This Day in Labor History: March 14, 1882

On March 14, 1882, textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts walked off the job. Thirty years later, a much more famous textile strike would take place in that town. That one gets all the attention. That’s for good reason. But this strike matters too. We often talk about how labor divides itself by race in this country, choosing white identity over class solidarity. But in this strike, it was labor dividing itself by gender, with men choosing misogyny over uniting with women.

In March 1882, spinners at the Pacific Main Mill had their wages reduced from 90 cents a day for eight sides of cloth to 68 cents a day for ten sides of cloth. That’s…an extreme action by the employers. Some of this came out of the long economic depression after the Panic of 1873 that was still causing some disturbances in the economy nearly a decade later. But while men had their hours increased and wages reduced too, the cuts to women’s wages were far larger. Led by a woman named Mary Halley, the women protested to their supervisors, noting that they could not support themselves on these wages. Rejected, the women decided it “was better to starve outside the mill than work.” On top of this, over the past year, Pacific owners had decided on speeding up production. So they went on strike.

Many of those who struck felt that it was not just about the wages and the speed up, but rather the attack on work cultures and skilled labor. They were right about that. We have lost so much today from our history and cultures of past work. It’s almost impossible to imagine today a world in which workers had actual autonomy over the daily labor, so long as the work more or less got done. But this was probably the biggest issue in 19th century strikes. Of course, workers lost this over time and that’s why we can’t imagine it today. But this was also a last ditch effort to maintain ideas and cultures of work.

Now, the men were a lot less interested in the strike than the women were. But the women had an interesting strategy around this. They knew their men were unsupportive. So they rallied women throughout the city, as well as children. Since so many of them were also taking care of children and many of those children were boys, they brought their brothers and sons to the strike too, hoping to pressure the men to join. They were also very harsh with scabs and did a good job of making sure women did not cross their lines. Their biggest problem here were the French Canadians, who were often employed as strikebreakers as they came down from Quebec to escape poverty. French Canadian leaders and newspapers in America were often extremely anti-union. Several French Canadians had scabbed. So the women got some of their French speaking members to pretend to scab, go into the mills, and confront the women. That worked and they walked out too.

The women developed quite a strike culture. They banned men from their meetings for one thing. They banned reporters too until they proved they could trust them after active acts of support, such as favorable stories. Even then, they needed a password to get into their meetings. They also developed a specific gendered consciousness. Among other things, they were angry that the owners were dismissing their contributions as women to building the industry. They complained about the sexual hierarchy of the mills. Now, it was 1882. They didn’t have the language to talk about sexual harassment in ways women today can. But they did talk and write about these smug cigar smoking managers using “nice sweet words and flatteries to jolly” the workers while puffing smoke in their faces.

As for the union men? They kind of sucked. They blamed women for using their money to buy nice clothes. Wrote one pro-labor newspaper editor in town, “Had the girls in the employ of the Pacific corporation appeared on the streets with rags. this cut down would not have been made.” Moreover, the mill owners had long divided workers by gender. They promoted from within for men, so the chances to rise in the hierarchy was real. They worked with men on home ownership plans and most men did not want to risk that. Male workers, including union members, found their masculinity threatened by striking women. The mayor, pro-labor for men, stated, “It is a source of regret that many of the young ladies, of whom there is a surplus in this city, do not take Horace Greeley’s advice and make many young men in the West happy.” Moreover, many of the men did not like the idea of women working at all and idealized a pre-industrial family economy of a single male wage supporting a family. This has had a tremendous amount of longevity in American history and in some ways, still influences Trumpism and its appeal today.

Meanwhile, Lawrence employers and town officials were shocked that the women struck. They thought they were in total control of their workplaces. They very much were not. These women were more than happy to sneak into the mills and play with a little fire. One arsonist destroyed Pacific’s entire cotton reserves. Sympathizers in mills not on strike just happened to trip foremen as they were walking down stairs and they tumbled and injured themselves. These women were not messing around. Sympathetic politicians started raising money for the strikers throughout the state. The strike also had an impact on mill conditions around the state. To say the least, Lawrence owners were not the only place in Massachusetts where owners wanted to cut wages. Fall River, already one of the worst places in the state to work, saw its industrialists get ready to cut wages, but then they pulled back due to the strike.

Not surprisingly though, the strike began to fail by the summer. About half the strikers left town to work elsewhere. It became easier for Pacific to bring in scabs and harder for workers to keep them out of the mills. Despite a last ditch attempt to reorganize through the growing Knights of Labor, the strike ended in August. Most of the leaders were blacklisted and disappeared from the public record. In the aftermath, the Pacific introduced new machinery and management techniques. It fired supervisors considered too supportive of labor.

I borrowed from Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 to write this post.

This is the 554th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.