"We were not ladies": Gender, class, and a women's auxiliary's battle for mining unionism

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Merithew, Caroline Waldron ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249158364     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2006.0039     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. United Mine Workers Journal, 15 September 1929, 1.
2. Proceedings, 33rd Constitutional Convention of the United Mine Workers of America, Indianapolis, Jan 23-31,1934, vol. 1 ([Indianapolis?]: Allied Printing, 1935), 315.
3. The emphasis on housewives is important since there was a precedence of women wage workers' involvement in dual unionism in the IWW. See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 128.
4. Levine, "Workers Wives," 48;
5. Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
6. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23-25;
7. Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 139-41;
8. Marjorie Penn Lasky, '"Where I Was a Person': The Ladies' Auxiliary in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters' Strike," in Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U S. Women's Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 181-205;
9. and Kathryn J. Oberdeck, "'Not Pink Teas': The Seattle Working-Class Women's Movement, 1905-1918," Labor History 32 (spring 1991): 193-230.
10. Dana Frank, "Gender, Consumer Organizing, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929," in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 273-95;
11. Darlene Clark Hine, "The Housewives' League of Detroit," in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 223-42;
12. Annelise Orleck, "'We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public': Militant Housewives During the Great Depression," Feminist Studies (spring 1993): 147-72;
13. and Margaret Rose, "'From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott/ 1965-1975," Labor History 32 (summer 1990): 271-93.
14. See Frank's Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 241-42;
15. Sharon Hart Strom, "Challenging 'Woman's Place': Feminism, the Left and Industrial Unionism in the 1930s," Feminist Studies 9 (summer 1983): 365-67;
16. and Lasky, "Where I Was a Person," 198-99.
17. Chateauvert, Marching Together, 71;
18. and Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle, 12-13 and 140.
19. and Levine, "Workers Wives," 50.
20. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, "O. Delight Smith's Progressive Era: Labor, Feminism, and Reform in the Urban South," in Visible Women, ed. Hewitt and Lebsock, 176-79;
21. Orleck, "We Are That Mythical Thing," 152-54;
22. Herbert Hill, "Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2 (winter 1988): 132;
23. Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 69-70 for questioning maternalist roles and 117-70 for strike.
24. Lasky, "Where I Was a Person," 198.
25. and Oberdeck, "Not Pink Teas" for the language of helpmeets.
26. First Annual Report, 8.
27. For an auxiliary involved in more traditional work, see Elizabeth Faue, "Paths of Unionization: Community, Bureaucracy, and Gender in the Minneapolis Labor Movement of the 1930s," in Work Engendered, ed. Baron, 308-309.
28. See Carl R. Weinberg, Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 21;
29. and Waldron Merithew, "Anarchist Motherhood," 217-46.
30. United Mine Workers Journal, 17 March 1910, 7.
31. Fwenty-Sixth Annual, First Biennial Conference United Mine Workers of America, District 12, 1916 (Peoria, IL: The District, 1916), 323-234.
32. Priscilla Long, "The Women of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Strike, 1913-14" in Women, Work and Protest, 63.
33. Thoreau Wieck, Woman from Spillertown, 9;
34. Lotta Work," Folder 1-3, Box 1, ABW.
35. United Mine Workers Journal, 1 August 1932,4.
36. See Harriet Hudson, The Progressive Mine Workers of America: A Study in Rival Unionism ( Urbana: The University of Illinois, 1952), 10-16.
37. Caroline Waldron, '"The Great Spirit of Solidarity': The Illinois Valley Mining Communities and the Formation of Interethnic Consciousness" (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2000).
38. Jack Battuello, Transcript, 35, Oral History Collection, University of Illinois at Springfield, hereafter UIS Oral History.
39. Hudson, The Progressive Mine Workers, 20, 32-33.
40. Frank, Purchasing Power, 241;
41. Temma Kaplan, "Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918," Signs 7 (spring 1982): 545-66.
42. Progressive Miner, 23 September 1932, 2.
43. See Long, "Women of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Strike," 63.
44. Jean E. Rosinos, "Marching Women of Illinois," in Labor Age, November 1932, 6.
45. Michael Miller Topp, Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 ), 101.
46. Jack Battuello, UIS Oral History, 41.
47. Frank Fries, UIS Oral History, 59.
48. The Militant, "Letters from Militants," 11 February 1933, 2;
49. New York Times, 27 January 1933, 7;
50. Progressive Miner, 3 February 1933, 1.
51. "Correspondence, 10,000 Miners' Wives," The Nation (March 1933): 234;
52. Topp, Those Without a Country, 119-21.
53. Pregressive Miner, 14 October 1932, 4.
54. Hall, "O. Delight Smith's Progressive Era," 181;
55. and Strom, "Challenging 'Woman's Place,'" 367.
56. Progressive Miner, 5 February 1935, 1.
57. For a different model of female working-class solidarity, see James Cassedy, "A Bond of Sympathy: The Life and Tragic Death of Fannie Sellins," Labor's Heritage 4 (winter 1992): 34-47;
58. and Stephen Burnett, "Women of Steel: Gender and Labor in the Great Steel Strike of 1919" (MA thesis, University of Missouri, Columbia, 1995).
59. Julie Guard, "Women Workers, Native 'Scabs,' and the Multi-Ethnic Politics of Identity in a Left-led Strike in Cold War Canada," Journal of Women's History 14 (winter 2003): 117-40.
60. Report of the United States Coal Commission, Part III, Bituminous Coal (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1925), 1422 and 1509.