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Narratives Serially Constructed and Lived: Ethnicity in Cross-Gender Strikes 1887–1903*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

Ileen A. DeVault
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On 1 August 1893, already feeling the pinch of economic downturn, management at the Pray, Small & Co. shoe factory in Auburn, Maine, posted new wages for its employees. Twelve days later, facing their first lower pay checks, female stitchers in the factory walked off their jobs. The union which represented the stitchers declared the shop non-union a week later and called for all of its members to join the stitchers' strike. Only about a dozen male workers answered this call, as the two most highly-skilled groups of male workers, the lasters and the shoe cutters, remained on the job. These workers belonged to their own separate unions, which had either already agreed to the new wage list (the cutters) or were in the middle of negotiations over it with the company (the lasters). It took the cutters another week before they decided to join the stitchers' action; it would take the lasters a month and a half and a citywide expansion of the strike to make the same decision.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 44 , supplement S7: Complicating Categories: Gender, Class, Race and Ethnicity , December 1999 , pp. 33 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1999

References

1. Unless otherwise noted, the story of this strike comes from coverage in the Lewiston Evening Journal (hereafter cited as LEJ), the Boston Globe, and the Shoe and Leather Reporter, vol. 56 (hereafter cited as SLR).

2. SLR, 5 October 1893 (vol. 56, no. 14), p. 798.

3. See Young, Iris M., “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective”, Signs, 19. (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Rose, Sonya, “Class Formation and the Quintessential Worker”, in Hall, John (ed.), Reworking Class (Ithaca, NY, 1997)Google Scholar ; and Sartre, Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London, 1976.)Google Scholar , esp. vol. 1, book I, ch. 4 and book 2, chs 1, 2, 6, and 7. In what follows, when I refer to Sartre's use of terms such as ‘serial’, I will put them in italics. When this word, or others appear not italicized, then I am using them in their ordinary English usage.

4. , Young, “Gender as Seriality“, p. 728.Google Scholar

5. The further comprehension of such an encoding of genders into unions belonging to the early AFL is the goal of my larger study, tentatively titled United Apart: Sex, Gender, and the Rise of Craft Unionism (forthcoming, Cornell University Press)Google Scholar . See also my essay, “To Sit Among Men: Skill, Gender, and Craft Unionism in the Early American Federation of Labor”, in Arnesen, Eric, Greene, Julia, and Laurie, Bruce (eds), Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (Chicago, IL, 1998)Google Scholar.

6. See Fantasia, Rick, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley, CA, 1988), p. 16.Google Scholar

7. United Apart examines strikes in four broad industries: boots and shoes, clothing, textiles, and tobacco products. All but tobacco products are represented in the narratives given in this paper.

8. See Blewett, Mary, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana, IL, 1988)Google Scholar , for a full description of the production process, its changing sexual division of labor, and the unions involved in nineteenth-century shoe production.

9. LEJ, 25 August 1893, p. 7.

10. SLR, 31 August 1893 (vol. 56.9), p. 493.

11. LEJ, 29 August 1893, p. 5.

12. LEJ, 16 September 1893, p. 16.

13. LEJ, 23 September 1893, p. 7; Boston Globe, 24 September 1893, p. 7.

14. LEJ, 25 September 1893, p. 7.

15. LEJ, 16 September 1893, p. 7.

16. SLR, 28 September 1893 (vol. 56, no. 13), p. 745.

17. LEJ, 5 October 1893, p. 5. Spelling aside, this may be a reference to the Social-Democratic Hnchagian Party, founded in 1887. See Mirak, Robert, Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 88–89, 207-209.Google Scholar

18. Boston Globe, 7 October 1893, p. 7.

19. Boston Globe, 8 October 1893, p. 1.

20. Samuel Gompers to AFL Executive Council, 5 February 1894, in Stuart B. Kaufman and Albert, Peter J. (eds), The Samuel Gompers Papers vol. y. Unrest and Depression, 1891–94 (Urbana, IL, 1989), p. 460Google Scholar . The LEF reported Auburn shoe factories to be operating at two-thirds of their capacity as of early January, 1894. United States Bureau of Labor , Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, vol. k Strikes and Lockouts (Washington DC, 1896)Google Scholar hereafter referred to as Strikes and Lockouts), reported 1,106 new workers in the factories as of 1 January 1894.

21. Pray, Small and Co. was still on the “We Don't Patronize” list in die American Federationist, vol. 2, no. 6, 08 1895.Google Scholar

22. Unless otherwise noted, this strike story is taken from the New York Times (hereafter cited as NYT) and the Newark Daily Advertiser (hereafter cited as NDA).

23. US Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Pt. II (Washington DC, 1897), pp. 698–699Google Scholar ; Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1888: Working Women in Large Cities (Washington DC, 1889), pp. 236 274–275Google Scholar . The statistics in these sources also indicate a large number of German male workers among the “cotton, woolen, and other textile mill operatives”, but Clark's was known for hiring “Scotch or North country Englishmen”. See The New York Daily Graphic, 25 01 1888, p. 617Google Scholar.

24. See Blewett, Mary H., “Deference and Defiance: Labor Politics and the Meaning of Masculinity in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century New England Textile Industry”, Gender & History, 5 (1993), pp. 398–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. NYT, 9 December 1890, p. 2.

26. NYT, 10 December 1890, p. 9.

27. NYT, 11 December 1890, p. 2.

28. NYT, 17 December 1890, p. 3.

29. NDA, 20 December 1890, p. 1.

30. NYT, 11 December 1890, p. 2. This statement also implies that there were important divisions by age as well as by sex and ethnicity in the mills.

31. NDA, 27 December 1890, p. 1, and 26 December 1890, p. 1.

32. SG to AFL Executive Council, 4 February 1891, Samuel Gompers Letterbooks, microfilm reel 4., vol. 5, frame 408; SG to Henry A. Woods, Kearney, NJ, 5 February 1891, reel 4, vol. 5, frame 413. AFL's boycott circular found in The Tailor, 2.20 (April 1891), p. 6. Most of the comments about Walmsley's treatment of women referred back to an 1888 strike of women workers at the mills. See The New York Daily Graphic, 25 01 1888, p. 614.Google Scholar

33. NYT, 4 January 1891, p. 16.

34. NDA, 5 January 1891, p. 1.

35. Ibid.

36. NYT, iz January 1891, p. 1.

37. NYT, 12 March 1891, p. 1.

38. NYT, 19 April 1891, p. 8.

39. Unless otherwise noted, the story of this strike is taken from the Baltimore Sun (hereafter cited as Sun).

40. Maryland, Bureau of Industrial Statistics, Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Industrial Statistics of Maryland, (Baltimore, MD, 1894), p. 81.Google Scholar

41. Glenn, Susan A., Daughters of the Shterl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, NY, 1990), p. 134.Google Scholar

42. Sun, 9 July 1892, p. 8.

43. Sun, 16 July 1892, p. 8.

44. Sun, 20 July 1892, p. 8.

45. Sun, 28 July 1892, p. 8.

46. Sun, 29 July 1892, p. 8.

47. Sun, 16 August 1892., p. 8.

48. Unless otherwise noted, the story of this strike is taken from the American Wool & Cotton Reporter, vol. 16, and the Wilkes-Barre Times (hereafter cited as WBT). Information on the workers ethnicity and households comes from the 1900 Manuscript Census for Wilkes-Barre, PA. The list of ethnicities includes both immigrants from the country indicated and those who could be identified as having parents or grandparents from the given country.

49. Fillipelli, R. (ed.), Labor Conflict in the United States: An Encyclopedia (New York and London, 1990). PP. 17–19.Google Scholar

50. Of the women who lived with miners, forty-seven per cent lived with a coal-mining brother and fifty-seven per cent had coal-mining fathers.

51. WBT, 15 July 1902, p. 8.

52. WBT, 11 August 1902, p. 6.