#weiu

Ted Snedeker, in the #WEIU #OurStory Bonus Feature, shares a story about his dad, Johnie Snedeker, and some of his experiences serving in the U.S. Navy

Increasingly, the mill girls were joined in these efforts by their middle-class sisters. Cross-class female solidarity surfaced early in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after the horrific building collapse of the Pemberton Mills factory in 1860, which killed 145 workers, most of them women and children. (The mills in Lawrence would later give rise to the famously militant “Bread and Roses” strike of 1912, in which female workers again played a leading role.) In the aftermath of the Pemberton disaster, middle-class women in the region flocked to provide emergency relief and, radicalized by what they witnessed, went on to establish day nurseries, medical clinics and hospitals, and cooperative housing to serve the needs of working women. By the postbellum years, with industrialization at full tide and economic polarization at record levels, a critical mass of middle-class female reformers had come to believe that the key to women’s elevation was not, as they once thought, “moral uplift,” but economic independence—and that cross-class struggle on behalf of female workers was the key to achieving it. A host of organizations launched by professional women, like Sorosis and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU), sprang up to campaign for the economic advancement of both middle- and working-class women. “From its first days,” historian Mari Jo Buhle observed in Women and American Socialism, “Sorosis encompassed broader purposes than aid to a handful of aspiring women professionals. All workingwomen, the leaders believed, shared a common grievance and a common need for organization.” The WEIU in Boston, like Lean In, held lectures to promote women in business—but it also sent investigative teams to expose poor conditions for women on the factory and retail floor, procured legal services for working women denied their rightful wages, offered job referral services for women of all classes, and set up cooperative exchanges for homebound women to sell their handcrafts so that even they might achieve some measure of fiscal independence from their husbands. In Chicago, the Illinois Woman’s Alliance launched a full-bore probe of abusive sweatshops that spawned a congressional investigation, successfully lobbied for a shorter workday for sweatshop workers, and even demanded legal rights for prostitutes, including the right to be free of police harassment.