Dreamers of a New Day (32 page)

This Gordian knot led Macarthur and Tuckwell into the broad alliance agitating for state intervention to regulate sweated work, which coalesced in Britain during the 1900s. In the nineteenth century some male and female outworkers had been part of the trade union movement, but by the early twentieth century, inner-city homeworkers were increasingly regarded as belonging to an unorganizable under-class. In 1906, Tuckwell declared that homeworking ‘pressed . . . into service’ a labour force of the unfit, ‘the aged and infirm, the crippled and the half-witted’. It forced children to ‘toil early and late’ and perpetuated the reproduction of unhealthy, badly educated, casualized workers. Tuckwell enquired rhetorically: ‘How shall we put hearts and energy into citizens reared under such conditions?’
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Keir Hardie with Mary Macarthur (Press Association)

The Anti-Sweating League did not take the homeworkers’ need to earn a livelihood into account. Homework was simply seen as a system of production which should be eradicated, and Gertrude Tuckwell did not think married women should work at all. The campaign gained momentum from anxieties about social cohesion, a political need to counter the vociferous lobby for immigration control, and the eugenic panic about physical degeneration. Fears that disease could be passed on from producers to consumers, and a conviction that dependence on cheap labour held back the development of the economy, also played a part.

Importantly, though, the Anti-Sweating League made homework visible, through conventional means of communication such as reports, pamphlets and meetings, as well as by more dramatic methods. In 1906 it mounted an ‘Exhibition of the Sweated Industries’ in London, in association with the Liberal
Daily News
and the wealthy Quaker manufacturer,
George Cadbury. Women workers appeared in person making cigarettes, jewel-cases, matchboxes, stockings, tennis balls, brushes, furniture and innumerable other everyday items. Fashionable London society learned that the women making the cheap goods they bought worked between twelve and sixteen hours a day, to earn five to seven shillings a week.
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The anti-sweating campaigners also helped to legitimate state intervention around wages. Instead of either a minimum wage or the licensing of homework customary in the US, the Trades Boards in low-paid industries, introduced in 1909, were based on the Australian model. The Boards regulated pay in industries such as laundry work and clothing, where many of the workers were women. While they established a degree of state intervention in the rate of pay, employers were quick to exploit loop-holes. The effectiveness of the Boards depended on workers complementing regulation through organization. In 1910 the women chain-makers at Cradley Heath resisted successfully when some employers and middlemen tried to evade the rates set by the Trades Board. Mary Macarthur’s campaign on their behalf resulted in sympathetic press coverage and an early Pathé newsreel.
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However, as Sylvia Pankhurst pointed out in 1912, employers would quickly devise a way round the minimum rates by giving an extra load of work out and expecting it to be finished in the same time.
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Other measures to counter women’s poverty were being debated in the early twentieth century. During the 1900s members of the Fabian Women’s Group argued for equal pay, married women’s right to work and the endowment of motherhood. However, equal pay caused some dissension. Beatrice Webb favoured the minimum rates set by the Trades Boards because she feared women would not be employed if they gained equal pay. Eleanor Rathbone was also opposed to equal pay, which she believed would result in even worse job segregation between the sexes.
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A mix of organizing and pressure for legislation also existed in the United States. Along with the Consumers’ League, the Women’s Trade Union League lobbied for women workers and pressed for protective legislation at work. The League gathered support from settlement workers, socialists and feminists, and also gained a base among women clothing workers in the early twentieth century. Though the American industrial system was modernizing rapidly in the 1900s, the use of women’s cheap labour persisted in the clothing sector, and from 1909 defiant immigrant women were radicalized in a series of insurgent strikes against low pay and lack of safety in the factories. In 1911, a fire at the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York killed 146 young women and injured many more. New Yorkers watched in horror as the terrified garment workers jumped to their deaths. A bolted lock was produced at the inquiry; but the jury, asked to decide whether the employers knew the door was locked, found them ‘not guilty’. One of the survivors, Rose Safran, who had been involved in an earlier strike at Triangle, reflected after the fire: ‘If the union had won we would have been safe. Two of our demands were for adequate fire escapes and for open doors from the factories to the street. But the bosses defeated us and we didn’t get the open doors or the better fire escapes. So our friends are dead.’
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The workers and their middle-class allies knew that the Triangle factory was typical of other work places. The tragedy brought home the flagrant human cost of America’s economic growth.

Despite the exploitative circumstances of work, the crowded tenement neighbourhoods near the factory districts generated a vigorous radical culture. Young militant working women were educated and politicized by the debates and ideas which circulated within their communities and beyond. They hungrily searched out books and ideas. Clara Shavelson stitched shirts for twelve hours and then went to the New York Public Library, to read works by Russian writers. Pauline Newman joined the Socialist Literary Society and read George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare, listening to Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman when they came to give talks. Rose Schneiderman borrowed books from other workers, and read the serialization of Emile Zola’s
J’Accuse
in the Yiddish evening paper
Abendblatt
, commenting later, ‘I devoured everything I could get my hands on.’
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Although all three women would remain politically active throughout their lives, they knew from their own experience and observation that most women workers had an equivocal relationship to their work. In 1912 Clara Shavelson described the young immigrant workforce in New York: ‘In the beginning they are full of hope and courage. Almost all of them think that some day they will be able to get out of the factory and work up, but continuing to work under long hours and miserable conditions they lose their hopes. Their only way to leave the factory is marriage.’
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The nature of working-class women’s employment undermined the association of work with individual fulfilment which prevailed in middle-class circles. Because they laboured for low pay in grim, damaging surroundings over which they exerted little control, self-actualization implied escaping from work, not gaining entry. Moreover they brought gendered expectations of a woman’s identity into the factories. These in turn were reinforced by their situation as workers; young working women, whose wages rarely extended to the pleasures of city life, relied on men friends to ‘treat’ them when they went out. Women trade union organizers such as Clara Shavelson and Rose Schneiderman knew that this desire to escape into romance and marriage made unionization more difficult, but they could not and did not condemn young women for it.

Rose Schneiderman (Tamiment Library)

Such ambivalence did, however, trouble a new wave of idealistic college students, inspired by feminist ideas of independence to support women’s trade union organizing. To one Detroit trade union organizer they seemed patronizing. In 1908 Kate Ryrie criticized well-off students who looked down on the working-class young women’s desire to find a husband ‘as vulgar and silly’. Ryrie asserted:

Let them change places with her in reality and not as a few days’ slumming experience, and I’ll guarantee that they’ll be as anxious to get out of the factory by the marriage route as they were to shake off
its dirt and get back to the shelter of their luxurious homes after their week’s experience. They would then know the importance of the lover question with the average working girl.
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The Women’s Trade Union League responded by trying to develop a union culture which could reach out to their members as women and as workers. Education was the key element in the League’s social unionism; indeed, many recruits arrived by way of union-oriented English language classes. For a small payment the League also offered health care, along with advice on ‘sex hygiene’. Lectures and classes covered not only industrial questions but the pros and cons of marriage and romance, domestic labour, even Lester Frank Ward’s ideas about women’s crucial role in early societies. A great pool of thwarted talent was released through these adult education projects. Intellectually minded League women went off to study at the University of Chicago; in 1916 Julia O’Connor, a telephone operator and organizer, sailed through a course called ‘Trade Unionism and Labor Problems’ with higher grades than the college students. Women’s colleges such as Vassar, Wellesley, Barnard and Bryn Mawr similarly developed close links with the Women’s Trade Union League. Boston telephone operators went on outings to Wellesley College and attended lectures given by Vida Scudder and other academic labour sympathizers, while Hazel Kyrk was one of a group of women economists who taught on the Bryn Mawr trade union courses.
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Regardless of all this ingenuity and innovation, the American Women’s Trade Union League, like its British counterpart, encountered considerable obstacles in organizing women workers and began to incline towards campaigning for legislation. This caused division within the League. Differing conceptions of the role and structure of trade unions emerged, as well as conflicts over legislation and the state. One organizer, Helen Marot, left the WTUL partly because she disagreed with the reliance on protective legislation, but also because she contested the League’s approach to ethnicity. Marot thought they should focus on uptown, mainly American-born women who stood more chance of organizing themselves, rather than working with immigrant women on the Jewish East Side. Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman, both from immigrant backgrounds, were deeply committed to the ghetto and resentful of Marot’s attitude, which they saw as prejudiced and elitist.
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However, the WTUL aimed at bringing women into the American
Federation of Labor, which had a strong tradition of autonomous unionism, and this is echoed in Marot’s argument in
American Labor Unions
(1914) that trade unions created workers’ sense of their own power, and that a vital aspect of consciousness was undermined by reliance on the state. Recognizing that women were less likely than men to organize, she attributed this partly to their work being unskilled, and to their responsibility for the home. Placing a strong emphasis on consciousness, Marot believed that cultural assumptions towards women and women’s ‘attitude toward themselves’ held them back as workers.
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The anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World groups also stressed the development of workers’ power, scorning reformist trade unionists that turned to the state. The IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn saw unions as demonstrating ‘education in action’, and her outlook was global. In 1909 she wrote in the IWW’s
Industrial Worker
that capital had organized the productive process ‘according to the commodity produced, from the source of the raw material straight through the distribution of the finished product’. By retaliating with ‘one big union’, the IWW provided an object lesson in resistance. ‘You find that straight line of capitalist industry sliced across by the union, just a little slice here and there.’ The extension of workers’ power required the creation of ‘an international union’ while overcoming prejudices within the US itself. Flynn believed it was futile to erect barriers against other workers, because capital could go anywhere in search of its ‘cheap labour’.
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In contrast to Marot, Flynn insisted that the making of the American working class meant overcoming divisions of skill, gender, ethnicity, race and nationality.