Excerpts

Women at Work During the colonial era into the 19th century, the primary accepted ideal for non-enslaved women was that of the virtuous housewife and helpmeet, and women's work was generally confined to the domestic sphere of home and assistance with family farm or plantation. Midwives were an exception: Women gave birth at home; there were no hospitals or trained nurses; and few doctors were available, especially in rural areas, to attend to women in childbirth. Midwifery was an indispensible and respected profession, as well as a potentially lucrative one for a practitioner. As towns and cities were founded, expanded, and prospered, women in non-farming families often worked alongside their spouses in shops, inns, taverns, and in printmaking and publishing. Widows in colonial cities were sometimes able to earn a decent living by working as craftswomen, shop owners, and administrators of their late husbands' businesses until a son became of age to take over. Women also managed inns, boarding houses, and even prisons. However, in an era when wages were generally low, many women who lived in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston and worked either to supplement a household income or by necessity after the death of a parent or the death or desertion of a spouse frequently faced limited employment opportunities, which left them on the edge of economic sustainability and often in poverty. Untrained and unskilled in the trades that were open to men, women worked as laundresses, cooks, seamstresses, wet-nurses, and domestic servants for half the wages of unskilled male laborers. By the early 1800s, women were also working for wages as schoolteachers. Teaching was considered to be the most respectable profession for unmarried women, who often began work when they were in their teens. During the 1800s, domestic work was a primary source of employment for free or newly freed African-American women and unmarried Irish women immigrants. Irish women began to arrive in East Coast cities during the first half of the 19th century and would eventually comprise fifty-three percent of Irish immigrants by the end of the century. More than sixty percent of Irish women worked as maids, cooks, nannies, or housekeepers, They came to the United States to leave behind their hardscrabble lives on Irish farms and to find the employment opportunities and marriage prospects which had greatly diminished during the Great Famine of 1840-1849 that devastated Ireland. Because newly arrived Irish women had few means and little knowledge of the country, they tended to stay in the cities where they landed rather than venture elsewhere for work. The advantages of working for wealthy and middle-class families included faster assimilation into American culture and wages that were higher than those of factory workers. Once Irish-Americans assimilated and became more economically successful, fewer women of Irish descent worked as domestics. During the 20th century, African-American women and Latinx women immigrants comprised the majority of domestic workers in the United States. The Mill Girls: The First Women Factory Workers When an industrial economy started to emerge during the Industrial Revolution that began in Great Britain in the 1770s and spread to the United States during the 1790s and early-mid 1800s, the textile industry was the first to be affected. Eli Whitney's mechanical cotton gin, invented in 1793 and patented in 1794, revolutionized the cotton industry, greatly enhanced the South's economy, and created a ready-made clothing industry; however, the cotton gin also increased the demand for slaves, who were needed to operate the machine. Home-based clothing manufacture became a common trade for women and, like teaching, was considered a respectable female wage-earning occupation, since spinning cloth and making clothes for their families was one of women's traditional domestic tasks. One center of clothing manufacture was Troy, New York, where hundreds of women sewed collars and cuffs at home for the city's clothing manufacturers. The home-based manufacture of "piece work" would become an integral part of the clothing industry in the mid-1800s and especially in the latter part of the 19th century into the 20th, when a large influx of immigrants from Europe arrived in New York City. There, they lived and worked in their tenement apartments, as well as in factory sweatshops. In 1793, English industrialist Samuel Slater (1768-1835), who had brought his expertise in operating looms and the spinning jenny to America from Great Britain, opened the country's first factory: a water-powered textile mill on the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Slater, who would go on to open mills in Massachusetts, first employed children aged seven to twelve to operate mill machinery and then hired whole families to work in his mill, developing company-owned villages to house his workers. Hours were long and wages were low, but the factory practices Slater called the "Rhode Island System" and was later known as the "Waltham-Lowell System," or simply the "Lowell System," became firmly established in American industry during the Industrial Revolution and later on in the century, during the development of such industries as mining. The success of Samuel Slater's mills and the increasing demand for manufactured cloth drew the attention of Massachusetts businessman Francis Cabot Lowell (1775-1817), who formed the Boston Manufacturing Company with investors in 1813. The following year, the company built a textile mill in Waltham that featured the first power loom, based on the British model, which offered a significant technological improvement in the making of cloth. Lowell integrated the chain of tasks under single roof, beginning what would become the American factory system in the nineteenth century. The mill became the most famous in the nation and highly profitable for their investors. After Lowell died in 1817, his business partners opened mills on the Merrimack River in Northeastern Massachusetts, which were in operation by 1823 in a planned settlement of boarding houses and eventually ten mill complexes that would make Lowell, incorporated as a city in 1836, the center of the nation's textile manufacturing. Other mill towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine would be similarly developed, although not as quite as large a scale. ... Rose Pesotta (1896-1965) A labor activist and anarchist, Rose Pesotta was one of the first female vice presidents of the International Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In that capacity, she challenged the authority of the male union leaders and was branded a troublemaker. Between 1934 and 1944, Pesotta was one of the most successful labor organizers in the United States. Born Rakhel Peisoty in the Ukraine, Pesotta was exposed to anarchist views early from the books in her father's library and in a local anarchist group. She refused her parents' arranged marriage for her and immigrated to New York City in 1913, where she found work as a seamstress in shirtwaist factories. She joined the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). She would create the union's first education department in 1915, and in 1920 was elected to an executive board position. Pesotta's charismatic personality, boundless energy, and empathy with the workers made her a sought-after and highly successful labor organizer, and she traveled the country broadcasting the union message and aiding workers' strikes and demonstrations. In 1934, she was elected as vice president of the ILGWU, a position she held for a decade. On loan from the ILGWU, she participated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in several of the key labor disputes of the 1930s in Akron, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan. She protested the lack of leadership positions for women in the union and refused a fourth term on the CIO Executive Board, stating that "one women vice president could not adequately represent the woman who now make up 85 percent of the International's membership of 305,000." Instead she went back to the factory from which she began, supporting herself as a seamstress.Following her resignation from ILGWU, she published two memoirs, Bread Upon the Waters (1945) and Days of Our Lives (1958), while supporting herself largely through factory work. She resigned from her job after a cancer diagnosis and moved to Florida, where she died alone in a Miami hospital. Esther Peterson (1906-1997) For more than fifty years, Esther Peterson was a determined advocate for workers' rights who was honored by the National Women's Hall of Fame as "one of the nation's most effective and beloved catalysts of change." She was a driving force in the fight for legislation to secure equal pay for equal work, creating the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to document workplace discrimination toward women. Born Esther Eggertsen, Peterson was the daughter of Danish immigrants. She grew up in a Mormon family in Provo, Utah, graduated from Brigham Young University in 1927, and earned a master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1930. She held several teaching positions, including one at the innovative Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. After her marriage to Oliver Peterson in 1932, the couple moved to Boston, where she taught at the Winsor School. In 1938, Peterson became a paid organizer for the American Federation of Teachers and then served as assistant director of education and lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1939-44, 1945-48). From 1958 to 1961 worked in Washington, D.C. as legislative representative of the industrial union department of the AFL-CIO. She would move on to various positions in the United States Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, where she worked from 1961 to 1969. As Assistant Secretary of Labor and Director of the United States Women's Bureau in the administration of President John F. Kennedy, Peterson was the highest-ranking woman in the administration. The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, the first such commission, focused federal attention for the first time on the status and condition of women in the workplace. Peterson was a driving force behind the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and would subsequently serve both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter as an adviser in consumer affairs. Peterson's consumer advocacy included truth in advertising, uniform packaging, unit pricing, and nutritional labeling laws. Peterson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 for her career as a significant voice for working women and for all consumers. Asked to provide advice to young people, she said that "your life can be satisfying and happy if you work to make a difference. Maybe the difference will be just a little tiny piece and not a bit difference. But the point is to make a difference by the way you live your life." Rose Schneiderman (1882-1972) For more than fifty years, Rose Schneiderman was an influential leader in what she called "the most exciting movement in the United States--the fight of workers for the right to organize." During her long and extraordinary career, much of which was spent as president of the New York Women's Trade Union League (NYWTUL) and the national Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), Schneiderman worked tirelessly to improve conditions for American women in the workplace and to provide trade union women with schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks. Schneiderman's commitment to bettering the quality of working women's lives is typified in a famous declaration often attributed to her, "The women worker needs bread, but she needs roses, too." Born in Saven, a small village in Russian Poland, Schneiderman was the eldest of four children. Her father worked as a tailor and her mother made custom uniforms for Russian soldiers. The family lived in one room in the back of a house where the landlady kept a saloon. Despite the resistance of education for girls, Schneiderman began attending Hebrew school at age four, and at six, as well as a Russian public school. She would continue her schooling on and off after the family immigrated to New York City in 1890, where they lived in a two-room tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. After her father's death, Schneiderman was placed in a Jewish orphanage for a time, and at age thirteen went to work as a cashier and sales clerk in a department store, working a seventy-hour week for $2.75. In 1898, she took a better-paying position as a lining-maker in a cap factory. Introduced to socialism and trade unionism by friends, Schneiderman recalled, "I became interested in politics. I knew nothing about trade unions or strikes and, like other young people, I was likely to look upon strikebreakers as heroic figures because they wanted to work and were willing to risk everything for it. My entire point of view was changed by the conversations I heard. . . ." In 1903, Scheiderman organized her shop into the first female local of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union, and under her leadership membership grew to several hundred. The following year, she became the first woman to hold national office in an American labor union when she was elected to the General Executive Board of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers' Union. In 1905, she began her association with the Women's Trade Union League. Formed in 1903, the WTUL was a coalition of reformers dedicated to unionizing working women. Schneiderman would call the WTUL, "the most important influence in my life," and she rose in the ranks as a masterful organizer. She would play a key role in the 1909 general strike of New York's garment workers, called the "Uprising of the 20,000," one of the pivotal events of the American women's labor movement. Schneiderman helped organize picket lines, raised money for strikers, and made numerous speeches in defense of the cause. After the strike was concluded, Schneiderman intended to complete high school and go on to college to become a teacher. Instead, she took a full-time position as an organizer with the NYWTUL, stating "my heart was in the trade-union movement." In 1918, she was elected president of the NYWTUL, a position she held until 1949. In addition to her WTUL activities, Schneiderman was an ardent suffragist and helped form the Wage Earner's League for Woman Suffrage. In 1926, now an nationally known figure, Schneiderman was elected president of the WTUL, and she turned her attention to promoting workers' education and lobbying for the minimum wage and eight-hour worked day. By the 1940s, the influence of the WTUL had waned, with its function of union organization and negotiation taken over by the AFL and CIO. Schneiderman, then 73, observed, "They don't need us anymore. Let's step out gracefully." She retired from public life, lived quietly in Manhattan, and in 1972 died in the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged. Schneiderman would write in her autobiography that "to me the labor movement was never just a way of getting higher wages. What appealed to me was the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship. You wanted the girl or man who worked beside you to be treated just as you were." Schneiderman dedicated her career toward realizing this ideal, and workers today take for granted the protections won for them by Rose Schneiderman's long struggle. Randi Weingarten (1957- ) A labor leader and educator, Randi Weingarten is the current president of the American Federation of Teacher and the former president of the United Federation of Teachers. Weingarten became the first openly gay individual to be elected president of a national American labor union. Born in New York City, Weingarten grew up in Rockland County, New York, and developed an early interest in labor unions and politics when her mother--a teacher--went on strike. Weingarten attended Cornell University and then the Cardoza School of Law. In 1986, she became counsel to the then president of the United Federation of Teachers, representing the union in several important cases and by the early 1990s was the union's chief contract negotiator. From 1991 to 1997, Weingarten also taught history at Clara Barton High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She was elected the union's assistant secretary in 1995, treasurer in 1997, and finally president in 1998, a position she held for twelve years, before becoming President of the American Federation of Teachers in 2008. As President of the UFT, Weingarten fought for higher salaries and better training for teachers, as well as merit pay. As President of the AFT, she has worked to put educational reform on the national agenda, to change how teachers are evaluated, and to improve access for all students. Weingarten has long advocated a "bottom up" approach to education reform that takes into account the views and needs of teachers and their students. Worried about the consequence of certain market-based proposals that she fears will result in the "eventual elimination of public education altogether," Weingarten sees the role of private, charter schools as complementing, rather than competing with, public schools. "Charter schools should be laboratories for innovation and creative ideas," she has asserted, "that can be scaled up so they can enrich communities." Often a lightning rod for the contentious issues surrounding education in America, Weingarten has been a tireless advocate for teacher's rights and responsibility as well as one of the nation's most effective contemporary labor leaders. Excerpted from The American Women's Almanac: 500 Years of Making History by Deborah G. Felder All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.