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Rosie's Mom
FORGOTTEN WOMEN WORKERS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
By Carrie Brown NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Carrie Brown
All right reserved. ISBN: 1555535356
Prelude: Forgotten Women On a winter's morning in 1916, Nellie stood for the first time before a cartridge heading machine. A floppy cap covered and confined her upswept hair. A pair of coarse, bloomer-style overalls-womanalls they called them-gave an unaccustomed freedom to her legs. Nineteen years old, fresh from the rugged life on a New Hampshire farm, Nellie knew hard work, and she knew long hours. But she had never before confronted a machine larger than herself, a machine that shook her whole body with its vibrations. She had never before handled caustic chemicals or fed percussion caps-already loaded with explosive powder-into a quick-running machine. And she had never before seen an unexpected explosion hurl a woman across the room. During the next two years, she would see or do all of these.
At the Union Metallic Cartridge factory, the farm girl became a munitions worker, her feet firmly planted on the shop floor, her hands and eyes intent on turning out as many cartridges as possible in a ten-hour shift. She had taken on this new job not for her country, since the United States had not yet entered the war, but for herself and her family. At first it was simply a question of a few more dollars in the weekly payenvelope. By the end of 1918, munitions work for Nellie-and for a million women like her-would become a patriotic duty. The feverish pace of production and the frequent industrial accidents would be among the sacrifices made by people on the home front, while American soldiers fought and died on the other side of the Atlantic.
Nellie was surrounded by women who had previously worked in other trades. Helen had pasted together paper boxes. Susan Jones had operated a power sewing machine to make men's clothing. Others had dipped chocolate candies by hand, or clerked in department stores, or cleaned the homes of the wealthy as live-in maids. And so the story of women war workers begins not in a munitions factory, but on the farms and at the candy companies, in the sweatshops and the garment factories where they worked before the war. It begins with young girls working in textile mills and canneries, before the social costs of child labor were calculated by the more comfortable middle class. It begins also in the homes where married women took in washing, and where they cooked for boarders as part of the struggle to feed their own children. And it begins on the street corners where workers listened to the messengers of trade unionism, socialism, and even revolution.
Women had, of course, been working in American factories since the early nineteenth century, when the invention of large textile machines took spinning and weaving out of the home and into the factory. Before that, for thousands of years, women had cared for livestock, raised gardens, made the family's bread, knitted their socks, and sewed their clothes. The entire family had worked together as an economic unit. Then came the spinning jennies and the looms, and the beginning of a separation between home life and work, both for men and for women. By 1860, factories produced not just thread and yarn and woven fabrics, but also cheap ready-to-wear clothing, gloves, and caps, all made on newly invented sewing and knitting machines. Soon large food-processing plants took over the canning of foods, and the meat packing houses of Chicago processed and preserved beef and pork. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the job of feeding and clothing the nation had been industrialized. For the prosperous middle-class family, the remaining heavy housework could be handled by hired help. The middle-class American wife, then, had leisure for music, reading, religious study, and charity work. The wives of white, American-born, skilled workers bore a heavier burden of housework, but still generally hoped to avoid working for wages. The stay-at-home wife was the ideal, and American working families achieved it with some success in prosperous times, and with less success during periods of family crisis or economic depression.
Who, then, made the clothing and processed the food and assembled all the new consumer goods for the middle and upper classes? A crush of immigrants, mostly passing through Ellis Island, filled the factories and sweatshops of America. Between 1865 and 1916, 27 million people entered the United States from abroad. Some few from the British Isles spoke English, but the vast numbers from southern and eastern Europe brought with them a profusion of other languages. Their lack of English and their often inappropriate work skills put new immigrants at the bottom of the economic ladder. Former agricultural workers canned foods in the city; Italian women accustomed to doing fine embroidery found themselves doing coarse needlework in sweatshops, or sorting rags in dark basement workrooms; schoolteachers who spoke Russian and Yiddish ended up toiling in the overpopulated garment district of the Lower East Side of New York.
In San Francisco, the port of entry for Chinese immigrants, women who managed to avoid forced prostitution could find work picking shrimp for six cents a pound or doing hand sewing. A rare few found lighter work in the service industries in Chinatown. In the Southwest, Mexican women worked in the fields, as did black women in the old South. The industrial work of the nation, however, was still largely done in the cities of Northeast and the upper Midwest by immigrants of European descent.
The flood of labor into those cities kept wages low and rents high. Immigrant districts were closely packed with seven-, eight-, and nine-story tenement buildings. High above the street, laundry fluttered on clotheslines that crisscrossed between the buildings. In summer, children slept on the fire escapes or on top of the chicken coops in the alleyways, and pillows and featherbeds bulged from the windows and hung on the railings. In winter, everyone crowded indoors, where an extended family shared a two- or three-room apartment, with perhaps a child or a boarder even sleeping in the kitchen. There might be one shared bath on a hall, or there might be only a cold-water sink, with the toilet out in the yard.
If a married man happened to be unskilled, disabled, intemperate, or just unlucky, his wages most often would not support his family. Then the women and children picked up the burden. The kitchen served as a workroom where mothers and their preschool-aged children made artificial flowers, picked nut meats from the shells, or pulled basting stitches from piles of overcoats that had been trundled home in carts or baby buggies. Older children, after school, could help bring in a few pennies doing the family work around the kitchen table. Sometimes the children left school early and went to work illegally. At the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York, when the state factory inspector came around, the children were hidden in boxes under piles of clothing as the inspector passed through, while in southern textile mills, underage children were openly employed. In major industrial centers around the country, three-fourths of the children left school without completing the seventh grade.
When they left school, the boys sought out apprenticeships, or at least entered factories where they would work alongside older, skilled men and could learn a trade. The girls went into "women's trades," where training consisted of a few hours, or a few minutes, of instruction in how to do one particular task-by hand or on a machine-and to do it as rapidly as possible, for ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day. The process of making one item was subdivided into many small tasks, and as long as each girl had to do only one of those tasks, ignorance of English was not a problem. Supervisors had little to explain: work quickly, don't stop.
Many native-born daughters of working-class families joined the immigrant girls in the factories, leaving school in their midteens because no one expected them to stay, helping out their families with a few extra dollars a week, waiting to see what else life had to offer. At the turn of the century, of the 5 million women who worked for wages, half were under the age of twenty-five. For the most part, the factories were filled with row upon row of girls in various stages of having the giddiness of adolescence drained out of them by long, tedious work.
If the girls looked around them, they could see a few married women, and some who were divorced or widowed, but still the American-born and the immigrant girls both expected marriage and children to release them from the factory. A Yiddish song expressed their dream:
Day the same as night, night the same as day,
And all I do is sew and sew and sew.
May God help me and my love come soon,
That I may leave this work and go.
And generally marriage would release them, except that all too often married life would be punctuated by periods of home work or factory work.
The work itself was almost entirely mechanical. In a cannery in Pittsburgh, cans of beans traveled on a conveyor belt past a row of young girls. As the cans passed, inexorably moving at the pace of the conveyor, the girls would slip a piece of pork into each can. One can, one piece of pork, for ten hours a day, six days a week. The worker became another arm of the machine, with no control over speed, no opportunity for a rest. A button-covering machine completed a button in a few seconds, and the new pieces had to be added in rhythm to keep up with the machine. A paper box-molding machine opened and closed thirty times in a minute. A flat ironing machine pressed sheets and tablecloths at forty or fifty feet a minute while women fed the linens in by hand? Where the pace was not driven by machine, workers were paid by the piece, and they needed to keep a quick and steady rate simply to make enough for food and rent. At a wholesale millinery factory, a quick woman could make a dozen hats in a day; and in a cigarette factory, an experienced packer could pack 35,000 to 40,000 cigarettes in a nine- or ten-hour day. In one fruit-canning factory, as the employer led a visitor through the plant, he paused near a group of four Hungarian women who pared quinces. "They are the best workers I have," he boasted. "They keep at it just like horses."
Most of the women's trades were seasonal. Food had to be canned just after harvest; candies needed to be fresh for the Christmas and Easter trades; winter cloaks were lined with fur only when they could be sold and not stored; hats could be designed only after the latest style was announced in Paris. In the busy season, "girls wanted" signs-in Hebrew, English, and Italian-cluttered the entrances to factories. Workrooms hummed with machinery. Girls crowded around long tables, putting in twelve- to sixteen-hour days-often at no extra pay for overtime. The employers and foremen hurried about, urging workers to a faster pace. Then, a few weeks later, the shops would be nearly empty, the machines would be silent, and the women would be searching for new work, often not finding it. In the year 1900, nearly one-quarter of the American work force was unemployed for some part of the year. Mimi, an Italian girl in New York, worked at sewing underwear for eight months, spent four months idle, then made lampshades for a year, then had another idle period of several months, then addressed envelopes for two months before being laid off again. Lisa Hasanovitz held forty jobs in four years, spending one desperate period in a sweater knitting shop where "the dust and lint from the wool were inhaled instead of air. I could hardly speak in the evening," she said, "my throat would be so clogged with wool." Others simply waited for their accustomed trade to begin hiring again, and spent the long weeks of unemployment hungry and worried.
Even when women did have work, the wages often kept them at the edge of starvation. Earning four or five dollars a week, a girl could just afford food, clothing, and carfare. There was nothing left for medical care, savings, or recreation. If she worked in the garment trades, she also had to buy her own needles and to pay for the power used by her sewing machine. In some factories, she was expected to provide her own sewing machine, which could cost two months' pay. Each day, she carried the machine on her back to and from work. If she complained about her wage or her treatment, the foreman would simply send her on her way. Another worker could be hired and trained within hours. If she arrived for work late, she might find herself locked out or forced to give up half a day's pay. Men-even unskilled men-earned nearly twice as much; and the skilled craftsmen had unions that protected both their wages and their hours. The young women-unskilled, uneducated, planning to work only a few years-and the older women-still unskilled and surrounded by teenagers-had no unions, no protectors, and no economic power.
In the chaos of this new industrial world, working women coped as best they could. They developed support systems in their families and ethnic communities. They switched jobs whenever a few pennies more could be made at a new factory. They took in washing or brought hand sewing home at night. But they were exhausted. When they had children, the children were undernourished and undereducated. Their workplaces were often filthy and dangerous. Foremen, who knew how little they earned, offered them a week's wages for an hour's indiscretion, and men in shops and on the streets accosted them and offered money for sexual favors. The established trade unions ignored them, and the politicians claimed that most women worked for "pin money." Finally, just as America headed into the twentieth century, women began to find new ways to help each other.
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Excerpted from Rosie's Mom by Carrie Brown Copyright © 2002 by Carrie Brown
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
