"Where Are the Organized Women Workers?" Author(s): Alice Kessler-Harris Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 92-110 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3518958 Accessed: 16/03/2009 13:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=femstudies. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies. http://www.jstor.org "WHERE ARE THE ORGANIZED WOMEN WORKERS?" Alice Kessler-Harris "The organizationof women," wrote FanniaCohn, an officer of the International LadiesGarment Workers Union to WilliamGreen, newly elected presidentof the Amer- ican Federationof Labor,"is not merely a moralquestion, but also an economic one. Menwill neverbe certainwith their conditions unless the conditions of the millions of women are improved."1 Her letter touched a home truth and yet in 1925, the year in which Cohn'sletter was written, the A. F. of L., after nearlyforty years of organizing, remainedprofoundly ambivalent about the fate of more than eight million wage-earning women. Duringthese four decades of industrialgrowth, the women who worked in the indus- trial labor force had not passivelywaited to be organized. Yet their best efforts had been tinged with failure. Figuresfor union membersare notoriously unreliable,and estimates fluctuate widely. But somethinglike 3.3 percentof the women who were engagedin industrialoccupations in 1900 were organizedinto trade unions. As low as that figure was, it was to decline even further. Around 1902 and 1903 trade union membershipamong women began to decrease,reaching a low of 1.5 percent in 1910. Then, a surgeof organizationamong garment workers lifted it upwards. A reasonable estimate might put 6.6 percentof wage-earningwomen into trade unions by 1920. In a decade that saw little changein the relativeproportion of female and male workers, the proportionof women who were trade union membersquadrupled, increasing at more than twice the rate for trade union membersin general. Even so, the relative numbersof wage-earningwomen who were trade union membersremained tiny. One in every five men in the industrialworkforce belonged to a union, comparedto one in every fifteen women. Althoughmore than 20 percent of the labor force was female, less than 8 percentof organizedworkers were women. And five years later, when FanniaCohn was urgingWilliam Green to pay attention to female workers,these star- tling gains had alreadybeen eroded.2 Figureslike these have led historiansof the workingclass to join turn-of-the-century labor organizersin lamentingthe difficulty of unionizingfemale workers. Typically, historiansargue that the traditionalplace of women in families,as well as their position in the workforce,inhibited trade unionism. Statisticaloverviews suggest that these argumentshave much to be said for them. At the turn of the century, most wage- earningwomen were young, temporaryworkers who looked to marriageas a way to escapethe shop or factory. Eighty-fivepercent of these women were unmarriedand Alice Kessler-Harris 93 nearly half were under twenty-five years old. Most women worked at traditionally hard-to-organize unskilled jobs: a third were domestic servants and almost one quar- ter worked in the garment and textile industries. The remainder were scattered in a variety of industrial and service jobs, including the tobacco and boot and shoe indus- tries, department stores, and laundries. Wage-earning women often came from groups without a union tradition: about one half of all working women were immigrants or their daughters who shared rural backgrounds. In the cities, that figure sometimes climbed to 90 percent.3 For all these reasons, women in the labor force unionized with difficulty. Yet the dramatic fluctuations in the proportions of organized working women testify to their potential for organization. And the large numbers of unions in which the proportion of women enrolled exceeded their numbers in the industry urge us to seek further ex- planations for the small proportions of women who actually became union members.4 No apparent change either in the type of women who worked or in the structure of jobs explains the post-1902 decline in the proportion of unionized women. On the contrary, several trends would suggest the potential for a rise in their numbers. The decline began just at the point when union membership was increasing dramatically after the devastating depression of 1893-1897. The proportion of first-generation im- migrant women who were working dropped after the turn of the century only to be matched by an increase in the proportion of their Americanized daughters who worked. Married women entered the labor force in larger numbers suggesting at once a more permanent commitment to jobs and greater need for the security unions could pro- vide. Large declines in the proportion of domestic workers reduced the numbers of women in these isolated, low-paying, and traditionally hard-to-organize jobs. At the same time, increases in office and clerical workers, department store clerks, and fac- tory operatives, offered fertile areas for promoting unionization among women. Stren- uous organizing campaigns by and among women in all these areas achieved few results. Although cultural background, traditional roles, and social expectations hindered some unionizing efforts, they were clearly not insurmountable barriers. Given a chance, women were devoted and successful union members, convinced that unionism would serve them as it seemed to be serving their brothers. In the words of a seventeen-year- old textile worker, "We all work hard for a mean living. Our boys belong to the miners' union so their wages are better than ours. So I figured that girls must have a union. Women must act like men, ain't?"5 In the garment workers union where women were the majority of members, they often served as shop "chairladies" and reached positions of minor importance in the union structure. Faige Shapiro recalled how her union ac- tivity began at the insistence of a business agent but quickly became an absorbing in- terest. In these unions, women arrested on picket lines thought highly enough of the union to try to save it bail money by offering to spend the night in jail before they returned to the line in the morning.6 In mixed unions, women often led men in militant actions. Iowa cigar makers re- ported in 1899 that some striking men had resumed work, while the women were standing pat.7 Boot and shoe workers in Massachusetts were reported in 1905 to be 94 "Where Are the Organized WomenWo rkers?" tough bargainers. "It is harder to induce women to compromise," said their president, "they are more likely to hold out to the bitter end ... to obtain exactly what they want."8 The great uprising of 1909 in which 20,000 women walked out of New York's garment shops occurred over the objections of the male leadership, striking terror into the hearts of Jewish men afraid "of the security of their jobs."9 Polish "spool girls" protesting a rate cut in the textile mills of Chicopee, Massachusetts, refused their union's suggestion that they arbitrate and won a resounding victory. Swedish women enrolled in a Chicago Custom Clothing Makers local, lost a battle against their bosses' attempts to subdivide and speed up the sewing process when the United Garment Workers union, largely male, agreed to the bosses' conditions. The bosses promptly locked out the women forcing many to come to terms and others to seek new jobs.10 At the turn of the century, female garment workers in San Francisco and tobacco strippers, overall and sheepskin workers, and telephone operators in Boston ran highly successful sex-segregated unions.11 If traditional explanations for women's failure to organize extensively in this period are not satisfying, they nevertheless offer clues to understanding the unionization pro- cess among women. They reveal the superficiality of the question frequently asked by male organizers and historians alike: "Why don't women organize?" And they encour- age us to adopt economist Theresa Wolfson's more sensitive formulation: "Where are the organized women workers?"12 For when we stop asking why women have not or- ganized themselves, we are led to ask how women were, and are, kept out of unions. The key to this question lies, I think, in looking at the function that wage earning women have historically played in the capitalist mode of production. Most women entered the labor force out of economic necessity. They were encouraged by expand- ing technology and the continuing division of labor which in the last half of the nine- teenth century reduced the need for skilled workers and increased the demand for cheap labor. Like immigrant men, and blacks today, women formed a large reservoir of unskilled workers.