Women's History Month 2020: Suffrage and Labor Movements

Library of Congress via Flickr the Commons

Yes, women have always worked. It's a myth that our female ancestors didn't work. Unless your family was well-off financially, chances are the women in the family worked. The 19th century saw even young women, including young girls, going to work to help support their family.

25 March 1911. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory produced women's blouses, or as they were then called shirtwaists, in Manhattan. The Factory took up three floors of a building (8th-10th) now known as the Brown Building. A fire that started in a scrap bin would result in the death of 146 garment workers, 123 of which were women. This occupational tragedy is one of the deadliest in US history. What happened? Stairwell doors and exits were locked to stop employees from taking unauthorized breaks. When the fire broke out, workers were either killed because they were trapped or because they jumped out of windows. [1]

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Wikipedia

The Women's Trade Union League founded in 1903 fought to stop sweatshop conditions. An obvious outgrowth of this, especially after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, is that women needed the vote to protect themselves and to advocate for better work conditions. But women were organizing long before 1903. Lowell Mill Girls were organizing, gathering signatures for petitions, and more in an era (early 19th century) when women didn't have the right to vote.[2][ (Well, some Massachusetts women had school suffrage rights as I posted last week.)

In the 20th century, female labor "leaders among the dramatically increasing group of working women argued that wage-earning women needed the vote. Only with suffrage, they insisted, could working women hope for equal pay, safe work places, and humane hours. In 1909, working-class suffragists generated a major debate about their cause within New York’s labor community, and in 1911 they formed the Wage Earners’ League for Woman Suffrage. One of the league’s flyers asked, “Why are you paid less than a man? Why do you work in a fire trap? Why are your hours so long?” The answer: Because you are a woman and have no vote. Votes make the law. The law controls conditions. Women who want better conditions must vote"[3]

Did your female ancestor work in a factory? If so, what was the history of that factory? What did she do? Was there a danger involved? Was she a member of a union? Was that union involved in the fight for suffrage? 

Resources

Yale University - Working Women 1800-1930















[1] "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire," Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire: accessed 10 March 2020).
[2]"Lowell Mill Women Create the First Union of Working Women," AFL-CIO (https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/lowell-mill-women-form-union: accessed 10 march 2020).
[3] "The Necessity of Other Social Movements to the Struggle for Woman Suffrage," National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-necessity-of-other-social-movements-to-the-struggle-for-woman-suffrage.htm: accessed 10 March 2020).