Women in unions: It’s not just Mother Jones

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_2927

By Mark Gruenberg
4 March 2007

WASHINGTON - Though Mary Harris “Mother” Jones is the most famous female organizer in the early years of unions, and an icon for women unionists, she is far from the only prominent female figure in U.S. labor. Nor is she alone: Masses of women joined her.
Indeed, women unionists produced some of the first big victories for labor. They include better wages and working conditions for textile workers following the great female-led “Bread and Roses” in 1912 in Lawrence, Mass.

And female union clothing workers scored some of their biggest organizing wins in New York in that same decade, both before and after the fatal 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

“Long before the Lawrence strike, textile workers banded together to protest their low wages and brutal conditions,” said Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Vice President Sol Stetin, introducing a definitive book on “Bread and Roses.”

And mill workers kept organizing and striking, Stetin said: Silk workers in Paterson, N.J., in 1913, textile workers in New Bedford, Mass., in 1928, and in Gastonia, N.C., the next year. And the 1934 400,000-person industry-wide Southern textile strike, which state governors crushed with troops.

What Stetin didn't say is that many, if not a majority, of those union workers were women.


FULL story at link.