The Women Who Ran Lawrence

On January 11, 1912, a group of Polish women at the Everett Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts opened their pay envelopes and saw the short pay. Massachusetts had just cut the legal work week for women and children from 56 hours to 54. The mill owners kept the hours per week the same in practice and cut the pay to match the new ceiling. The Polish women walked out. The next day, workers at the American Woolen Company's Washington Mill walked out shouting "short pay, all out." Within a week, roughly 20,000 workers across the Lawrence mills were on strike.

They spoke more than two dozen languages on the strike committee and more than forty in the mills. The majority were immigrant women. A lot of them were teenagers.

Who actually ran it

The national press credited the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW sent Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, who helped set up a 56-person strike committee with translation built into every meeting. After a striker named Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed during a clash with police on January 29, 1912, the state arrested Ettor and Giovannitti as accessories, even though both men were two miles away when the shot was fired. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Bill Haywood came in to take over the public-facing work.

The daily strike, though, ran on the tenement networks of immigrant women. They ran the relief committee. They ran the soup kitchens. They ran the picket lines. They decided, block by block, who could hold the line and who needed food that week.

Camella Teoli was 14 years old. A mill machine had torn the scalp off her head and put her in the hospital for seven months. When she could work again, she made $6.55 a week. In March 1912, she rode to Washington and testified before a congressional committee. Asked why she joined the strike, she said, "Because I didn't get enough to eat at home."

The Philadelphia station

By early February, Lawrence families could not feed their children. The strike committee began sending kids by train to sympathetic families in New York and Philadelphia. On February 10, 119 children left for Manhattan. Margaret Sanger, then a trained nurse working with the IWW, escorted them and later told Congress that of the 119 children, only four had underwear on.

On February 24, a second group of mothers and children tried to board a train for Philadelphia. Lawrence police and militia surrounded the station. They clubbed the mothers. They clubbed the children. They dragged them into a truck. One pregnant mother miscarried.

That was the turning point. The national press went from covering a strike to covering an atrocity. Congress opened hearings on March 2. Teoli and Sanger testified. Mill owners had spent two months telling the country the strikers were foreign agitators. The country had just watched American police beat their children at a train station.

The settlement

The American Woolen Company capitulated on March 12, 1912. Workers voted to accept on March 14. The raises ran from about 5 percent for the highest-paid to 25 percent for the lowest-paid, with time-and-a-quarter overtime and no retaliation against strikers. The workers at the bottom got the biggest raises. That was the deal the women had held out for. Ettor and Giovannitti were acquitted that November.

About the slogan

"Bread and Roses" is real movement language. Illinois factory inspector Helen Todd used a version of it in a 1910 speech. James Oppenheim published a poem called "Bread and Roses" in The American Magazine in December 1911, weeks before the Lawrence walkout began. The story that young women carried a banner reading "We Want Bread, and Roses Too!" on the Lawrence picket line first appears in a 1915 Upton Sinclair anthology, three years after the strike. No contemporary photograph, news article, or pamphlet from 1912 shows the phrase on a sign.

The slogan did not make Lawrence. Lawrence made the slogan.

They did not need a picket sign. They had the picket line.

Sources

• 1912 Lawrence textile strike (Wikipedia, as a pointer to primaries)
• Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 (Digital Public Library of America exhibition)
• Children's Exodus (Digital Public Library of America)
• Camella Teoli testifies about the 1912 Lawrence textile strike (History Matters, George Mason University)
• Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860 to 1912, Ardis Cameron (University of Illinois Press)
• The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (International Publishers)
• Anna LoPizzo (Wikipedia, summarizing contemporary press and court records)
• "Bread and Roses," James Oppenheim, The American Magazine, December 1911
• Bread and Roses (Wikipedia entry on the poem and slogan)
• Bread and Roses: Women Workers and the Struggle for Dignity and Respect, Robert J.S. Ross, WorkingUSA 16:1 (2013)
• Proclamation of the Striking Textile Workers of Lawrence, 1912 (History Is A Weapon)