You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Wednesday February 3, 1904
Boston, Massachusetts - First Executive Board Meeting of WTUL to Convene in March
As the newly elected Executive Board of the recently formed National Women's Trade Union League prepares to hold its first meeting, they must consider the ongoing economic crisis. Much of the early optimism regarding the organizing ability of the League has dissipated as unemployment increases. Competition between men and women for fewer and fewer jobs also, sadly, increases the hostility of the male dominated trades unions towards the organization of women.
The employers are only too ready to use the crisis to their own advantage. They are forming anti-union alliances, and using well-worn anti-union tactics to crush labor organizing, such as: blacklists, ironclad oaths (yellow-dog contracts), court injunctions, wage cuts and speedups. While the employers remain willing to use the men against the women, and the women against the men, they seek to crush the unions of both equally.
This is a difficult time for the young organization to attempt to inspire women to join unions in order that they might fight for better pay, shorter hours, and decent working conditionals. Yet the work of the Women's Trade Union League will continue in spite of all difficulties encountered.
SOURCE
Women and the American Labor Movement
From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I
-Philip S Foner
NY, 1979
Photo: Seal of the National Women's Trade Union League
http://www.nwhm.org/...
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Tuesday February 3, 1914
From The Indianapolis Star: "House Mine Committees To Inquire into Strikes"
Washington, Feb. 1-Subcommittees of the House committee on mines will leave Washington next Wednesday night for the West to investigate the Colorado and Michigan mine strikes. The Colorado investigators, Representatives Foster, Illinois, chairman; Byrnes, South Carolina; Evans, Montana (Democrats); Austin, Tennessee, and Sutherland, west Virginia (Republicans), will go first to Denver, then to Trinidad and Pueblo and later to Boulder.
Representatives Taylor of Colorado, chairman; Hamlin, Mississippi; Carey, Pennsylvania (Democrats); Howell, Utah, and Switzer, Ohio (Republicans), the subcommittee for the Michigan inquiry, will go direct to Calumet and take in Houghton and other places in the strike-affected area.
None of the committeemen would venture a prediction as to how long their tasks would occupy them.
SOURCE
The Indianapolis Star
(Indianapolis, Indiana)
-of Feb 2, 1914
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Monday February 3, 2014
More on the first officers and the first executive board of the WTUL:
The WTUL was founded in Boston in November of 1903. Three meetings were held, November 14, 17, and 19, as the convention of A. F. of L. met nearby. Delegates from the AFL convention were invited to the WTUL founding convention, but few chose to attend. Nevertheless...
By the end of the third session, the Women’s Trade Union League of America had been officially formed, officers elected, and a constitution adopted. The founders had decided that it would be in the best interest of the new organization to have nationally known women among the first slate of officers. Mary Morton Kehew, a prominent Boston social reformer, was elected president; Jane Addams, founder and head of Hull House, vice president; Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, secretary; and Mary Donovan, secretary of the Lynn (Massachusetts) Central Labor Union, treasurer. The first executive board consisted of two social reformers and three trade unionists: Mary McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement, who had been active in organizing women in the Chicago meat packing industry; Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses’ Settlement on Henry Street in New York, which had organized some small women’s unions in New York in the 1890’s; Mary Freitas, a textile worker from Lowell, Massachusetts; Leonora O’Reilly of New York, who after many years as a shirtwaist maker and labor advocate had become a vocational educator; and Ellen Lindstrom, a garment workers’ organizer from Chicago.
[emphasis added]
SOURCE
"Introduction: The Women’s Trade Union League"
By Robin Miller Jacoby
http://microformguides.gale.com/...
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Bread and Roses-Kate Vikstrom
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
-James Oppenheim