The Women Who Gave Us Labor Day

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/sigal09042006.html


-snip-

From its inception, the holiday was unabashedly about men - extolling muscles and the workingman. Labor’s mythic personalities were men like Jimmy Hoffa, bushy-browed mine workers’ leader John L. Lewis and the radical organizer Big Bill Haywood. Its martyrs and saints were also men, like Joe Hill and the Haymarket Square anarchists and Gene Debs.

I’m a child of the labor movement, except that I experienced its triumphs and defeats through the eyes of women –- especially my mother, Jennie.

When I was five years old, during the Great Depression, I accompanied her to Chattanooga,Tennessee, where she had been sent by the Textile Workers Union.She was an organizer. Her assignment was to sign up the mill hands who tended the looms and spindles—and were paid as little as four dollars for a 60-hour work week.

-snip- (this snip tell of the horrible working conditions for the women)

Word soon got out that Mom was having clandestine meetings at our kitchen table, after dark, with both black and white women workers. Breaking the color line was in itself a capital crime at that time and place. Deputies came and arrested Jennie, and so we both ended up behind bars in the Hamilton County jail. We were lucky to get off so lightly. After a day and a half, the sheriff took us to the train station and graciously ran us out of town.

Jennie was an average woman – without being average at all. She had left school at twelve and led her first strike at thirteen after witnessing the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City. She was the equal, if not better, of any man at the bargaining table and on the picket line - where she insisted on wearing her ‘best’: Belgian lace gloves, cloche hat and ‘Cuban’ heels. She was afraid of nothing and could not be intimidated, But, like so many women of her time, she was shy of “putting herself forward”, in self promotion, even more than she feared jail or a cop’s truncheon. Her amazing generation of women could fight for others but were strangely reticent about speaking up for themselves.

-snip-

Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist living in Los Angeles. He has recently published a memoir of his mother, ‘A Woman of Uncertain Character’. This column was written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. email: [e-mail]
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read the snips and learn how it really was back then and teach your daughters real herstory.

most of today's young women haven't a clue how their foremothers fought and died for their rights.

[demosincebirth]

1. What brave women we have had in the the labor movement, in the past.

Women like Jennie, and there were many, are my heroes. Too bad they don't make it mandatory, in the U.S. school system to teach the "History of Labor" to our high schoolers.

[Cerridwen]

2. Thank you! For more info on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, see link

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/

One of the best days of my life came when I had the opportunity to educate a young woman about women's history. She called the women's rights group I organized for looking for information for a class project. We got off the phone an hour later. She had plenty of information and sources to gather more. She hadn't known any of what I had told her; laws denying women the right to make contracts, speak in public, etc., laws denying women custody of their children, Triangle Shirtwaist fire, women's roles in the labor movement, and so on and so forth. She was so excited and happy to learn women's history. I can still hear her excitement and thanks in my mind.

Another of my "best days" was when a young woman I met socially, who worked in a "man's field" heard me discussing my foray into "men's work." She stopped mid-discussion and said "Thank you for what you did to make it easier for me to do what I do." I get teary-eyed just thinking of it.

So, do what you can, tell who you can, speak to the girls, educate, tell your story, tell the stories you've learned. The rewards are beyond belief.

:D