March 8, 2017 • 42 mins
International Women's Day, celebrated every March 8, is a holiday inspired by factory women going on strike for better wages and working conditions. Cristen and Caroline explore why the (sometimes fake) history of the commemorative day is central to working-class issues within feminism then and now.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you From house Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and we're recording this episode as a
celebration of International Women's Day, happens every March eight. Although
(00:24):
I kind of feel like International Women's Day and Gallantine's
Day should just be folded into the same February celebration
as long as it is still like really cool and
pro lady and pro awesome ladies, as opposed to what
Women's Day in Russia has become, which it had such
great strong political roots in Russia, and now Women's Day
(00:46):
is like this weird Valentine's Mother's Day saccerin hybrid where
and you're like, what's wrong with that? At least take
a candy. It's like, yeah, you get candy and flowers,
but it's in celebration of of um, Like how sweet
and sexy lady is not necessarily like go women. Yeah,
(01:07):
there was a really awkward photo that I found of
Vladimir Putin handing bouquets of tulips to a group of
Russian women and he was almost smiling, but it just
did not look like a very celebratory affair and only
smiles when he's riding bears shirtless in the wilderness exactly. Um,
(01:30):
but the looks on the women's faces said to me like, well,
here's this, here's bouque. Alright, this is all I'm getting. Well,
I mean there was I forget where I was reading
the article. It might have been in the Washington Post
or the Wall Street Journal, one of those really important
newspapers that I regularly read. Um, but your name dropping
(01:51):
paper absolutely j school nerd alert. But the reporter was
talking to younger women in Russia who are so over
International Women's Day because they're like, we would just prefer
maybe more rights, higher wages rather than flowers once a year. Yeah.
(02:11):
I like one idea in that article that was quoted
of how to celebrate Women's Day in Russia was like,
you know, just flowers and coffee won't do. Guys. You know,
maybe go on a car race with your lady, but
there is a dilemma when it comes to whether she
should be the driver or the navigators. Yeah. Okay, so
(02:32):
International Women's Day in Russia not so rad yet yet,
because we're going to talk to you about the secret
history of international Women's Day and how it came about
in the United States, and why it is about so
much more than just posting of Instagram photos of rad ladies.
(02:56):
I mean, of course we'll probably post like some notorious
RBG photos things like that, but it's spelt so much
more than just oh oh women, you know, polite applause,
because the labor history behind it is I mean a
something that we don't hear about very often and be
(03:16):
something that does deserve our recognition, right because labor feminists,
so to speak, have really led the way in this
country for establishing the fight for rights and and at
one time for suffrage. Yeah, and in fact, International Women's
Day was inspired by female factory workers going on strike,
(03:37):
and like we said, it's definitely worth taking a look
at how all of that went down. And we're focusing
on the United States. I know, we were just talking
about Russia for a few minutes. We're coming back to
the United States, um, partially to fill in this huge
gap in our history of labor organizing that we rarely
hear about. And uh, this info we're about to cover
(03:59):
is coming from articles from in These Times and Urbana
Champagne Independent Media Center. So when it comes to striking,
people have walked off their jobs in protests since the
medieval period. We've always been fed up with our horrible
bosses and walked out. But in terms of the organized
(04:20):
strikes as we think of them today, those didn't really
start until the early nineteenth century. And you know who
led the way, Caroline women, textile workers. I didn't even
wait for you to answer. I was so excited I
opened my mouth and then yes. And but of course
it was called turning out at the time. They weren't striking,
they were turning out, which I like that. It's like
(04:41):
you're you're turning out in support of, you know, like
getting paid. Yeah. I feel like there's like a little
dance move that would go along with that, you know,
the turn out. Yeah, a little hip swivel and sachet away. Yes.
Uh So in eight four, uh, you get America's first
textile mills, Slater Mill and popp Tucket, Rhode Island, which,
by the way, is now a museum if you'd like
(05:02):
to visit, which absolutely I would never been to Rhode
Island before anyway. Slater Mill was the site of the
first factory organized strike in the United States, and it
was initiated by Kristen a bunch of angry women. True story.
It was also the first strike of any kind involving women,
(05:22):
and originally, which is horrifying, the mill owners hired children
to run the looms, but a bunch of new mechanization
technology demanded that you get a more skilled labor force,
but they still had to be cheap. So who's maybe
a little taller, but also as cheap as children at
(05:44):
this time, A bunch of angry women, Yeah, exactly. So
they bring these ladies in and the owners assumed, uh,
women are really just tall children, so they will be
very easy to control. Yeah, we're not even being sarcastic listeners.
A number of the source is we were reading about
Slader Mill and this historic strike emphasized how the mill
(06:08):
owners and managers were just so perplexed when the women,
you know, revolted because they're like, but they we thought
you're supposed to be just tall children, um, And so
they were wrong. They were wrong. And one hundred and
two women between the ages of fifteen and thirty abandoned
(06:30):
their textile looms to protest a twenty five wage cut,
and they went on strike and they won back a
majority of their wage, and this inspired future strikes around
New England, including strikes organized by those famous low Girls. Yeah,
(06:50):
we could do an entire podcast on the Lowell Girls,
and I checked and stuff you missed in history class
has not devoted a podcast of the Little Girls that
I know of. I could be mistaken, um, but we
should probably suggest it to Tracy and Holly. But we're
still going to talk about him for a little bit
because this provides such important context to the environment leading
(07:12):
up to International Women Say the founding of it. So
in the twenties, Lowell, Massachusetts is incorporated as a planned
town for textile manufacturing, which to me sounds a lot
like today's mixed use developments, only without you know, like
t J Max's and any amenities. And Okay, it's not
(07:35):
like that at all. That's kind of horrible. Um. But
over the next couple of decades, Lowell employed eight thousand
mill operatives, as they called them, and they were mostly
like at Slater Mill, they were mostly women and kids
who would come in from farming families in rural New England.
And this employment, of course offered a new kind of freedom,
(07:57):
particularly for the women, got them out of their house
but it also stoked public fears about up ending gender
roles and family values, and some even considered it unvirtuous
to be a factory girl. Yeah, this is definitely echoes
and shades of what we talked about in our babysitting
episode about the the advent of the teenager and how
(08:17):
immediately there were fears about what she was doing and
who she was doing it with. I mean, seriously, it's like,
let's get some cheap labor in here, and let's pay them,
but then we're going to be awfully scared about what
they're going to do with that money. Exactly because wantonness
looms at the textile mills. Kuldn't resist. I'm actually really sorry,
(08:39):
but I mean it's not like they weren't unsupervised. All
of these low mill operatives lived in factory and boarding houses,
but the room and board also came out of their paychecks. Yeah.
So for a sample work week for a little girl,
you'd work about eighty hours a week, and and at
one point so that the work day used to start
(09:01):
at seven am. They would wake up and have breakfast
and then start working. But then this real genius of
a guy that rolls into the mill, and he's like,
you know what, we've noticed those women work so well,
just right when they wake up. So let's start the
work day at five, and then we'll give them a
little bit of a breakfast break and they can get
back to work at seven. So they work for eighty
(09:24):
hours a week, and they make a whopping three dollars,
of which a dollar twenty five goes right back to
Lowell to pay for their room and board. Yes, so
things aren't glowing by any means. And when textile competition
starts to step up in commodity prices drop, Lowell ends
up cutting wages, and as you might imagine, all of
(09:45):
those ladies were none too pleased. Yeah, and apparently, as
some sources have noted, the Lowell girls were already considered
kind of rebel rousers. I mean the fact that they
were working outside the home and they gave the owners
a lot of golf um. But I mean, this is
such a crucial point in our American labor history because
(10:09):
in four the Lowell girls strike to protest um. But
the company quickly cracks down. But still it's significant. You
have eight hundred of their workers, which was about a
sixth of the mill force going on strike, and to
also drive home the significance of this and the gender
(10:29):
politics of the day. There's a mill worker named Harriet
Hansen Robinson who was there, and she wrote about the
incident later, and she recalled a female coworker hopping up
on a stump and delivering this impromptu pro strike speech,
probably doing her little turnout Sasha move and Robinson said
(10:51):
this was the first time a woman had spoken in public,
and Lowell and its echoes similar kinds of milestones like
that with the ten Prince movement and the abolition movement
and suffrage, where you have this social consciousness raising among
and within groups of women, inspiring them to speak out
publicly for the very first time. Yeah, not only did
(11:13):
you have that one woman sashing on the stump, but
women marched through town. They made speeches, they passed resolutions
within their group, and of course held meetings, which is
so dangerous women holding meetings. But apparently those kinds of activities,
aside from maybe making speeches, that does seem a little radical,
but them parading through town and meeting among themselves was
(11:36):
still considered female appropriate. They weren't pushing their boundaries too far.
But I gotta say as a twenty one century reader
of um, because there was a lot of writing about this.
Their rhetoric was very independence heavy, you know, they called
themselves daughters of freedom, which okay, but it was also
very slave heavy, where they continually compared their working auditions
(12:00):
to slavery, and we're like, how dare you United States
enslave us in these working conditions? Which is a little
bit awkward because this is an eighteen thirty four in
America is still like almost thirty years away from legally
abolishing actual slavery. Yeah, that's a little um, that is
a little icky. Yeah, But I mean, like for the
(12:23):
for the times, it made sense. They were trying to
essentially spin there patriotic womanhood into something to get them
better working conditions. Yeah. Well, so two years later we
get the second strike and things really intensify at this point,
and while the textile economy itself was fine, Lowell still
(12:47):
raised the room and board costs for women, and the
law mill girls are like, I don't think so, buddy,
No way. This time of the workforce, which was between
two thousand participants, went on strike and the mills ran
below capacity for months, even though I mean they ended up,
(13:08):
you know, the company ended up negotiating with them. Um,
they still felt the impact of that strike, and the
women also formed the Factory Girls Association. So these are
the first seeds you see of female lead union organizing.
And scholars have said that this signaled what they called
(13:29):
a new consciousness among these working class women who we're
really trying to combine the domestic values that they were
raised with in an urbanized setting to temper all of
those fears and criticisms of them as being unvirtuous women
who are just up ending gender roles. And this action
(13:52):
would lay the foundation for what was called the ten
hour movement, yeah, cutting back on those what was an
eighty two hour week, yeah something. So by four all
of those low operatives they've continued to wise up, they've
continued to get mad, and they are continuing to get political,
and they form the Low Female Labor Reform Association, which
(14:16):
is the first union of American working women that focused
on winning that ten hour work day. And this group
gets credit for initiating some of the earliest reforms in
the textile industries working conditions and as a piece over
at the a f l c i O notes that
(14:38):
since women couldn't vote at the time, the Low Female
Labor Reform Association was focused on petition campaigns. So they
were like, Okay, we can get all these signatures and
then we'll take it to the Massachusetts state legislature and
get them to legally cap the work day at ten hours.
So they did that. They were collecting signatures, they were
(14:59):
organ iizing other chapters, union chapters at other mills. They
started publishing what they called factory tracks to expose mill conditions,
and they were also actively testifying before state legislators. So
you have to see how determine these women were to
work within the constraints that they had, both economically and politically,
(15:21):
and we're still intent on saying nope, we're going to
make this happen. Yeah, there was a lot of lady
power going on. There was one low mill girl writing
about this who said they have at least learned the
lesson which a bitter experience teaches. Not to those who
style themselves their natural protectors are they to look for
the needful help, but to the strong and resolute of
(15:43):
their own sex. So like, don't depend on these men
who are running the mills, or even the men who
are running the government. You have to help yourself. So
listeners are probably wondering at this point what happened to
International Women's Day. Well, friends, don't don't worry, because we're
about to stitch it all together when we come right
back from a quick break. So this is where the
(16:16):
podcast takes a little bit of a conspiratorial turn. And
I've been so excited to talk to you about this, Caroline,
because talk about some podcasts research really throw in a
curveball at us, because here's the thing. Allegedly, International Women's
Day was inspired by a strike on March eight, eight
(16:36):
seven that was, you know, continuing in this tradition that
women were developing of organizing going on strike. Um, these
were supposedly women garment workers in New York City who
marched and picketed demanding improved working conditions again the ten
hour work day and equal rights for women, and police
responded with brutality, clubbing them allegedly, yes, and then allegedly
(17:05):
on March eight, nineteen o eight, apparently supposedly allegedly the
needle trades ladies in New York marched again, honoring the
eighteen fifty seven march, again demanding the vote and an
end of sweatshops and child labor. This all sounds really good.
This all sounds like a great foundation for International Women's Day. Yeah,
of course we should recognize those those two strikes that
(17:27):
may or may not have happened. Um, But if we
pull back for a minute, especially if we look at
nineteen o eight when that second strike allegedly maybe supposedly happened.
By this time post Civil War, we have women and
especially widows flooding the job market like never before. But
(17:48):
when they arrive looking for jobs, unions are largely uninterested
in representing them. So like that Lowell mill girl recommended,
don't depend on the dudes, turn to your lady friends.
So they began forming their own organizations and initiatives. And
this is also the time when you have working class
women's labor demands intersecting with the work of suffragists and
(18:11):
progressive era feminist like Jane Adams, Florence Kelly, and Rose Snyderman.
And speaking of Stuffy miss in history class a little
while back, they do have an episode I know on
Jane Adams. And in eighteen sixty nine you get the
publication of Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, which
is possibly jointly written with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill,
(18:31):
which helps launch an argument for gender equality. So it's
really kind of infiltrating popular discourse. And in eighty nine,
the International Socialist Congress accepted the principle of women's right
to work and equal pay. And you might be like, oh,
why why are they mentioning socialists all of a sudden.
Don't worry, it'll make sense in a second. And in
(18:52):
nineteen o three, the Women's Trade Union League was formed,
So we see more and more and more organizing happening
among the women. And that brings us to nine nine,
which is a pivotal year in the history of International
Women's Day because on February, the Socialist Party in the
United States celebrates the first National Women's Day in New York,
(19:15):
allegedly to honor those two strikes when that happened in
eighteen fifty seven and then in nineteen o eight. Yeah,
so they didn't have the Google to be able to
verify whether those strikes had indeed happened exactly. We are
sounding very like what we're teasing a lot of information here, uh.
And then in November of that year, in November nineteen
(19:37):
o nine, you get the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
that teams up with the National Women's Trade Union League
and they launched the first long term general strike by women.
And this was a strike a turning out against Leaser
Setting Company and a Triangle Waste company, two of the
(19:57):
quote most notorious shops in New York. And for listeners
in New York, the Lower East Side was where all
of this stuff was happening. That was the factory hub,
and shirtwaist workers were among the worst paid. And shirtwaist
for anyone who didn't know, like me, what exactly that was,
I was thinking, like, is that a cumber bund or what?
(20:18):
It's just another name for a blouse. It was like
a super popular type of blows, women's blows at the time.
So these workers, though, were among the worst paid. And
we're mostly Eastern European Jewish immigrants, So this is a
group of people who don't have a ton of political leverage,
but they're organizing through these unions to form what's nicknamed
(20:41):
the Uprising of twenty thousand and it started out as
just that joint effort by the women's unions, but then
it became a general strike after a woman named Clara
Lemlick asked to be heard in a Cooper union meeting.
They were discussing, like, Okay, what are we gonna do?
They've got the shirtwaist strike. How do we feel about this?
(21:03):
A couple of guys got up and gave some lackluster
speeches and they're like okay. So leml gets up and,
speaking in Yiddish, she declared, I am tired of listening
to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are
here for is to decide whether we shall or shall
not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike
(21:23):
be declared now. And she fired that crowd up so
much that they determined then and there to join the strike. Yeah,
and they I mean they took an oath. It was
all sorts of excitement going on, so much excitement that
there were several men at the time who said that
the thirteen week long strike was a strike against God.
(21:44):
And one of my favorite things was what George Bernard
Shaw wrote upon reading this. He said, delightful medieval America
always an intimate personal confidence of the Almighty. And I
love it because it almost sounds modern, the way that
men so men hashtag nettlemen. Uh tend to frame a
lot of women's activism in general that it's like against
(22:07):
your place as a woman, against nature. Yeah, well, speaking
of nature, I mean this strike happened for thirteen weeks
in the dead of winter. I mean, can you imagine
picketing in late November in New York? Answer? No, I cannot.
I live in this South for a reason. Um. But
it wasn't just the factory workers who were striking. This
(22:30):
was also the first time you see wealthier women joining
the picket lines because they would come out and sort
of protect the factory workers from police brutality, because the
police aren't gonna beat up, you know, a well connected,
wealthy woman from New Jersey, but they would have no
(22:51):
qualms beating up a female factory worker. And Kristen, is
this where we get them mink brigades? Yes, okay, So
so I want to hear about them. Okay, I'll tell
you about the mink brigades, which is my new favorite
feminist history phrase. So, these elite allies of these working
(23:11):
class folks who were going on strike became known as
the mink Brigades because they would come down and marching
the picket lines. With their minks on. A lot of
them were socialites from New Jersey and the woman who
kind of spearheaded their participation was a girl named Anna Morgan.
She was super duper rich and she had like a
(23:31):
twenty tho dollar a year stipend to live on, and
she just like hung out in New York and she
was like, Ladi Da, my life is really easy. Then
she strikes up a friendship and possible romantic relationship with
one Elizabeth Marbury, who at the time was in a
quote unquote Boston marriage to famed interior designer and star
(23:52):
of Our Women in Interior Design podcast, Elsie Dwolf. And
this pair was very connected. They were also very progressive,
and Marbury awakened Anna Morgan's social consciousness and she was like,
you know what, I have the means and resources to
(24:12):
do something to help these other women. So she organizes
these mink Brigades and they march alongside the Uprising of
twenty thousand UM. And the thing is, though, this is
really where you start to see a snapshot of class
divisions within the suffrage movement and early feminism, because the
(24:34):
wealthy women were not very radical, I mean even for
Europeans observing America at the time, suffragists were considered more conservative. Yeah, exactly,
I mean, especially if you compare them to suffragettes in
Britain who were way more intense. And these suffragists, though
the Mink Brigades, were not too fond of the striking
(24:57):
and the picketing. They really preferred to launch consumer boycotts
and advocate for fair labor standards I mean, which are
to me are things that you see echoed in second
way feminism as well. Um, So there was there was
some tension between these groups. And didn't those Mink Brigade
ladies sort of start to pull back once they realized
(25:19):
that they weren't having the same kind of sway in
the way that they wanted to with a lot of
these more radical women. Yeah, because the you know, these
working women, I mean, this was a group of largely
you know, politically marginalized immigrant women. It was like a
cross ethnic group, and they were so fed up. They
were just like everything is at stake for them, so
(25:40):
they didn't care about being more radical. So yeah, they
come together for a little bit, but then they would
end up splintering the more things change them, where they
stay the same in terms of those racial and class
divisions and feminism interesting to notice. Um. Well, so, going
back to that thirteen week strike, though the women were
eventually sick, sucessful in winning a fifty two hour work week,
(26:02):
which I mean, I guess that's better than an eighty
two hour work week. Uh. They won four paid holidays
and a better pay scale and union recognition. Now, the
sad news is that one year later, after all of
this happened, the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened, killing six people,
(26:22):
most of whom were women workers, and they could not
escape the factory because, like the doors were bolted shut
to ensure that the women wouldn't walk out and strike again. Um,
and Stephie missed in history class does have a whole
podcast on that. In the wake of this, though, the
families who you know, who's sisters, daughters, wives were killed
(26:45):
in the fire, they were compensated. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.
One employer was fined just twenty dollars for for their
role in the fatalities. So it really seems more like
it's the uprising of All's end and then followed by
the disaster at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that inspires the
(27:06):
future international Women's Days, because meanwhile, in the Socialist Party,
let's hop back to socialists. I feel like we need
some like fancy transition music to go back to the
Socialist Party's our socialist transition music um. In nineteen ten,
at the Women's Conference of International Socialist Women in Copenhagen,
two ladies Rosa Luxembourg, which that's a fantastic name, by
(27:29):
the way, and Clara Zetkin suggests March eight should be
International Women's Day and they should call for universal suffrage.
And this was strategic on their part. Like Zekin had
a difficult relationship with feminists, she didn't really like them
all that much. But like a lot of the platforms
(27:50):
that she has spells like suffrage, we're kind of feminists.
But the tension between feminism and socialism was that socialism
at the time is more interested in uplifting like the
economic rights of largely working class men versus women's rights. Correct.
But also going back to the thing you said earlier
about the assumption that many of the feminists and suffrages
(28:15):
of the time, if they got the vote, would just
vote along conservative lines with their husbands. There was a
lot of fear around that too, and zet Can though
felt and they're they're one of the sources that we
read had a snapshot of this statement she and some
other socialists put out. She basically felt like with this
heavy sigh of like we've just we've got to show
(28:35):
them the way, like we I don't like them, I
don't like what they stand for, but women have to
come together and the Socialist women are the best women
to show them how to do it well. And there
was that angle of the strategy, but there was also
the sort of socialist propaganda angle where they were like,
the party also needs to demonstrate their care for women
(28:58):
and their interests in women, and so this International Women's
Day can do both of those things at the same time.
And on March nineteenth, nineteen eleven, International Women's Day was
celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, and they protested
for voting rights, workers rights rights, the whole public office.
(29:20):
I mean, they were they were out in mass And
it's also this year though, that Socialist women in Boston
I believe said that they would march with suffragists to
the local suffrage hearings. It was time, you know, to
band together and really show support. But a journalist covering
the event noted that they were actually way more socialists
(29:42):
than there were suffragists, and noted something along the lines
of like, oh, maybe maybe the socialists are actually way
more passionate about this than the suffragists are. Representation matters, ladies. Well,
if we hop forward though to nineteen seventeen and traveled
back to Russia, where a podcast began, this is pretty incredible.
(30:05):
Russian women that year observed International Women's Day for the
first time, and it ended up instigating the Russian Revolution
and Zar Nicholas abdicating. Yeah, okay, and this is where
we get to what Kris and I have been hinting
at for a minute now, for like thirty minutes, for
thirty minutes now, I know we've constantly been hinting at this.
(30:26):
So scholar Ti mccaplan wrote the paper on the Socialist
Origins of International Women's Day, and she reveals how those
eighteen fifty seven and nineteen o eight strikes likely never happened. Yeah,
and likelier still, they were a convenient story to steer
(30:47):
attention away from the holidays socialist and communist roots. Yeah,
I mean because Clara Zetkin, for instance, was close pals
with Lennon, who later declined aired International Women's Day a
national holiday in Russia. And International Women's Day was really
a Communist holiday until a late nineteen sixties, so you
(31:09):
haven't celebrated by communist China, obviously in Russia all the
other communist countries at the time. So in nineteen when
the u N declares the Year of the Woman, we
still have some of that Cold War anks. So International
(31:30):
Women's Day gets a bit of an historical makeover. And
I don't know that there was someone at the u
N or wherever being like, okay to make up a
strike eighteen fifty seven, Yeah, that sounds good. Um, But
and Timacaplan wasn't able to cite exactly when and how
(31:53):
the myth of those two strikes arose, because I don't know.
I mean, it almost seems like pointless mythology, because as
you have all of these other actual strikes that were
happening at the time that could have easily been linked
to it. Was it the degree of it all, the
fact that in those alleged strikes early on, there was
supposedly so many women participating in such police brutality. Like,
(32:16):
oh my god, look at your sisters. They were, you know,
beaten by the police. Yeah, I mean, I think the
police brutality angle of it was definitely a big one.
And our research for this podcast corroborates Kaplan's claim that
the strikes were made up, because before we ran across
her paper, I was getting so frustrated searching and searching
(32:37):
for information, especially on that eighteen fifty seven strike. And
if you look up seven Women's Strike, New York City,
all you'll find our articles and timelines of International Women's Day. Interesting,
there's no actual like, there's not any historic articles on
(32:59):
the strike, in the same way as you find so
much information on the you know, the Little Girls Uprising
of two thousand, twenty thousand, excuse me, and the whole
Slater Mill incident. Yeah, because if there are articles from
Boston journalists in nineteen eleven covering a in in uh
comparison with the supposed eighteen fifty seven strike, covering a
(33:20):
relatively small group of suffragists and socialists, if they're covering that,
they sure as heck, about sixty years prior would have
covered a giant, massive strike of women who were then
beat up by police. Yeah, I mean, and we did
not do like an in depth Lexus nexus search, so
who knows there could be something buried there. I would
(33:41):
still like further academic confirmation that this was the case.
So listeners, if you have any intel, please let us know,
because all evidence points to those two strikes being made up,
like the history of International Women's Day is apocryphal, to
make it more palatable for the United States and other
(34:04):
countries to celebrate what is essentially a socialist and communist holiday,
had the socialist ladies leading the way, and now I mean,
now it's celebrated. International Women's stays celebrated in more than
a hundred countries, So I mean that's fabulous. And the
thing is finding out that those strikes might not have
happened is certainly not a reason to not celebrate. If anything,
(34:27):
I think we should celebrate it even more in recognition
of this history that we just talked about um and
especially how it's often erased from labor history at large,
and also too to celebrate the successes achieved by the
nineteen twenties. I mean, all the striking that women were
doing might not have made massive impacts in that moment,
(34:50):
but incrementally they were building up to some pretty major reforms. Yeah.
So by the nineteen twenties, you had a bunch of
state laws that were regulated hours and wages and working
conditions for female employees. Uh. They secured union contracts and
grievance procedures and a lot of factories and workshops, and
(35:10):
all of the striking and agitating really paved the way
for the Fair Labor Standards Act of the New Deal. Yeah,
I mean, and these are the kinds of employment standards
that all of us benefit from, you know, not just
female employees. And for one final historical note, when FDR
came to office, he appointed Francis Perkins, the first female
(35:32):
labor secretary, who had been heavily involved with all of
that kind of labor feminism and the factory strikes in
organizing and was sort of enmeshed in that world. So
we probably need to circle back and talk more about
Francis Perkins at some time. Totally, But it was so
unexpected for me, at least to connect those dots between
(35:55):
this holiday going back to you know, these textile old
towns that were popping up in the deplorable conditions and
women immediately being like, uh, no, I don't think so.
And then all all the way to historic appointments like
Francis Perkins, and I mean, just I keep going back
to the class differences in in how in how these
(36:17):
battles were waged and what women felt that they had
to do or could do. It's so different when you
look at the women who were actually in the factories
working versus the mink brigades that came down and stood
with them to an extent. Yeah, I mean, because you
would think that the mink brigades could wield so much
more power to make things happen, but they seemed a
(36:40):
lot more reserved and conservative and nervous. Well, you could
argue that, for instance, a woman who's raking in twenty
K year at that time, I mean, she's kind of
part of the however radical she might have become befriending
those women, Uh, she's kind of part of the establishment.
So like, if you're raking in that much money a year,
(37:02):
you kind of do have a steak in the status
quo to an extent. Yeah, I mean, and that was
just her allowance, you know, alright, still drop in the bucket.
So listeners, um, Happy International Women's Day, whether you're listening
to this on March eighth or not. Um, we hope
that you all had as much fun listening to this
(37:23):
history as we did learning about it and talking about it.
And yeah, if anyone has more information to give us,
please let us know. Mom said at house Stuff Works
dot com is our email address. You can also tweet
us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook. And
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. All right, so we have a couple of
(37:47):
letters on babysitting for you. This one's from David. He says,
great to finally be writing you. I enjoyed your episode
on babysitting, but don't think you emphasized enough the role
that Latina women play in babysitting white children in a Erica.
Being a first generation Mexican American in southern California, I
had a mother who left my sister and me with
an elder cousin of ours while she worked as a
(38:07):
babysitter for several upper middle class white families. The Freakin
based babysitting you mentioned in your podcast was essential to this.
My cousin could take care of us during the day
and learn English and job training at night school to
increase her job prospects back in Mexico. This gave the
opportunity from my mother to leave the home and gain
economic autonomy by taking advantage of the high demand of
(38:28):
childcare and more affluent communities, But the disparities still remained
in this dynamic. Parental care needed by all children was
concentrated in white communities due to their economic ability to
afford experienced help, and could only occur with the assistance
of Latin women and the familial networks they had. This
dynamic leaves many underprivileged Latin children without a quality care
(38:49):
system that perpetuates economic mobility in the future because of
the insufficient development of language skills and varied interactions we
received relative to foreign babies at white children. This podcast
episode was especially interesting to me because, as a student
at u c l A, our campuses neighbors are rich,
celebrities and people living Beverly Hills and bel Air. I
recently used this as the base of a satirical Craigslist
(39:11):
ad titled Mexican Mail to Babysit Your White Children, where
I essentially pressured and mocked my regional audience into hiring
myself a nineen year old Mexican male as an active
liberal social pride, I use lines like I have no
experience with childcare, will check off any diversity requirement you
may have logged in your postmodern psyche with a felt pen.
(39:32):
If requested, I could bring a picture book of the
true history of the Mexican American War, and I will
work for cheap, specifically eighty six point one since on
the dollar of a white female according to the Bereau
of Labor statistics. Funny enough, several people responded to my
advertisement wanting to legitimately hire me. I was tempted to
take a position as a sitter, but as a male,
which I do not think you touched on this podcast,
(39:53):
I was fearful of any lititious risk associated with the
perception of being a male babysitter. Anyways, thank you so
much for this podcast. I started listening at the age
of thirteen and really feel that I've grown up with it.
Learning the difficulties of the female experience, learning every week
the specifics of cultural, institutional, and historical suppression of women's
influence and autonomy, and getting the opportunity to hear the
(40:16):
stories behind so many great women overlooked by many history books.
Really amazing work. David. Oh, David, we need we need
a button or something to send him. Davia, this is
a great letter. A. I love your sense of humor,
like keep rocking that, but be like, thank you so
much for sharing your story. I what is so important
(40:36):
to to Christian and me is to be able to
present these larger topics and then be able to hear
the personal stories from you guys about how these topics
are actually affecting your lives. So we really appreciate your letter. Well,
I have another fantastic babysitting email from Erica. She writes,
I thought i'd share a bit about my grandma's experience
(40:58):
in the mid to late fifties. She lived in a
super super small town in Wisconsin. She's told me that
instead of sending invitations, a couple getting married would just
post an ad in the town newspaper, which is why
she married my grandpa in Florida. So she lived in
this tiny town when she was a teenager, and I
doubt she was part of a babysitting union, which is
(41:18):
probably why she only made twenty five cents an hour
and had to work for very long periods of time.
She didn't have a very good experience babysitting, but luckily
for her, she was out of there and married in
Florida by the time she was nineteen. My experience with
babysitting was luckily different. I worked for some very nice
families who paid me what they wanted. I never said
a fear anything, which, to be honest, probably meant I
(41:39):
earned more than I would had if I had said
a fee. I missed babysitting and sometimes wonder if twenty
one would be too old to do it again, or
if anyone would even think of a young adult instead
of a teenager. Any thoughts. Thanks for your awesome podcasts
or the highlight of my week, Erica. I know someone
who regularly babysits who is in her early thirties. One
(42:01):
is by no means too old a babysit, and I
would imagine that people would prefer an older person coming
over to take care of their kids versus a team.
So those are my two pennies and send us your
two pennies. Mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com
is our email address and for links to all of
our social media as well as all of our blogs, videos,
(42:22):
and podcasts with our sources. So you can learn more
about the conspiratorial history of International Women's Day, head on
over to stuff Mom Never told You dot com or
more on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how
stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you From house Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and we're recording this episode as a
celebration of International Women's Day, happens every March eight. Although
(00:24):
I kind of feel like International Women's Day and Gallantine's
Day should just be folded into the same February celebration
as long as it is still like really cool and
pro lady and pro awesome ladies, as opposed to what
Women's Day in Russia has become, which it had such
great strong political roots in Russia, and now Women's Day
(00:46):
is like this weird Valentine's Mother's Day saccerin hybrid where
and you're like, what's wrong with that? At least take
a candy. It's like, yeah, you get candy and flowers,
but it's in celebration of of um, Like how sweet
and sexy lady is not necessarily like go women. Yeah,
(01:07):
there was a really awkward photo that I found of
Vladimir Putin handing bouquets of tulips to a group of
Russian women and he was almost smiling, but it just
did not look like a very celebratory affair and only
smiles when he's riding bears shirtless in the wilderness exactly. Um,
(01:30):
but the looks on the women's faces said to me like, well,
here's this, here's bouque. Alright, this is all I'm getting. Well,
I mean there was I forget where I was reading
the article. It might have been in the Washington Post
or the Wall Street Journal, one of those really important
newspapers that I regularly read. Um, but your name dropping
(01:51):
paper absolutely j school nerd alert. But the reporter was
talking to younger women in Russia who are so over
International Women's Day because they're like, we would just prefer
maybe more rights, higher wages rather than flowers once a year. Yeah.
(02:11):
I like one idea in that article that was quoted
of how to celebrate Women's Day in Russia was like,
you know, just flowers and coffee won't do. Guys. You know,
maybe go on a car race with your lady, but
there is a dilemma when it comes to whether she
should be the driver or the navigators. Yeah. Okay, so
(02:32):
International Women's Day in Russia not so rad yet yet,
because we're going to talk to you about the secret
history of international Women's Day and how it came about
in the United States, and why it is about so
much more than just posting of Instagram photos of rad ladies.
(02:56):
I mean, of course we'll probably post like some notorious
RBG photos things like that, but it's spelt so much
more than just oh oh women, you know, polite applause,
because the labor history behind it is I mean a
something that we don't hear about very often and be
(03:16):
something that does deserve our recognition, right because labor feminists,
so to speak, have really led the way in this
country for establishing the fight for rights and and at
one time for suffrage. Yeah, and in fact, International Women's
Day was inspired by female factory workers going on strike,
(03:37):
and like we said, it's definitely worth taking a look
at how all of that went down. And we're focusing
on the United States. I know, we were just talking
about Russia for a few minutes. We're coming back to
the United States, um, partially to fill in this huge
gap in our history of labor organizing that we rarely
hear about. And uh, this info we're about to cover
(03:59):
is coming from articles from in These Times and Urbana
Champagne Independent Media Center. So when it comes to striking,
people have walked off their jobs in protests since the
medieval period. We've always been fed up with our horrible
bosses and walked out. But in terms of the organized
(04:20):
strikes as we think of them today, those didn't really
start until the early nineteenth century. And you know who
led the way, Caroline women, textile workers. I didn't even
wait for you to answer. I was so excited I
opened my mouth and then yes. And but of course
it was called turning out at the time. They weren't striking,
they were turning out, which I like that. It's like
(04:41):
you're you're turning out in support of, you know, like
getting paid. Yeah. I feel like there's like a little
dance move that would go along with that, you know,
the turn out. Yeah, a little hip swivel and sachet away. Yes.
Uh So in eight four, uh, you get America's first
textile mills, Slater Mill and popp Tucket, Rhode Island, which,
by the way, is now a museum if you'd like
(05:02):
to visit, which absolutely I would never been to Rhode
Island before anyway. Slater Mill was the site of the
first factory organized strike in the United States, and it
was initiated by Kristen a bunch of angry women. True story.
It was also the first strike of any kind involving women,
(05:22):
and originally, which is horrifying, the mill owners hired children
to run the looms, but a bunch of new mechanization
technology demanded that you get a more skilled labor force,
but they still had to be cheap. So who's maybe
a little taller, but also as cheap as children at
(05:44):
this time, A bunch of angry women, Yeah, exactly. So
they bring these ladies in and the owners assumed, uh,
women are really just tall children, so they will be
very easy to control. Yeah, we're not even being sarcastic listeners.
A number of the source is we were reading about
Slader Mill and this historic strike emphasized how the mill
(06:08):
owners and managers were just so perplexed when the women,
you know, revolted because they're like, but they we thought
you're supposed to be just tall children, um, And so
they were wrong. They were wrong. And one hundred and
two women between the ages of fifteen and thirty abandoned
(06:30):
their textile looms to protest a twenty five wage cut,
and they went on strike and they won back a
majority of their wage, and this inspired future strikes around
New England, including strikes organized by those famous low Girls. Yeah,
(06:50):
we could do an entire podcast on the Lowell Girls,
and I checked and stuff you missed in history class
has not devoted a podcast of the Little Girls that
I know of. I could be mistaken, um, but we
should probably suggest it to Tracy and Holly. But we're
still going to talk about him for a little bit
because this provides such important context to the environment leading
(07:12):
up to International Women Say the founding of it. So
in the twenties, Lowell, Massachusetts is incorporated as a planned
town for textile manufacturing, which to me sounds a lot
like today's mixed use developments, only without you know, like
t J Max's and any amenities. And Okay, it's not
(07:35):
like that at all. That's kind of horrible. Um. But
over the next couple of decades, Lowell employed eight thousand
mill operatives, as they called them, and they were mostly
like at Slater Mill, they were mostly women and kids
who would come in from farming families in rural New England.
And this employment, of course offered a new kind of freedom,
(07:57):
particularly for the women, got them out of their house
but it also stoked public fears about up ending gender
roles and family values, and some even considered it unvirtuous
to be a factory girl. Yeah, this is definitely echoes
and shades of what we talked about in our babysitting
episode about the the advent of the teenager and how
(08:17):
immediately there were fears about what she was doing and
who she was doing it with. I mean, seriously, it's like,
let's get some cheap labor in here, and let's pay them,
but then we're going to be awfully scared about what
they're going to do with that money. Exactly because wantonness
looms at the textile mills. Kuldn't resist. I'm actually really sorry,
(08:39):
but I mean it's not like they weren't unsupervised. All
of these low mill operatives lived in factory and boarding houses,
but the room and board also came out of their paychecks. Yeah.
So for a sample work week for a little girl,
you'd work about eighty hours a week, and and at
one point so that the work day used to start
(09:01):
at seven am. They would wake up and have breakfast
and then start working. But then this real genius of
a guy that rolls into the mill, and he's like,
you know what, we've noticed those women work so well,
just right when they wake up. So let's start the
work day at five, and then we'll give them a
little bit of a breakfast break and they can get
back to work at seven. So they work for eighty
(09:24):
hours a week, and they make a whopping three dollars,
of which a dollar twenty five goes right back to
Lowell to pay for their room and board. Yes, so
things aren't glowing by any means. And when textile competition
starts to step up in commodity prices drop, Lowell ends
up cutting wages, and as you might imagine, all of
(09:45):
those ladies were none too pleased. Yeah, and apparently, as
some sources have noted, the Lowell girls were already considered
kind of rebel rousers. I mean the fact that they
were working outside the home and they gave the owners
a lot of golf um. But I mean, this is
such a crucial point in our American labor history because
(10:09):
in four the Lowell girls strike to protest um. But
the company quickly cracks down. But still it's significant. You
have eight hundred of their workers, which was about a
sixth of the mill force going on strike, and to
also drive home the significance of this and the gender
(10:29):
politics of the day. There's a mill worker named Harriet
Hansen Robinson who was there, and she wrote about the
incident later, and she recalled a female coworker hopping up
on a stump and delivering this impromptu pro strike speech,
probably doing her little turnout Sasha move and Robinson said
(10:51):
this was the first time a woman had spoken in public,
and Lowell and its echoes similar kinds of milestones like
that with the ten Prince movement and the abolition movement
and suffrage, where you have this social consciousness raising among
and within groups of women, inspiring them to speak out
publicly for the very first time. Yeah, not only did
(11:13):
you have that one woman sashing on the stump, but
women marched through town. They made speeches, they passed resolutions
within their group, and of course held meetings, which is
so dangerous women holding meetings. But apparently those kinds of activities,
aside from maybe making speeches, that does seem a little radical,
but them parading through town and meeting among themselves was
(11:36):
still considered female appropriate. They weren't pushing their boundaries too far.
But I gotta say as a twenty one century reader
of um, because there was a lot of writing about this.
Their rhetoric was very independence heavy, you know, they called
themselves daughters of freedom, which okay, but it was also
very slave heavy, where they continually compared their working auditions
(12:00):
to slavery, and we're like, how dare you United States
enslave us in these working conditions? Which is a little
bit awkward because this is an eighteen thirty four in
America is still like almost thirty years away from legally
abolishing actual slavery. Yeah, that's a little um, that is
a little icky. Yeah, But I mean, like for the
(12:23):
for the times, it made sense. They were trying to
essentially spin there patriotic womanhood into something to get them
better working conditions. Yeah. Well, so two years later we
get the second strike and things really intensify at this point,
and while the textile economy itself was fine, Lowell still
(12:47):
raised the room and board costs for women, and the
law mill girls are like, I don't think so, buddy,
No way. This time of the workforce, which was between
two thousand participants, went on strike and the mills ran
below capacity for months, even though I mean they ended up,
(13:08):
you know, the company ended up negotiating with them. Um,
they still felt the impact of that strike, and the
women also formed the Factory Girls Association. So these are
the first seeds you see of female lead union organizing.
And scholars have said that this signaled what they called
(13:29):
a new consciousness among these working class women who we're
really trying to combine the domestic values that they were
raised with in an urbanized setting to temper all of
those fears and criticisms of them as being unvirtuous women
who are just up ending gender roles. And this action
(13:52):
would lay the foundation for what was called the ten
hour movement, yeah, cutting back on those what was an
eighty two hour week, yeah something. So by four all
of those low operatives they've continued to wise up, they've
continued to get mad, and they are continuing to get political,
and they form the Low Female Labor Reform Association, which
(14:16):
is the first union of American working women that focused
on winning that ten hour work day. And this group
gets credit for initiating some of the earliest reforms in
the textile industries working conditions and as a piece over
at the a f l c i O notes that
(14:38):
since women couldn't vote at the time, the Low Female
Labor Reform Association was focused on petition campaigns. So they
were like, Okay, we can get all these signatures and
then we'll take it to the Massachusetts state legislature and
get them to legally cap the work day at ten hours.
So they did that. They were collecting signatures, they were
(14:59):
organ iizing other chapters, union chapters at other mills. They
started publishing what they called factory tracks to expose mill conditions,
and they were also actively testifying before state legislators. So
you have to see how determine these women were to
work within the constraints that they had, both economically and politically,
(15:21):
and we're still intent on saying nope, we're going to
make this happen. Yeah, there was a lot of lady
power going on. There was one low mill girl writing
about this who said they have at least learned the
lesson which a bitter experience teaches. Not to those who
style themselves their natural protectors are they to look for
the needful help, but to the strong and resolute of
(15:43):
their own sex. So like, don't depend on these men
who are running the mills, or even the men who
are running the government. You have to help yourself. So
listeners are probably wondering at this point what happened to
International Women's Day. Well, friends, don't don't worry, because we're
about to stitch it all together when we come right
back from a quick break. So this is where the
(16:16):
podcast takes a little bit of a conspiratorial turn. And
I've been so excited to talk to you about this, Caroline,
because talk about some podcasts research really throw in a
curveball at us, because here's the thing. Allegedly, International Women's
Day was inspired by a strike on March eight, eight
(16:36):
seven that was, you know, continuing in this tradition that
women were developing of organizing going on strike. Um, these
were supposedly women garment workers in New York City who
marched and picketed demanding improved working conditions again the ten
hour work day and equal rights for women, and police
responded with brutality, clubbing them allegedly, yes, and then allegedly
(17:05):
on March eight, nineteen o eight, apparently supposedly allegedly the
needle trades ladies in New York marched again, honoring the
eighteen fifty seven march, again demanding the vote and an
end of sweatshops and child labor. This all sounds really good.
This all sounds like a great foundation for International Women's Day. Yeah,
of course we should recognize those those two strikes that
(17:27):
may or may not have happened. Um, But if we
pull back for a minute, especially if we look at
nineteen o eight when that second strike allegedly maybe supposedly happened.
By this time post Civil War, we have women and
especially widows flooding the job market like never before. But
(17:48):
when they arrive looking for jobs, unions are largely uninterested
in representing them. So like that Lowell mill girl recommended,
don't depend on the dudes, turn to your lady friends.
So they began forming their own organizations and initiatives. And
this is also the time when you have working class
women's labor demands intersecting with the work of suffragists and
(18:11):
progressive era feminist like Jane Adams, Florence Kelly, and Rose Snyderman.
And speaking of Stuffy miss in history class a little
while back, they do have an episode I know on
Jane Adams. And in eighteen sixty nine you get the
publication of Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, which
is possibly jointly written with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill,
(18:31):
which helps launch an argument for gender equality. So it's
really kind of infiltrating popular discourse. And in eighty nine,
the International Socialist Congress accepted the principle of women's right
to work and equal pay. And you might be like, oh,
why why are they mentioning socialists all of a sudden.
Don't worry, it'll make sense in a second. And in
(18:52):
nineteen o three, the Women's Trade Union League was formed,
So we see more and more and more organizing happening
among the women. And that brings us to nine nine,
which is a pivotal year in the history of International
Women's Day because on February, the Socialist Party in the
United States celebrates the first National Women's Day in New York,
(19:15):
allegedly to honor those two strikes when that happened in
eighteen fifty seven and then in nineteen o eight. Yeah,
so they didn't have the Google to be able to
verify whether those strikes had indeed happened exactly. We are
sounding very like what we're teasing a lot of information here, uh.
And then in November of that year, in November nineteen
(19:37):
o nine, you get the International Ladies Garment Workers Union
that teams up with the National Women's Trade Union League
and they launched the first long term general strike by women.
And this was a strike a turning out against Leaser
Setting Company and a Triangle Waste company, two of the
(19:57):
quote most notorious shops in New York. And for listeners
in New York, the Lower East Side was where all
of this stuff was happening. That was the factory hub,
and shirtwaist workers were among the worst paid. And shirtwaist
for anyone who didn't know, like me, what exactly that was,
I was thinking, like, is that a cumber bund or what?
(20:18):
It's just another name for a blouse. It was like
a super popular type of blows, women's blows at the time.
So these workers, though, were among the worst paid. And
we're mostly Eastern European Jewish immigrants, So this is a
group of people who don't have a ton of political leverage,
but they're organizing through these unions to form what's nicknamed
(20:41):
the Uprising of twenty thousand and it started out as
just that joint effort by the women's unions, but then
it became a general strike after a woman named Clara
Lemlick asked to be heard in a Cooper union meeting.
They were discussing, like, Okay, what are we gonna do?
They've got the shirtwaist strike. How do we feel about this?
(21:03):
A couple of guys got up and gave some lackluster
speeches and they're like okay. So leml gets up and,
speaking in Yiddish, she declared, I am tired of listening
to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are
here for is to decide whether we shall or shall
not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike
(21:23):
be declared now. And she fired that crowd up so
much that they determined then and there to join the strike. Yeah,
and they I mean they took an oath. It was
all sorts of excitement going on, so much excitement that
there were several men at the time who said that
the thirteen week long strike was a strike against God.
(21:44):
And one of my favorite things was what George Bernard
Shaw wrote upon reading this. He said, delightful medieval America
always an intimate personal confidence of the Almighty. And I
love it because it almost sounds modern, the way that
men so men hashtag nettlemen. Uh tend to frame a
lot of women's activism in general that it's like against
(22:07):
your place as a woman, against nature. Yeah, well, speaking
of nature, I mean this strike happened for thirteen weeks
in the dead of winter. I mean, can you imagine
picketing in late November in New York? Answer? No, I cannot.
I live in this South for a reason. Um. But
it wasn't just the factory workers who were striking. This
(22:30):
was also the first time you see wealthier women joining
the picket lines because they would come out and sort
of protect the factory workers from police brutality, because the
police aren't gonna beat up, you know, a well connected,
wealthy woman from New Jersey, but they would have no
(22:51):
qualms beating up a female factory worker. And Kristen, is
this where we get them mink brigades? Yes, okay, So
so I want to hear about them. Okay, I'll tell
you about the mink brigades, which is my new favorite
feminist history phrase. So, these elite allies of these working
(23:11):
class folks who were going on strike became known as
the mink Brigades because they would come down and marching
the picket lines. With their minks on. A lot of
them were socialites from New Jersey and the woman who
kind of spearheaded their participation was a girl named Anna Morgan.
She was super duper rich and she had like a
(23:31):
twenty tho dollar a year stipend to live on, and
she just like hung out in New York and she
was like, Ladi Da, my life is really easy. Then
she strikes up a friendship and possible romantic relationship with
one Elizabeth Marbury, who at the time was in a
quote unquote Boston marriage to famed interior designer and star
(23:52):
of Our Women in Interior Design podcast, Elsie Dwolf. And
this pair was very connected. They were also very progressive,
and Marbury awakened Anna Morgan's social consciousness and she was like,
you know what, I have the means and resources to
(24:12):
do something to help these other women. So she organizes
these mink Brigades and they march alongside the Uprising of
twenty thousand UM. And the thing is, though, this is
really where you start to see a snapshot of class
divisions within the suffrage movement and early feminism, because the
(24:34):
wealthy women were not very radical, I mean even for
Europeans observing America at the time, suffragists were considered more conservative. Yeah, exactly,
I mean, especially if you compare them to suffragettes in
Britain who were way more intense. And these suffragists, though
the Mink Brigades, were not too fond of the striking
(24:57):
and the picketing. They really preferred to launch consumer boycotts
and advocate for fair labor standards I mean, which are
to me are things that you see echoed in second
way feminism as well. Um, So there was there was
some tension between these groups. And didn't those Mink Brigade
ladies sort of start to pull back once they realized
(25:19):
that they weren't having the same kind of sway in
the way that they wanted to with a lot of
these more radical women. Yeah, because the you know, these
working women, I mean, this was a group of largely
you know, politically marginalized immigrant women. It was like a
cross ethnic group, and they were so fed up. They
were just like everything is at stake for them, so
(25:40):
they didn't care about being more radical. So yeah, they
come together for a little bit, but then they would
end up splintering the more things change them, where they
stay the same in terms of those racial and class
divisions and feminism interesting to notice. Um. Well, so, going
back to that thirteen week strike, though the women were
eventually sick, sucessful in winning a fifty two hour work week,
(26:02):
which I mean, I guess that's better than an eighty
two hour work week. Uh. They won four paid holidays
and a better pay scale and union recognition. Now, the
sad news is that one year later, after all of
this happened, the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened, killing six people,
(26:22):
most of whom were women workers, and they could not
escape the factory because, like the doors were bolted shut
to ensure that the women wouldn't walk out and strike again. Um,
and Stephie missed in history class does have a whole
podcast on that. In the wake of this, though, the
families who you know, who's sisters, daughters, wives were killed
(26:45):
in the fire, they were compensated. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.
One employer was fined just twenty dollars for for their
role in the fatalities. So it really seems more like
it's the uprising of All's end and then followed by
the disaster at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that inspires the
(27:06):
future international Women's Days, because meanwhile, in the Socialist Party,
let's hop back to socialists. I feel like we need
some like fancy transition music to go back to the
Socialist Party's our socialist transition music um. In nineteen ten,
at the Women's Conference of International Socialist Women in Copenhagen,
two ladies Rosa Luxembourg, which that's a fantastic name, by
(27:29):
the way, and Clara Zetkin suggests March eight should be
International Women's Day and they should call for universal suffrage.
And this was strategic on their part. Like Zekin had
a difficult relationship with feminists, she didn't really like them
all that much. But like a lot of the platforms
(27:50):
that she has spells like suffrage, we're kind of feminists.
But the tension between feminism and socialism was that socialism
at the time is more interested in uplifting like the
economic rights of largely working class men versus women's rights. Correct.
But also going back to the thing you said earlier
about the assumption that many of the feminists and suffrages
(28:15):
of the time, if they got the vote, would just
vote along conservative lines with their husbands. There was a
lot of fear around that too, and zet Can though
felt and they're they're one of the sources that we
read had a snapshot of this statement she and some
other socialists put out. She basically felt like with this
heavy sigh of like we've just we've got to show
(28:35):
them the way, like we I don't like them, I
don't like what they stand for, but women have to
come together and the Socialist women are the best women
to show them how to do it well. And there
was that angle of the strategy, but there was also
the sort of socialist propaganda angle where they were like,
the party also needs to demonstrate their care for women
(28:58):
and their interests in women, and so this International Women's
Day can do both of those things at the same time.
And on March nineteenth, nineteen eleven, International Women's Day was
celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, and they protested
for voting rights, workers rights rights, the whole public office.
(29:20):
I mean, they were they were out in mass And
it's also this year though, that Socialist women in Boston
I believe said that they would march with suffragists to
the local suffrage hearings. It was time, you know, to
band together and really show support. But a journalist covering
the event noted that they were actually way more socialists
(29:42):
than there were suffragists, and noted something along the lines
of like, oh, maybe maybe the socialists are actually way
more passionate about this than the suffragists are. Representation matters, ladies. Well,
if we hop forward though to nineteen seventeen and traveled
back to Russia, where a podcast began, this is pretty incredible.
(30:05):
Russian women that year observed International Women's Day for the
first time, and it ended up instigating the Russian Revolution
and Zar Nicholas abdicating. Yeah, okay, and this is where
we get to what Kris and I have been hinting
at for a minute now, for like thirty minutes, for
thirty minutes now, I know we've constantly been hinting at this.
(30:26):
So scholar Ti mccaplan wrote the paper on the Socialist
Origins of International Women's Day, and she reveals how those
eighteen fifty seven and nineteen o eight strikes likely never happened. Yeah,
and likelier still, they were a convenient story to steer
(30:47):
attention away from the holidays socialist and communist roots. Yeah,
I mean because Clara Zetkin, for instance, was close pals
with Lennon, who later declined aired International Women's Day a
national holiday in Russia. And International Women's Day was really
a Communist holiday until a late nineteen sixties, so you
(31:09):
haven't celebrated by communist China, obviously in Russia all the
other communist countries at the time. So in nineteen when
the u N declares the Year of the Woman, we
still have some of that Cold War anks. So International
(31:30):
Women's Day gets a bit of an historical makeover. And
I don't know that there was someone at the u
N or wherever being like, okay to make up a
strike eighteen fifty seven, Yeah, that sounds good. Um, But
and Timacaplan wasn't able to cite exactly when and how
(31:53):
the myth of those two strikes arose, because I don't know.
I mean, it almost seems like pointless mythology, because as
you have all of these other actual strikes that were
happening at the time that could have easily been linked
to it. Was it the degree of it all, the
fact that in those alleged strikes early on, there was
supposedly so many women participating in such police brutality. Like,
(32:16):
oh my god, look at your sisters. They were, you know,
beaten by the police. Yeah, I mean, I think the
police brutality angle of it was definitely a big one.
And our research for this podcast corroborates Kaplan's claim that
the strikes were made up, because before we ran across
her paper, I was getting so frustrated searching and searching
(32:37):
for information, especially on that eighteen fifty seven strike. And
if you look up seven Women's Strike, New York City,
all you'll find our articles and timelines of International Women's Day. Interesting,
there's no actual like, there's not any historic articles on
(32:59):
the strike, in the same way as you find so
much information on the you know, the Little Girls Uprising
of two thousand, twenty thousand, excuse me, and the whole
Slater Mill incident. Yeah, because if there are articles from
Boston journalists in nineteen eleven covering a in in uh
comparison with the supposed eighteen fifty seven strike, covering a
(33:20):
relatively small group of suffragists and socialists, if they're covering that,
they sure as heck, about sixty years prior would have
covered a giant, massive strike of women who were then
beat up by police. Yeah, I mean, and we did
not do like an in depth Lexus nexus search, so
who knows there could be something buried there. I would
(33:41):
still like further academic confirmation that this was the case.
So listeners, if you have any intel, please let us know,
because all evidence points to those two strikes being made up,
like the history of International Women's Day is apocryphal, to
make it more palatable for the United States and other
(34:04):
countries to celebrate what is essentially a socialist and communist holiday,
had the socialist ladies leading the way, and now I mean,
now it's celebrated. International Women's stays celebrated in more than
a hundred countries, So I mean that's fabulous. And the
thing is finding out that those strikes might not have
happened is certainly not a reason to not celebrate. If anything,
(34:27):
I think we should celebrate it even more in recognition
of this history that we just talked about um and
especially how it's often erased from labor history at large,
and also too to celebrate the successes achieved by the
nineteen twenties. I mean, all the striking that women were
doing might not have made massive impacts in that moment,
(34:50):
but incrementally they were building up to some pretty major reforms. Yeah.
So by the nineteen twenties, you had a bunch of
state laws that were regulated hours and wages and working
conditions for female employees. Uh. They secured union contracts and
grievance procedures and a lot of factories and workshops, and
(35:10):
all of the striking and agitating really paved the way
for the Fair Labor Standards Act of the New Deal. Yeah,
I mean, and these are the kinds of employment standards
that all of us benefit from, you know, not just
female employees. And for one final historical note, when FDR
came to office, he appointed Francis Perkins, the first female
(35:32):
labor secretary, who had been heavily involved with all of
that kind of labor feminism and the factory strikes in
organizing and was sort of enmeshed in that world. So
we probably need to circle back and talk more about
Francis Perkins at some time. Totally, But it was so
unexpected for me, at least to connect those dots between
(35:55):
this holiday going back to you know, these textile old
towns that were popping up in the deplorable conditions and
women immediately being like, uh, no, I don't think so.
And then all all the way to historic appointments like
Francis Perkins, and I mean, just I keep going back
to the class differences in in how in how these
(36:17):
battles were waged and what women felt that they had
to do or could do. It's so different when you
look at the women who were actually in the factories
working versus the mink brigades that came down and stood
with them to an extent. Yeah, I mean, because you
would think that the mink brigades could wield so much
more power to make things happen, but they seemed a
(36:40):
lot more reserved and conservative and nervous. Well, you could
argue that, for instance, a woman who's raking in twenty
K year at that time, I mean, she's kind of
part of the however radical she might have become befriending
those women, Uh, she's kind of part of the establishment.
So like, if you're raking in that much money a year,
(37:02):
you kind of do have a steak in the status
quo to an extent. Yeah, I mean, and that was
just her allowance, you know, alright, still drop in the bucket.
So listeners, um, Happy International Women's Day, whether you're listening
to this on March eighth or not. Um, we hope
that you all had as much fun listening to this
(37:23):
history as we did learning about it and talking about it.
And yeah, if anyone has more information to give us,
please let us know. Mom said at house Stuff Works
dot com is our email address. You can also tweet
us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook. And
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. All right, so we have a couple of
(37:47):
letters on babysitting for you. This one's from David. He says,
great to finally be writing you. I enjoyed your episode
on babysitting, but don't think you emphasized enough the role
that Latina women play in babysitting white children in a Erica.
Being a first generation Mexican American in southern California, I
had a mother who left my sister and me with
an elder cousin of ours while she worked as a
(38:07):
babysitter for several upper middle class white families. The Freakin
based babysitting you mentioned in your podcast was essential to this.
My cousin could take care of us during the day
and learn English and job training at night school to
increase her job prospects back in Mexico. This gave the
opportunity from my mother to leave the home and gain
economic autonomy by taking advantage of the high demand of
(38:28):
childcare and more affluent communities, But the disparities still remained
in this dynamic. Parental care needed by all children was
concentrated in white communities due to their economic ability to
afford experienced help, and could only occur with the assistance
of Latin women and the familial networks they had. This
dynamic leaves many underprivileged Latin children without a quality care
(38:49):
system that perpetuates economic mobility in the future because of
the insufficient development of language skills and varied interactions we
received relative to foreign babies at white children. This podcast
episode was especially interesting to me because, as a student
at u c l A, our campuses neighbors are rich,
celebrities and people living Beverly Hills and bel Air. I
recently used this as the base of a satirical Craigslist
(39:11):
ad titled Mexican Mail to Babysit Your White Children, where
I essentially pressured and mocked my regional audience into hiring
myself a nineen year old Mexican male as an active
liberal social pride, I use lines like I have no
experience with childcare, will check off any diversity requirement you
may have logged in your postmodern psyche with a felt pen.
(39:32):
If requested, I could bring a picture book of the
true history of the Mexican American War, and I will
work for cheap, specifically eighty six point one since on
the dollar of a white female according to the Bereau
of Labor statistics. Funny enough, several people responded to my
advertisement wanting to legitimately hire me. I was tempted to
take a position as a sitter, but as a male,
which I do not think you touched on this podcast,
(39:53):
I was fearful of any lititious risk associated with the
perception of being a male babysitter. Anyways, thank you so
much for this podcast. I started listening at the age
of thirteen and really feel that I've grown up with it.
Learning the difficulties of the female experience, learning every week
the specifics of cultural, institutional, and historical suppression of women's
influence and autonomy, and getting the opportunity to hear the
(40:16):
stories behind so many great women overlooked by many history books.
Really amazing work. David. Oh, David, we need we need
a button or something to send him. Davia, this is
a great letter. A. I love your sense of humor,
like keep rocking that, but be like, thank you so
much for sharing your story. I what is so important
(40:36):
to to Christian and me is to be able to
present these larger topics and then be able to hear
the personal stories from you guys about how these topics
are actually affecting your lives. So we really appreciate your letter. Well,
I have another fantastic babysitting email from Erica. She writes,
I thought i'd share a bit about my grandma's experience
(40:58):
in the mid to late fifties. She lived in a
super super small town in Wisconsin. She's told me that
instead of sending invitations, a couple getting married would just
post an ad in the town newspaper, which is why
she married my grandpa in Florida. So she lived in
this tiny town when she was a teenager, and I
doubt she was part of a babysitting union, which is
(41:18):
probably why she only made twenty five cents an hour
and had to work for very long periods of time.
She didn't have a very good experience babysitting, but luckily
for her, she was out of there and married in
Florida by the time she was nineteen. My experience with
babysitting was luckily different. I worked for some very nice
families who paid me what they wanted. I never said
a fear anything, which, to be honest, probably meant I
(41:39):
earned more than I would had if I had said
a fee. I missed babysitting and sometimes wonder if twenty
one would be too old to do it again, or
if anyone would even think of a young adult instead
of a teenager. Any thoughts. Thanks for your awesome podcasts
or the highlight of my week, Erica. I know someone
who regularly babysits who is in her early thirties. One
(42:01):
is by no means too old a babysit, and I
would imagine that people would prefer an older person coming
over to take care of their kids versus a team.
So those are my two pennies and send us your
two pennies. Mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com
is our email address and for links to all of
our social media as well as all of our blogs, videos,
(42:22):
and podcasts with our sources. So you can learn more
about the conspiratorial history of International Women's Day, head on
over to stuff Mom Never told You dot com or
more on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how
stuff Works dot com.
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.