2

“Shouting Amazons”

We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the rush that never will be checked, the tide that will never turn until it has reached its flood—that will be irresistable, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours!CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!

Upton Sinclair

The Jungle (1905)

“Vat is the matter mit the vimmins?” shouted an enthusiastic German-American socialist as he watched the parade go by. “They’re all right!” Thirty-five thousand women—a number matched by few U.S. labor demonstrations since—marched down Michigan Avenue in the 1903 Chicago Labor Day parade; among them were garment workers, sausage girls, cracker packers, waitresses, schoolteachers, candy dippers, and scrubwomen. The scrubwomen sang as they marched, “Shall idle drones still live like queens on labor not their own?” and the candy dippers, dressed in white and perched on a muslin-draped float, made marshmallows and tossed them out to the watching crowd. The unprecedented turnout was discussed by the labor press around the country: how did it happen that Chicago had so many working women organized when New York, a far bigger city, had only 5,000 female union members?¹

The answer to this question lay in the previous twenty years of efforts to organize working women in Chicago. In the early days of the local labor movement, 1876–1886, trade union and revolutionary activity were virtually merged and only a few women became active. Their political development, however, and the practical experience they gained made their leadership crucial to the next stage, when it became possible to build more stable women’s unions and coalitions.

Flattened by the Chicago fire in 1871, the city became an industrial boom town in the 1880s, rebuilt in high style. Its front office area, the Loop with its gorgeous lakefront views, gleamed with the new architecture of Louis Sullivan and his followers; the splendid Palmer House Hotel, built in 1875 with ninety thousand square feet of Italian marble tile, became the symbol of the new Chicago bourgeoisie. North and west of the Loop lay its economic foundations—the working-class slums made up of miles of wooden tenements and jerry-built flats housing wave upon wave of displaced farmers and immigrants: Irish, English, German, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Bohemian, and French Canadian. Each ethnic group had its own turf, and, as settlement worker Jane Addams described her own Halstead Street neighborhood, conditions were deplorable:

The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer…. Rear tenements flourish; many houses have no water supply save the faucet in the back yards, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and ashes are placed in wooden boxes which are fastened to the street pavements.²

In such tenements lived the factory workers of Chicago, many of them American-born women from the countryside, with an increasing leavening of immigrants. Both groups were “just off the farm,” bewildered by their new industrial condition and deprived of their traditional support systems, but the native-born women had one advantage most immigrants lacked—they spoke English. As one of them, Lizzie Swank, recalled:

These women, most of them, were Americans who had been carefully looked after and protected in their own comfortable homes, and whose mothers and grandmothers before them had been similarly treated. Perhaps they had worked as hard in the home and as thoroughly earned their living as now, but it had been in a manner that the world knew nothing about.

With these traditional ideas, they still considered that their affairs were their own, and if they worked hard and got little for it, it was nobody’s business. They preferred to bear their privations alone, and allow others to think that they were comfortably situated, quite well off, and needed no one’s sympathy.³

The new women workers were ashamed of their poverty; they took it personally, and such things were not to be discussed with strangers. They had not been workers long enough to have developed the consciousness of workers; for this they needed years of industrial experience as part of a group, with the consequent realization that it was not their fault as individuals if they were poor. Lizzie Swank had resolved to help them come to such an understanding.

An Ohio farm girl herself, Lizzie Swank began working when she was fifteen, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse like the one she had attended. In two years she was married, and when her husband died five years later, she supported herself and her two children by teaching music. She might have stayed in the Ohio countryside forever had it not been for the great railroad strike of 1877. It awakened something in her that made her long for change.

It was an epic battle, a nationwide strike of over one hundred thousand men, with active support from the labor movement, socialists, masses of working-class women, and farmers. The strike was particularly bitter in Chicago, where the police organized a special militia to subdue the workers; that being insufficient, federal troops were sent in fresh from the Indian wars. When the workers were attacked, they fought back, and bloody battles took place at the Halstead Street viaduct and at the German workers’ Turner Hall. The role of women in these struggles was particularly remarked upon by the press: “Enraged female rioters … the unsexed mob of female incendiaries … the Amazonian army.”⁴ When the strike was broken, the bitterness of Chicago workers knew no bounds; they formed armed self-defense bands, lehr und wehr verein, which repeatedly marched down Ashland Avenue during the 1880s.⁵

Such activity was unheard of in the farmlands of Ohio, and in 1879, her children grown, Lizzie Swank came to Chicago with her sister to learn more about the labor movement:

“The working classes” was a term that was just beginning to be heard and I longed to know more of the people set off as belonging to a caste…. With my sister I went to work at a cloak factory and during the next two years passed through every phase of a struggling sewing woman’s existence. I have worked in the largest factories of the city, during the busiest season, and earned $1.50 a day. I have sewed in sweat shops in dull seasons and earned $3 a week. I have made children’s trimmed dresses at $1 per day, linen ulsters at $1.75 a dozen, worked button holes on shirts at 50 cents per dozen shirts and furnished my own thread. I know of all the struggles, the efforts of genteel poverty, the pitiful pride with which working girls hide their destitution and drudgery from the world.⁶

She looked around for a union to join. It took her a year to track down the Working Women’s Union, the only woman’s union in Chicago. It had been organized in 1878 by “a few energetic women who had become interested in economics”—in other words, by socialists, among whom were Alzina Stevens, Lucy Parsons, and Elizabeth Rodgers.⁷ Most of its members were housewives, but the organization had about a thousand members, including women from a variety of trades. Lizzie Swank saw an advertisement for one of their meetings, and brought four of her fellow workers.

She organized with so much enthusiasm that within a year she was made secretary of the Working Women’s Union, and she was soon writing stirring exposures of conditions in the garment industry. There were punitive fines for everything from tardiness to talking. Stacks of unfinished cloaks lay everywhere amid piles of lint and dust, posing a constant danger of fire and lung damage to workers. Cloaks that sold for $12.00 or $15.00 retail were made for only $.75 or $1.00; somebody was getting rich, but it certainly wasn’t the women workers. While Lizzie Swank agitated about these things inside the shop, other members of the Working Women’s Union visited workplaces to talk to the women and encourage them to organize. They handed out leaflets and spoke outside the factory gates. It was slow work: most of the women were either uninterested or shocked and “we could see but little accomplished in comparison with our ardent hopes.”⁸ It took considerable dedication to go on organizing with so little success:

Women looked askance at gatherings where “women spoke in meetin’,” and “no nice girl would belong to one.” The idea that working women had “a cause” was new and unconventional and scarcely to be entertained by these women so recently from the retirement of the fireside. They might be induced to attend a meeting or two, and even be delighted there, but joining a union—that was a different thing, and too bold and decided a step for women in those days.

Besides, most of the young and good-looking girls looked upon their employment as only temporary; they would marry sooner or later, and thus escape from the shop. What became of sewing women as a class they did not care.⁹

The members of the Working Women’s Union were distinguished from those they sought to organize mainly by their politics. Most were decidedly radical in their views; some—Elizabeth Rodgers and Lucy Parsons, for instance—had spent years in the socialist movement, others—Alzina Stevens and Lizzie Swank—became converts through their union work. Lizzie Swank was soon going to meetings of the Socialist Labor Party. At the first one, she reported, “it took but four hours of earnest discussion with an old-time Socialist to convert and make me a pledged worker for the great cause for life,”¹⁰ Their political radicalism is important, for only a larger and more consistent vision of social change than that of simple trade unionism could sustain them in such difficult work and explain the risks they took and the isolation from other women that was sometimes their lot.

In these early days of the labor movement, trade union activism was equated by the press, police, and much of the public with being a “Commune-ist”—advocating something like the Paris Commune. Anyone with such views left respectability far behind; if this was hard for men, it was much harder for women, who were under consistently greater social pressure to conform or be cast out into the terrors of life as fallen women, beyond the protecting arm of any father or husband. Any woman who was an active trade unionist in 1880 had to be willing to risk being jailed, being called an “unsexed female incendiary” or prostitute, and being an outcast in much of society. Women organizers in the 1880s thus tended to be very highly motivated and strong individuals who were often both social and sexual radicals as well.

Lucy Parsons is the best known of the Chicago group, because of her later career as an anarchist speaker and because she was the widow of the Haymarket martyr, Albert Parsons. The Parsons were Southerners who came north to escape the Ku Klux Klan backlash against blacks and Radical Republicans that followed Reconstruction. It was easier for them to live together in the North, since they were forbidden to do so under the South’s miscegenation laws—Lucy Parsons was black. They moved into a German neighborhood on the near north side of Chicago, where they came in contact with socialist refugees and soon became Marxists. When Parsons, a printer by trade, was blacklisted because of their activism in the 1877 railroad strike, Lucy Parsons opened a dressmaking shop and her husband further supplemented their income with an unsteady salary as a socialist journalist. With other socialists he helped found the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly in 1878 and was elected its president; Lucy Parsons was a frequent speaker at both the Working Women’s Union and socialist meetings.¹¹

Another leader in the Working Women’s Union, Elizabeth Rodgers, was active as a socialist in the West before she and her husband moved to Chicago. According to an 1887 interview, “I also organized the Rocky Mountain social clubs, but our red badges are now folded and laid away. I also organized socialistic groups all through the western country.”¹²

Unlike Lucy Parsons, Lizzie Swank, and Elizabeth Rodgers, Alzina Stevens, the founder and president of the Working Women’s Union, came from a wealthy background; she was the declassed daughter of a once-proud New England family, the Parsons of Parsonsfield, Maine. Her father was a rich farmer and small manufacturer, but when he was killed in the Civil War, the family lost everything, and in 1862 Alzina Stevens went to work in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, a child laborer like any other.¹³ On her thirteenth birthday her right index finger got caught in a machine. The company doctor cut the mangled digit off without bothering with anesthetic—nor did he trouble to inform her mother. Alzina Stevens later remarked; “If my interest in the cause of organized labor had ever flagged, if I had ever been in danger of growing discouraged, the sight of that poor finger and the memory of the horror of that day would have been spur enough.”¹⁴

In the 1830s Lowell was known as a new kind of model factory town where the female work force was so cultured that they even put out literary magazines. But due to monopolization and speedup, conditions in the famous “City of Spindles” began to decline soon afterward. The first union of female factory workers in the United States, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, was formed in the 1840s to fight declining conditions in the mills, and though it was long dead by the time Alzina Stevens arrived, she was bound to hear tales of its “turn-outs,” or strikes, its petitions to the legislature, and its campaign for the ten-hour day. She was uniquely in touch with this first stirring of a women’s labor movement and she took the example of Lowell westward to Chicago to the next generation of activists.

In 1866 she left the Lowell mills, no longer able to tolerate the wage reductions which were “so frequent and excessive that self- respecting American girls, who wished to live the rational life of human beings, were finally forced out of the mills entirely and compelled to seek new fields of industry.”¹⁵ At some point between then and 1872, when she appeared in Chicago, she married a man named Stevens. We know no more than that; the marriage ended in divorce and she never spoke about it to even her most intimate friends.¹⁶ In Chicago, she determined to learn the printing trade, and got a job as a “copy-holder” with “the privilege of filling in odd times working at the case.” After she had taught herself typesetting and the other “mysteries of the craft,” she applied to Typographical Union No. 16 for membership—she thought it likely that she was the first woman ever admitted.¹⁷ She then felt that she must spread the message of unionization to other women workers:

I have always deplored the unorganized condition of women wage workers. To it may be principally attributed, I believe, the low wages which most of them receive and the numerous petty exactions and tyrannies of which they are made the victims. Therefore I have constantly maintained the necessity for their industrial organization on the same lines as men. I have been a firm believer and a persistent advocate of thorough industrial organization for both sexes and have never ceased to urge the paramount importance of independent political action on the part of wage workers, realizing that it is the only complete and ultimate solution of the labor problem.¹⁸

She did not at first consider herself a radical, however, and did not announce her conversion to socialism until 1879, a year after the Working Women’s Union was founded.¹⁹

With women leaders like Alzina Stevens, Lizzie Swank, Elizabeth Rodgers, and Lucy Parsons, the Working Women’s Union naturally took a broad view of its tasks. It not only tried to organize women into unions, but also played an active role in larger labor struggles, particularly the long and militant campaign for the eight-hour day which was just beginning. In 1879 the Chicago Eight-Hour League held a three-day festival, culminating in a Fourth of July parade. The Working Women’s Union had a pink float, bearing banners with slogans that showed both its labor and feminist aspects: “IN A UNION OF STRENGTH WE SEEK THE STRENGTH OF UNION,” and “WHEN WOMAN IS ADMITTED INTO THE COUNCIL OF NATIONS, WAR WILL COME TO AN END, FOR WOMAN MORE THAN MAN, KNOWS THE VALUE OF LIFE.”²⁰

The few members of the Working Women’s Union who were wage earners rather than housewives tried to do workplace organizing. Most women workers were not yet interested in joining an organization, however, and it was all too easy for a militant spirit like Lizzie Swank to go out on a limb and become isolated. She was working at S—& Co.’s cloak and suit factory when Mr. S. cut prices during the busy season, at the same time making a new rule that no worker could be paid for her share of work on a cloak until work on the whole cloak had been finished. He made no provision for paying interim wages during the changeover from one system to another, and many women went without income for several weeks and could not pay their boardinghouse keepers. They complained, and Lizzie Swank suggested they write up their grievances, sign them, and give them to the boss. All but 4 out of 150 workers signed. They then stopped work and the forelady could do nothing with them. Soon Mr. S. stormed in, screaming, “What do you silly hussies mean by sending me such a paper as dis? Dis is not ladylike!” He advised them to stop listening to agitators and to talk to his wife if they had any problems. “I know who wrote dis paper,” he continued. “Nobody here could or would do it but Mrs. Swank. She has been going to some of dem bad labor meetings and dere is where she got dis idea. She and her sister. Miss Hunt, may get deir books made out and go home…. De rest of you go back to work and see dat you behafes yourselfs.”²¹

The other workers backed down and only Lizzie Swank and her sister were fired. She later heard that Mr. S. had changed the offending rules. “They reaped the benefit of the protest and we the disgrace.” The strike—which she believed to have been the first women’s strike in Chicago’s history—had lasted all of three hours. “Ten years later,” she said, “such a strike would have had a different ending.”²²

Lizzie Swank did factory work for two years, after which her health declined and she returned to teaching music. By then, however, the Working Women’s Union had been transformed into a female local of a new national labor organization, the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. This was a combination of union, reform organization, and fraternal society. Founded in secret in 1869, it became successful only after 1881, when it began to organize openly. It was at this point that it began to charter women’s assemblies and admit women to its mixed assemblies.

The Knights of Labor was not a strictly working-class organization. Unlike later labor unions, it allowed middle-class people to be members; it admitted anyone, in fact, except lawyers, saloonkeepers, bankers, stockbrokers, and professional gamblers, all of whom the Order felt to be parasites. It stood for equal pay for equal work, an end to child labor, and no discrimination against women or blacks. It led massive boycotts and militant strikes, especially on the railroads. It identified with the eight-hour movement, and its principal motto was “An injury to one is the concern of all.”

The Working Women’s Union was given a charter as Knights of Labor Local Assembly No. 1789 in 1881. There were several other female assemblies in Chicago, each organized by trade, and 120 in the country as a whole. There were also many women inmixed assemblies. In such favorable conditions, strong women leaders quickly began to develop and achieve recognition within the Order, and in fact the development of such women was one of the chief contributions of the Knights to later stages of organization·. Among them were Elizabeth Rodgers and Elizabeth Morgan, both active in Local Assembly No. 1789, as well as Alzina Stevens, who continued active in the labor movement after she moved to Ohio and became leader of the Joan of Arc Assembly in Toledo.

In 1886 Elizabeth Rodgers became the head of the Chicago district organization of the Knights of Labor, the first woman to achieve such high office. That year she brought her youngest child, a two-week-old infant, to the national convention in Richmond rather than stay home. Her husband George was a union man himself and at first supported her endeavors, as she explained to Emma Willard, a fellow member of the Knights of Labor and the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union;

My husband always believed that women should do anything they liked that was good and which they could do well…. But for him I would never have got on so well as a Master Workman. I was the first woman in Chicago to join the Knights. They offered us the chance, and I said to myself, “There must be a first one, and so I’ll go forward.”²³

But in 1886 George Rodgers changed his mind. She continued anyway: “My husband tried hard to persuade me to resign, on account of so much turmoil and trouble in labor circles at that time. Feeling the responsibility, but knowing my duty to my sex, I thought it was an opportunity to show our brothers how false the theory is that women are not good for anything.”²⁴

Like Elizabeth Rodgers, Elizabeth Morgan was married to an activist, Tommy Morgan. One of the founders of the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, he was known as “Resolution Morgan,” because of the large numbers of progressive resolutions he introduced. Among them was one that led to the passage of the first compulsory education bill in Illinois in 1879, an unenforced city ordinance; he was also responsible for the AFL’s passage of a resolution supporting woman suffrage in 1890.

Both Morgans were English immigrants who had grown up as child laborers in Birmingham, and neither had much formal education. Tommy Morgan, a machinist and engraver, managed to educate himself thoroughly while working at his trade; his wife had less intellectual self-confidence, as she wrote Samuel Gompers: “My education is but poor but I will do the best I can as I, like many children, had to work when but eleven years old … and for that reason I am not very good to write.”²⁵ Her strengths were strategic and organizational, and she showed them in both her political life and her private business.

Tommy Morgan came to Chicago in 1869 and sent for his wife a year later, saving the money for her passage by walking the eight miles back and forth to his job at the Illinois Central Railway. The family did well enough until the panic of 1873, when he was out of work for fifteen weeks. They had no credit. Elizabeth Morgan waited in the house without food, heat, or rent money, with two babies, while her husband tramped around looking for work. It was a time of great suffering and fear and one which changed the course of their lives. They realized that immigrating to the United States had not solved their economic problems; “in this land flowing with milk and honey thousands were starving.”²⁶

Both became socialists as a result of this experience. Elizabeth Morgan, busy with housekeeping and childcare, at first did not have as much time for the movement as her husband did, although she did become a charter member of the Sovereigns of Industry, a cooperative society, in 1874.²⁷ She kept a large garden from which she fed her family, selling the surplus, and was determined to accumulate enough real estate so they would never again have to worry about the rent. By 1894, despite the enormous amount of time she spent on political work, she had saved enough to buy three houses, one of which she ran as “Morgan’s Hotel” for tourists to the 1893 World’s Fair. “Yes,” she told a reporter, “I am a practical woman. Idealists are all very well, but they would find it hard to get along without us, after all.”²⁸

Her practical sense and ability to get things done were to prove of enormous value to the working women and children of Chicago. A founding member of Local Assembly No. 1789, she was elected its delegate to the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly. The experience she gained there in the intricacies of the labor movement was to make her a vital link in the chain of continuity between the early women’s organizations and those that developed after the demise of the Knights of Labor.

Like her, Lizzie Swank and Lucy Parsons were active in Local Assembly No. 1789, but they became increasingly dissatisfied with its socialist vision of revolution through “independent political action” and, with Albert Parsons, moved rapidly toward anarchism as they became convinced that the powers-that-be would never let them win an election. They began to concentrate on labor organizing as an alternative to electoral work, initiating a campaign for the eight-hour day. Although they accompanied their organizing with considerable eloquence on the subjects of “FORCE!” (in Parsons’ typography) and “DYNAMITE!” in their paper the Alarm, which Albert Parsons edited with Lizzie Swank, only their words were incendiary. In practice they were more interested in demonstrations than bombs. Their successes in mass organizing were unquestionably the reason that the Chicago bourgeoisie made them a target of a campaign of repression culminating in the Haymarket riot.

The story of the great eight-hour movement, its culmination in the police-staged riot at Haymarket Square, and its tragic denouement in the judicial murder of Parsons and four of his fellow anarchists has been too often told to need extensive repetition here.²⁹ What has not been sufficiently noted is the participation of Chicago working women in the movement that led up to Haymarket.

The eight-hour agitation climaxed with a march of eighty thousand workers down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue on May Day, 1886. Most of those who marched were men, but the women who watched were inspired by their example. That night two new assemblies of the Knights of Labor, one of mixed trades and the other of tailors and seamstresses, were formed to build the general strike for the eight-hour day. A woman at one saloon meeting told the Chicago Tribune: “No, we’ll never give in…. we want eight hours’ work with ten hours’ pay, which means a fair advance. Why, all the tailor girls on the North, West, and South sides are in this thing with us.”³⁰ The sewing women whom Lizzie Swank had been powerless to organize six years before had begun to move at last.

The next morning Lizzie Swank led a delegation of hundreds of working women on their own eight-hour march. She began in the garment district, where a number of women formed a procession and visited all the shops, calling on the women to come out. As the parade moved along, it left “garrisons of women” on each corner to “buttonhole others and induce them to join the movement,” according to the Chicago Tribune. The paper described the hated “shouting Amazons” with a touch of admiration:

The ranks were composed of women whose exterior denoted incessant toil, their in many instances worn faces and threadbare clothing bearing evidence of a struggle for an uncomfortable existence. As the procession moved along the girls shouted and sang and laughed in a whirlwind of exuberance that did not lessen with the distance traveled.³¹

The next day, May 3, the police marched on a peaceful rally in Haymarket Square and ordered it to disperse. As if by signal, a bomb was thrown at them and they opened fire on the crowd, injuring over two hundred workers and killing an unknown number. The next morning a dragnet swept up most of the activists in the Chicago labor movement, eight of whom were eventually selected for prosecution on charges of murdering the policemen killed during the riot, although they probably died as a result of crossfire from their own forces. Only one of the men arrested was even present in Haymarket Square at the time and he was on the stage in full view. But alibis made no difference; the goal of the prosecution was clearly to kill off the most militant sector of the labor leadership in Chicago and thus destroy the movement. As one clothing manufacturer explained, “l’m not afraid of anarchy; oh no; it’s the utopian scheme of a few, a very few, philosophizing cranks, who are amiable withal, but I do consider that the labor movement should be crushed! The Knights of Labor will never dare to create discontent again if these men are hanged!”³²

Five of the eight were executed on November 11, 1887, despite an international protest of unprecedented size. One of them, August Spies, stated confidently in his final defense speech: “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement … the movement from which the downtrodden millions,the millions who toil in want and misery—expect salvation—if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”³³

But although Spies was right, and the Haymarket tragedy did not put an end to the labor movement, it did split it. The Master Workman of the Knights of Labor, Terence Powderly, and certain other of its leaders had been lukewarm in their support of the militant eight-hour movement to begin with. After Haymarket, Powderly grew extremely distrustful of any industrial action, favoring instead a strategy of building “a system of cooperatives, which will make every man his own master, and every man his own employer.”³⁴ Powderly broke strikes called by his own members and encouraged them to scab on strikes called by craft unions outside the Order. Under such circumstances the organization began to decline, and by 1890 it was no more than a hollow shell.

Local Assembly No. 1789 had dissolved some time before. As Lizzie Swank noted, the “useful career” of the female assembly came to an end after Haymarket, when “a difference of opinion grew up among the members, some going on to extreme radical views, others turning back to absolute conservatism.”³⁵

Elizabeth Rodgers appears to have been one of the latter. She was accused in the labor press of saying, in reference to the Haymarket martyrs, “The bone and sinew of honest labor has no sympathy with the condemned men in the county jail. They are not of us. They are men whose capital was the credulity of misled workingmen. If the fate of the prisoners was submitted to a vote in my district they would be hung tomorrow.” When her lack of solidarity was criticized, she responded only by saying, “I am not in favor of capital punishment, and think it barbarous and a relic of past ages. Not being in favor of the above, I never could have said to anyone that the condemned men should be hanged.”³⁶ She dropped out of the labor movement entirely and in 1888 nearly sued the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, swearing out a writ for the return of her sewing machine.³⁷ She went into the insurance business, organizing a mutual fund under the auspices of the Women’s Catholic Order of Foresters, whose members paid ten cents a week in return for being able to turn to the society when ill, thus avoiding an appeal to charity.’³⁸

Of the women who had been leaders in the women’s labor organizing of the 1880s, only Lizzie Swank and Elizabeth Morgan remained involved. Lucy Parsons continued as a spokeswoman for a variety of anarchist causes, but did not concentrate on work with women. Lizzie Swank also confined much of her activity to the anarchist movement, marrying a fellow radical, William Holmes, changing her name to Lizzie Swank Holmes and continuing to work on the Alarm. She did, however, help Elizabeth Morgan spearhead the formation of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union and the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, the organizations that were to lead the next wave of radical work with women.

Some years after the demise of Local Assembly No. 1789, Lizzie Swank Holmes summed up her early organizing efforts for the AFL magazine, the American Federationist, pointing to the enormous problems the organizers of her generation had faced:

They had really done more than they knew. They had blazed the way for future organizations to follow. They had familiarized timid, ignorant women with the idea of organization for mutual benefit. They had taught these women that the conditions of labor were not the same as in the old days of home work, and that it was necessary to meet new conditions with new methods.

The logic of events also helped, and when other organizers who were more clearly trade unionists and not amateur economists came on the scene, they found the field partly ripe for harvesting….

The work of the pioneers can not be defined, counted, and set down in statistical figures. At first glance, it may look as though there were little to show for their efforts. But it is true, nevertheless, that the latter workers could not have accomplished what they have had it not been for the devoted, earnest, often disheartening toil that the pioneers in trade unionism performed.³⁹

In 1878 Lizzie Swank Holmes could find very few working women who would even dare come to a meeting. By 1886 she could lead a march of hundreds of working women for the eight-hour day. By 1903 thirty-five thousand were ready to march on Labor Day. This change is a measure of her achievement as well as of the maturation of the female part of the industrial workingclass. While her work and that of other early organizers like Lucy Parsons, Alzina Stevens, Elizabeth Rodgers, and Elizabeth Morgan resulted in no permanent organizational gains for women, these pioneers set an example of militance and involvement, making it possible for working women to imagine new ways of being, and changing the climate for organizing women in Chicago.