Women have always worked
Devoting all week to working women. Stories fr labor historian Barbara Mayer Wertheimer's 1976 book. "She always believed that it was women who 'will be the ones to organize other women...to transmit enthusiasm and confidence in trade unionism.'" #LaborDay
Daily Suffragist
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02/09/2019
<a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/wertheimer-barbara-mayer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Barbara Mayer Wertheimer</a>
Women's Typographical Union 1
Women got the chance to learn typesetting when owners needed scabs. Augusta Lewis realized we'd do better unionized, and in 1868 she created Women's Typographical Union 1. It met @ the office of Susan B Anthony's newspaper Revolution. #Suffrage100 #KnowYour19 #Union
Daily Suffragist
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06/09/2019
No Night Work for Women
FFwd to 1913: Post-Triangle Shirtwaist fire, safety laws finally pass. 1 bans women from night shifts➡️female printers, proofers <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@nytimes</a> & other a.m. papers are axed. The NY Typographical Union won't help get their jobs back, so 3 women organize on their own for an exemption.
Daily Suffragist
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08/09/2019
The first men to vote for women
In 1893, men in Colorado voted to let women vote - the first time such a thing had ever happened. 16 years earlier a referendum failed in CO - just like in KS, MI, NE, OR, RI, WA & SD. So how'd we finally win? [1/2] <br />#StateOfTheWeek #Colorado<br /><br />Progressive collaboration: labor reformers, working class immigrant women in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the integrated Colorado Equal Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Piper Ensley👇 a founder of that group & of the Colorado Association of Colored Women's Clubs.Â
Daily Suffragist
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13/09/2019
Rosh Hashana, Day 1: Meet Rose Schneiderman
To ring in the Jewish new year, I’m highlighting 2 women whose impact on labor rights for all working people -esp. women- endures. Both fierce union organizers, suffragists, lesbians. Read <a href="https://twitter.com/AnneliseOrleck1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@AnneliseOrleck1's</a> profiles: <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/schneiderman-rose" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rose Schneiderman first</a>. Shana tova!
Daily Suffragist
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30/09/2019
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/schneiderman-rose
Rosh Hashana, Day 2: Meet Pauline Newman
Pauline Newman was dykier than Rose. At 16 she led the biggest rent strike in NYC. After scores of friends died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, she helped write & enforce NY safety laws. Led women in WTUL & ILGWU for decades. There's so much more: read👇! <a href="https://t.co/zMPlqoMjRh?amp=1" target="_blank" dir="ltr" class="r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0 css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406" title="https://buff.ly/2mHW2lf" rel="noreferrer noopener"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-hiw28u r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">https://</span>buff.ly/2mHW2lf</a>
Daily Suffragist
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01/10/2019
<a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/newman-pauline">https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/newman-pauline</a>
The other Meriwether sister
Remember Elizabeth Meriwether, the suffragist who helped start the Memphis chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? She shared her home with her brother- & sister-in-law, Lide Smith Meriwether. Lide was as devoted a suffragist as Elizabeth, and more progressive. <br /><br />Lide devoted much of the 1870s to supporting local sex workers (forgive the anachronism) and their children. Her view of “fallen women” was progressive for its time: she believed prostitution was a result of economic need, not inherently low morals. <br /><br />By 1886 Eliz. & her husband had moved to St. Louis. Maybe Lide felt freer to do cross-racial work without them around, because she expanded her activism to the Knights of Labor. KofL was challenging the rapaciousness of RR barons like Jay Gould. It was integrated and co-ed. <br /><br />KofL held “large, festive, interracial gatherings throughout the South replete with parades that included black women who rode in carriages…” (Paula Giddings) Ida B Wells attended a meeting in Memphis where she was treated “with the courtesy usually extended to white ladies.”<br /><br />One of the speakers that day was Lide Meriwether. Lide was state president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Under her leadership WCTU organized its 1st Black chapters in the South. A meeting she chaired in 1886 was probably the 1st interracial women's mtng in Memphis. WCTU had a fraught relationship with suffrage, but it was the place to organize respectable women in conservative Memphis. <br /><br />It took Lide 3 years, but she managed to add a suffrage plank to WCTU’s platform. In 1889 she formed the first suffrage club in Memphis, with 50 members. Lide was truly the face of the white women’s suffrage movement in Tennessee for the rest of the century. She toured the state in the 1890s as a paid organizer for NAWSA, and presided over state suffrage conventions, where she was elected “honorary president for life.” <br /><br />Lide is honored on the <a href="https://www.thenorthstar.com/a-new-monument-in-tennessee-highlights-black-women-in-the-suffrage-movement/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tennessee Women’s Suffrage Trail</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/TNSuffrageTrail" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TNSuffrageTrail</a>. @<a href="https://twitter.com/MichelleDuster" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MichelleDuster</a> wrote about the expansion of the trail, which now honors Lide alongside Ida B Wells & Mary Church Terrell (and Elizabeth Meriwether):<br /><br />Lastly, b/c I can’t make this stuff up: Lide’s daughter Virginia eloped in 1882 (her sister eloped the same night!) Virginia immediately realized she’d made a mistake & returned. Her new husband pursued her, armed. She got hold of his gun, he brandished another, and she shot him. <br /><br />As he lay dying, he acknowledged she had fired in self-defense. In Memphis, Virginia Meriwether was talk of the town. She moved to New York and enrolled in the Blackwell sisters’ medical school. At her death in 1949 she was the oldest practicing woman doctor in New York.
Daily Suffragist
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10/01/2020
Leonora O'Reilly
Leonora O’Reilly had a hand in umpteen important organizations of the Progressive Era. She was a founder of the Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the NAACP, to name a few. “Leonora O’Reilly attracted people like a magnet.†- B.Wertheimer ☘ï¸ðŸ§µ <br /><br />Born in New York City, Leonora’s mother Winifred took her to labor meetings as an infant. Leonora worked in a factory from 13. She joined the Knights of Labor at 16. (Mother/Daughter 👇) <br /><br />In 1886, as a teenager, she founded her 1st organization: the NY Working Women’s Society. <br /><br />The Society helped pass the nation’s first factory inspection law. <br /><br />O’Reilly was a gifted recruiter. She brought many activists and benefactors into the movement for labor reform, including Josephine Shaw Lowell and Mary & Margaret Dreier. In 1890 she founded the Consumers League of NY, which later became a national power, passing protective laws under Florence Kelley’s lead. <br /><br />In 1897 O'Reilly founded a local of the United Garment Workers. In 1903 she was a founding board member of the Women’s Trade Union League. <br /><br />O’Reilly was terrific on the stump: “the League’s most famous orator.†For 23 years she fit her activism around full-time factory work, until WTUL paid her to travel and lecture. 1909-1910, <br /><br />“Leonora O’Reilly gave a speech almost every day for the League or some affiliated cause.†She co-founded the NYC Wage Earners Suffrage League w/Clara Lemlich. It was a space for working women only - not society benefactors. In 1912 O’Reilly testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, delivering “plainer speaking than the committee had ever heard from a woman.â€<br /><br />“There are 8 million of us in the US who must earn our daily bread. You have been making laws for us and the laws you have made have not been good for us. We working women want the ballot as our right. You say it is not a right but a privilege. Then we demand it as a privilege.â€Â
Daily Suffragist
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17/03/2020
Scale of atrocity * caliber of organizing
Why do some tragedies generate change and others don’t? <br /><br />109 years ago today the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 people - mostly Jewish & Italian immigrant women. The fire was key to winning labor & safety laws. The political power women built in its aftermath contributed directly to suffrage. <br /><br />But many horrifying examples of venality and mismanagement don’t lead to any change at all. So why did this one? Here’s a simple equation: Scale of atrocity * caliber of organizing = possibility of change. <br /><br />The Triangle fire was big - it's still one of the biggest industrial disasters in U.S. history. At the time of the fire, immigrant organizers like Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and Clara Lemlich were fresh from a significant success in the Uprising of 20,000. <br /><br />In 1910, garment workers struck all winter - and won. The leaders built skill and fortitude in that fight, and were ready to take it further. They knew women who died at Triangle; Newman had worked there for years. For the public, the horror of women jumping from the Triangle factory's windows was catalyzing. <br /><br />What will we make from this moment?
Daily Suffragist
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25/03/2020
South Dakota
South Dakota became a state in 1899. Its motto: “Under God the People Rule.” National suffrage leaders converged on the state immediately to campaign for a doomed suffrage amendment. Its motto: “Women Are People.” A #StateOfTheWeek thread <br /><br />White women in the Dakotas had sought the vote since at least 1883, but the territorial legislature worried it might hurt their chance for statehood. When North & South Dakota were admitted to the union, neither Native men nor any woman could vote. <br /><br />Eleanor Flexner summarizes: ]“The South Dakota campaign in 1890 was one of the most rigorous that suffrage workers ever endured -- blazing hot all summer, while the 75-yo Susan B Anthony and the veteran Henry Blackwell (a mere 65) toured the state, and freezing cold during Mrs. Catt’s tour in the fall. <br /><br />“In addition, living conditions were ‘primitive,’ and all the speakers had to cover immense distances. The decision for the newly united suffrage association to enter the campaign had hinged on pledges of support from farm and labor organizations." <br /><br />But... “when the campaign was already under way, the Knights of Labor and the Farmers Alliance launched a 3rd party, which refused to encumber itself with the controversial issue of votes for women. <br /><br />"The outcome was a defeat of almost 2-to-1, after a murderous campaign: “Mrs. Catt came down with typhoid fever immediately afterward and very nearly died, and when Miss Anthony returned to her home in Rochester, her sister Mary commented that for the first time she realized that Susan was growing old.” <br /><br />A referendum the same day to enfranchise Native men failed too. The massacre at Wounded Knee took place two months later. #StateOfTheWeek #CenturyofStruggle
Daily Suffragist
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27/03/2020