britain and America the numbers of women in trade unions increased dramatically. In her pioneering history
Women in Trade Unions
(1920), an optimistic Barbara Drake would argue that the war politicized many working women by bringing them into the trade union movement.

However, the post-war move out of well-organized male jobs and the tendency for women to return to unorganized sectors soon reduced the impact of the wartime growth in union membership and the capacity of marginal groups to resist.
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Mounting unemployment in Britain and
a series of labour defeats enabled employers to push down the minimum rates in low-paid industries. Once again women were frequently presented with domestic service as the sole alternative to unemployment. Complaints about being pushed towards service were heard in 1922 when the shop workers’ leader, Margaret Bondfield, chaired a Trades Union Congress conference of unemployed women. Yet the bold interconnecting vision acquired in the war years persisted. The women at the conference wanted all workers – including homeworkers, cleaners and domestic servants – to be covered by the Unemployment Insurance Act.
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Awareness of women’s specific needs and of gender inequality also proved resilient. In the early 1920s Lily Webb, who came from a Lancashire textile family, was active in the newly formed Communist Party and in the National Unemployed Workers’ Union, advising women activists on unemployment. Though the Communist Party put the stress on women’s exploitation as workers, Webb, at the grass-roots, was aware of women’s need for social provision such as food centres, clinics and maternity hospitals. In her reports from the Manchester region in the paper
Out of Work
, she was sharply critical of the men’s tendency to ignore these issues.
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Women clerks looking for work (Working Class Movement Library)

One labour market shift did survive the war. Growing numbers of women in both Britain and the US were entering ‘white-collar jobs’ as clerical and sales workers, while the more highly educated were moving not only into teaching but into the civil service, academia and the professions. The numbers of women graduates were particularly striking in the US, where in 1920, 7.6 per cent of women attended college. A few even penetrated the male bastions of finance. The American Augusta Bratton, having achieved success in banking, argued that there was ‘room in the business world for both masculine and feminine brains’. She was not sure, however, whether women unlike herself were motivated to cope in a man’s world: ‘They are still taking advantage of their sex to usurp privileges which would never occur to men to take’. The tough-minded Bratton considered that women must stop giving in to ‘trivial ailments when it is not absolutely necessary’.
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She warned women that if they wanted equal pay, they must prove themselves. How women were to relate to the competitive market place was to be an issue which refused to go away.

Post-war women workers in the United States were expressing an equally confident sense of their ability to fight their own battles. With America booming and unemployment relatively low, some working women were assuming rights rather than defining themselves in relation to men. Dana Frank records how in a 1919 Seattle debate about whether a ‘family wage’ earned by the man should be the goal, ‘Feminist Unionists argued that women had the right to work both as independent individuals and out of need to support their families’.
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While African-American working-class women were largely excluded from better-paid jobs, the sociologist Elise Johnson McDougald noted an informal assertiveness among them, even outside the organized sectors. In her essay ‘The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation’ (1925), she wrote that ‘The Negro woman . . . is revolting against residential domestic service. It is a last stand in her fight to maintain a semblance of family life. For this reason, principally the number of day or casual workers is on the increase . . . how else can her children, loose all afternoon, be gathered together at night-fall.’
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A strong emphasis on women’s independence was also evident in the demand by the egalitarian American feminist Alice Paul, and the powerful National Woman’s Party, for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to establish women’s equal economic rights during the early 1920s. To the egalitarians, the claims of Florence Kelley from
the Consumers’ League, and Mary Dreier from the Women’s Trade Union League, for special laws for women workers around maximum hours, minimum wages and the prohibition of night work, seemed to be stuck in the past. Moreover the old problem for those who sought regulation in the workplace remained: the only way of upholding federal intervention against the freedom of contract was by making a case that women were naturally, rather than socially or economically, incapable of defending themselves at work. This was anathema to the liberal egalitarians, who defended women’s unrestricted freedom to have fulfilling careers or do skilled jobs.

Some American women tried to combine claims for equality with protection. The socialist feminist Harriot Stanton Blatch rejected the tactic of classing women with children, contending that special protection would exclude women from skilled work. Instead, Blatch argued, protection had to be for both sexes.
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But of course this approach was in conflict not only with employers’ profits but with widely held convictions about the freedom of the market. Women trade union activists, who initially had supported legislation because unionization among women was so hard, became increasingly exasperated by the egalitarians’ disregard of the actual circumstances of women workers. WTUL member Pauline Newman pointed out that the freedom and equality most working-class women had enjoyed before any restriction on time was merely the freedom to work long hours for low wages, or to ‘leave the job and starve’.
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Over the course of the decade the battle lines polarized.
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