3

Mary Kenney and the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union

No, I wouldn’t like to die, sir, for I think the good Lord’s hard

On us common working women, an’ the likes of me’s debarred

From his high, uncertain heaven, where fine ladies all go to,

So I try to keep on livin’, though the Lord knows how I do.

I wonder, an’ I wonder, as I sometimes sit and sew,

If lady callers take us for a sort o’ wax-work show;

An’ what they’d say about us if one half the truth they knew,

An’ whether they would manage any better than we do.

Elizabeth Morgan

“I Am Only a Working Woman” (1897)¹

Although Local Assembly No. 1789 disintegrated in the wake of the repression following the Haymarket Square riot, its members were far from abandoning their organizational goals. In 1888 Elizabeth Morgan succeeded in getting Samuel Gompers of the AFL to grant them a charter as a federal, or occupationally mixed, women’s union: the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union Local No. 2703. Its other founders included Lizzie Swank Holmes, Elizabeth Korth, and Corinne Brown. None were wage earners. Corinne Brown had been at one time a teacher and a principal in the Chicago public school system, but she stopped working when she married Frank Brown, a banker. Lizzie Swank Holmes was a radical journalist, and Elizabeth Morgan and Elizabeth Korth were both housewives. Nevertheless, the women had no difficulty in getting an AFL charter as a federal union, a catchall form designed for precisely such ambiguous situations.

The AFL used the form of the federal union not only when there were not enough men in any one trade to start regular craft unions, but also in order to organize women (or blacks) separately. Sex-segregated unions short-circuited local male opposition to organizing females since the women could organize a federal local and appeal directly to Gompers for a charter. By organizing on a gender rather than an occupational basis, they could thus escape the jurisdiction of the men who ran the craft locals in their city. There were other advantages to the form; it enabled working women to meet in a large group even though there might be only a few of them active from any single trade; it allowed them to work together with progressive housewives, who often had more time and energy than they did; and it made the union into a social center for women, who usually felt ill-at-ease in the saloons where the men’s unions met. Of course, sex-segregated unionism also had disadvantages for women. Often male and female locals in the same shop would bargain separately, with the women getting the worst of it; or the men would bargain for the women, but would not fight for their raises as hard as they did for their own.²

Like most early women’s labor organizations, the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union combined organizing goals with intellectual ones, and stressed the need for reliable statistical information on the number and conditions of women workers, at a time when such information was hard to come by. The LFLU’s announcements of its existence laid out these purposes:

Without organization for self-protection, with the many disadvantages of sex, and the help[less]ness of childhood, the female and child workers are the victims of every avaricious, unscrupulous, and immoral employer. The Ladies’ Federal Labor Union has been organized to prevent, to some extent, the moral, physical, and mental degradation of women and children employed as wage-workers in this city.

First, by the organization of all women who realize the necessity for a protective society.

Second, to receive reports from and inquire into the complaints of women and children, made against unjust and inhuman employers, and by every honorable means attempt to remove the wrongs complained of.

Third, to secure the enforcement of such local and state laws as will tend to improve the conditions of employment of women and children, and to agitate for the enactment of such further legislation as may be required.

Fourth, to secure the aid and cooperation of the great labor organizations of this city and country, and the active assistance of the many women’s organizations.

Fifth, the discussion of the labor question for intellectual improvement.

Sixth, social enjoyment.³

Initially, the LFLU’s members included typists, seamstresses, dressmakers, clerks, music teachers, candy makers, and gum makers, with only one or two of each. In the next four years, however, LFLU Local No. 2703 gave birth to women’s locals in twenty-three trades, including bookbinding, shirtmaking, cloakmaking, watchmaking, and shoe making.⁴

Within a few months its founders realized that a union was not the most appropriate form of organization for achieving such diverse ends. They turned their attention to their fourth purpose, “to secure … the active assistance of the many women’s organizations,” and formed the Illinois Woman’s Alliance. From that point on, the LFLU and the Alliance worked hand in hand, one concentrating on labor organization, the other on those community issues (education, child labor, police brutality, public institutions) that most affected working-class women and children. Elizabeth Morgan, Elizabeth Korth, and Corinne Brown soon made the Alliance’s work their major concern, since they were not themselves factory workers; and a new generation of wage-earning women began to organize a women’s labor movement in Chicago through the LFLU.

Pre-eminent among these was Mary Kenney, a young bookbinder who grew up in the pioneer community of Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s hometown. As a child she learned how to work: scrubbing, scouring, splitting wood, carrying water, making candles and soap, milking cows, and doing the other back-breaking household chores of rural life. When she was fourteen her father died and she went to work for wages, first as a dressmaker’s apprentice, then at a printing press at $2 a week. She learned “every branch of the trade done by women”⁵ and in four years worked her way up to forewoman. Every day after work she went home to nurse her invalid mother, do the washing and ironing, carry the wood and water, and prepare meals. Though she didn’t get a lot of sleep, she later remembered this as the happiest period of her life because of the fellowship with the other girls from work. When the factory she worked in moved to Keokuk, Iowa, Mary Kenney followed, but after the business failed in 1886 she resolved to go to Chicago where she could make more money.

Her first Chicago job was at J. M. W. Jones, a large printing press that did work for the city. Mary Kenney was a good worker and she knew it, so even in these new surroundings she did not hesitate to push for her rights—in fact, the foreman soon nicknamed her “Woman’s Rights.” When the man in charge of perforating bank supplies went on sick leave, she was asked to fill in for him, and she kept the job after he came back. She said she would only do the job if she got the pay he had been getting, but the foreman replied that she was already getting more than workers who had been there ten years. “I refuse to do a man’s job without a man’s pay,” she said.⁶ She won. She even took work breaks, which were unheard of at the time, stopping work for fifteen minutes at ten and at three o’clock. She insisted that to do otherwise would impair her efficiency.⁷ She also refused to have her pay docked or to be subjected to other of the routine harass- ments common in factories of the period:

The bindery was on the top floor, the seventh. One morning the elevator was stopped for about ten minutes and, for the first time, I was late. When my week’s pay came, they had deducted ten cents. I went to the foreman and asked him if he would go to the man who had my ten cents and say that if I was worth ten cents for ten minutes when I was not at work, I was worth at least ten cents for ten minutes when I was. He agreed and brought back the money.⁸

From her relatively privileged position, Mary Kenney could see and identify with the misery of less fortunate workers. She realized that most workers could not win fifteen-minute breaks for themselves as individuals, and that they would have to win them collectively.

After my experience with J. M. W. Jones Co., I was convinced that the workers must organize. I felt I could depend on many of the employees in this shop. If I invited Mary Grace and Mary Costigan to attend a meeting, they would do their best to get others. Someone must go from shop to shop and find out who the workers were that were willing to work for better working conditions. I must be that someone. So I decided to find another job. I searched through the advertisements and went out during the noon hour for interviews. In this way I didn’t lose time. My recommendation as a general skilled worker and my connection with J. M. W. Jones Co. gave me good standing.⁹

Almost without thinking, Mary Kenney sacrificed the benefits of staying in one job and earning a steady wage so that she could organize other women workers. Her extreme independence and her willingness to take up such a task singlehanded were characteristic of women labor leaders of this period. To Mary Kenney such initiative was a principle of women’s organization.

There are several reasons which prevent women from wishing to organize. In the first place they are reared from childhood with one sole object in view—an object I do not wish to discourage but to elevate from present conditions—-that is looking forward to marriage. If our mothers would teach us self-reliance and independence, that it is our duty to wholly depend upon ourselves, we would then feel the necessity of organization and especially of the new form of organization which is voluntary co-operation…. [But women workers feel] that an institution which has for its platform protection, is for men only and the only protection they expect is the protection given them by men, not realizing that it is their duty to protect themselves. So that the only hope in the organization of women is in getting them to feel that [they] are, or should learn to be, independent.¹⁰

As she went about her organizing, Mary Kenney became interested in the question of sanitation.

I became a tramp bookbinder, going from shop to shop to organize the trade. I found the toilets in three out of four shops so unsanitary as to be dangerous. The Chicago Board of Health was the only organizer with the power to make employers keep the toilets clean, but they didn’t have inspectors enough. Whenever I found unsanitary conditions, I would send a post card with the name and the number of the street, but with no signature.¹¹

The Illinois Woman’s Alliance was at this time conducting a ferocious campaign against bad working conditions for women, so the board of health was unusually sensitive to such charges. If she had known the right people, Mary Kenney’s agitation for clean toilets could have gotten her a job with the Democratic machine that ran Chicago, which was under pressure from the Illinois Woman’s Alliance to appoint women:

A woman inspector came to a shop where I was working and said the Chairman of the Board of Health wanted to see me. “He’s been trying to find you for some time,” she said. “He asked me if I knew a woman working in a bindery that went from one shop to another. I told him that I thought it was Miss Kenney. … I said you had asked me if there was a law to compel employers to keep toilets clean.”

I asked what the Chairman of the Board of Health wanted and she said that she didn’t know.

When I went to his office, he said, “Miss Kenney, you have sent in more complaints about unsanitary conditions than ail the people in Chicago together. There’s a vacancy here and I want you to apply for the position.”

I said, “Fine. When do I get it?”

“Who do you know?”

“Nobody.”¹²

She did not get the job. Instead she continued to go from shop to shop, getting to know the women in her industry, making propaganda about unions, trying never to stay more than two weeks in the same place. The eight-hour movement, strong even after Haymarket, gave her many examples of the benefits unionization could bring women workers. Construction workers building a factory across the street from one shop where she worked had a union and the eight-hour day, while the bookbinders began work an hour before them and stopped an hour later. Whenever the whistle blew across the street, Mary Kenney would ask her fellow workers if they were doing their “share in the fight for a shorter workday.” In that shop, she noted, “not only the women, but the men were willing to organize.”¹³

Once she had established herself in Chicago, Mary Kenney sent for her mother and installed them both in a “home for working girls,” a new kind of institution being developed by philanthropists to allow single women to live on their meager salaries. While some protested that such homes made it even harder to get decent pay for women,¹⁴ working girls who could get into them usually did, not only for economic reasons, but also for the social life, the collective living, they provided.

These homes were often linked to the Working Girls Clubs, which were first formed in 1884 by Grace Dodge, a New York society woman, in order to give young women factory workers an opportunity to hear “practical talks” on moral and religious questions. In 1885, these clubs were united in a national association with its own magazine, Far and Near. Soon the women at the residence where Mary Kenney lived formed a Working Girls Club and she was elected president.

It was not long before she became aware of the limitations of this form of organization, however: “I was much disgusted with the talk of the group. It was always about outings. I thought that helping to get better wages was much more important. If you had good wages you could have your own outings.”¹⁵ As soon as she heard about the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union, which some club members belonged to, she hastened to join. Before long she was one of its delegates to the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly.

Through the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union and the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly, Mary Kenney began to make the kind of union contacts that enabled her to organize her trade successfully. She also found allies, and resources among middle- class feminists and reformers, particularly those at Hull House.

Jane Addams, the founder of modern American social settlement work, established herself at Hull House on the west side of Chicago in 1888. She heard about Mary Kenney and sent her an invitation to dinner. Since Mary Kenney had not found the “ladies” she met in the Working Girls Club particularly appealing, she decided not to go. As she noted, “Small wages and the meagre way Mother and I had been living had made me grow more and more class conscious.”¹⁶ Her mother, however, insisted that she give Jane Addams a hearing: “You can’t judge without knowing her and she might be different from the other club women. It’s condemning you are.” So Mary Kenney went to the dinner. Her first thought upon seeing Hull House’s large and beautiful rooms was: “If the Union could only meet here!”¹⁷ When Jane Addams asked how she could help organize the bookbinders, Mary Kenney replied, “We haven’t a good meeting place, we are meeting over a saloon on Clark Street and it is a dirty and noisy place, but we can’t afford anything better.” Jane Addams not only said the bookbinders could meet at Hull House, but she volunteered to go through the factory district and help leaflet for their meetings herself. Mary Kenney was won over: “When I saw there was someone who cared enough to help us and to help us in our way, it was like having a new world opened up.”¹⁸

After organizing the bookbinders, Mary Kenney went on to other trades, continuing to use Hull House as a base. Jane Ad- dams asked her if she wanted to live there, and soon she was attending classes to improve her reading and writing. In 1891, knowing of Mary Kenney’s interest in communal living, Jane Addams told her that if she could find enough people to form a cooperative boardinghouse, Hull House would put up the first month’s rent and supply the furniture. She suggested a vacant apartment building on nearby Ewing Street. By the end of the following week Mary Kenney had six members; within a year the “Jane Club” had taken over the entire apartment building. They had weekly meetings and each member paid $3 a week for food, service, and living expenses. Life at the Jane Club had a spirit as different from the ordinary boarding house as wine is from water.

The social spirit was just as cooperative as the financial relationships. We enjoyed doing things together. While I was doing social and organization work, I had the opportunity of meeting a good many men, and if there was a dance or a ball we wanted to attend, I would tell an acquaintance that about twenty “Janes” would like to attend a certain ball and ask him to bring each an escort. Such fun in the introductions! And no choosing of a special girl, except for height…. Some of us were advocates of the union label and, as the young men entered and we took their hats, we looked to see if there was a union label inside. And we looked for the union label on their cigars.¹⁹

It was through Hull House that Mary Kenney met Samuel Gompers, who had come there collecting signatures for a petition for woman suffrage that the AFL was to present to Congress. Tommy Morgan had raised this issue in the AFL, and by 1891 Gompers was able to give Congress 229,000 signatures in support of the Susan B. Anthony amendment.²⁰ Gompers was struck by Mary Kenney’s organizing ability and remembered her at the AFL convention in that same year. The only two women delegates to the convention—Ida Van Etten of the Working Women’s Society of New York and Eva McDonald Valesh, a journalist from Minnesota—recommended that the AFL create the post of national organizer for women at a salary of $1,200 a year plus expenses; that it appoint a woman to fill this post; and that it make her a member of the executive council. They argued that unless women workers were organized, they would undercut wages and the whole working class would suffer. Gompers agreed to the first two proposals and in 1892 appointed Mary Kenney general organizer for women, though he did not give her executive board status. She was twenty-eight years old at the time.

Mary Kenney served in this post for six months, during which she accomplished a great deal: she organized unions of boot and shoe workers, shirt workers, male bookbinders, garment workers, hackmen, and retail clerks in Chicago; she went to New York and organized locals of bookbinders and shirtmakers; and then she helped with the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania.²¹ When the garment workers struck in Chicago in 1893, she creatively combined labor union activity with support work by the women’s movement—a pattern that was to become the rule in garment strikes led by the Women’s Trade Union League which she later co-founded: “At Hull House we formed committees of well-known women to visit the [strikers’] homes. They carried relief, food, clothing, and money. Newspaper reporters came daily to Hull House to hear the reports of these committees. Day after day their reports went before the public…. With three thousand people out of work and the days passing, our responsibilities were great.”²²

At the same time, Mary Kenney learned what she and other working-class women were to find again and again through the years: they had to keep an eye on their middle-class allies. One of the newspapers ran a feature on the garment employer who paid the lowest wages and who had refused to arbitrate; he then came to Hull House, said he was sorry for the hungry children, and offered Mary Kenney a check for $200.

When I realized whose name was on the check, I said, “But you have had two opportunities to settle this strike.”

He said, “I won’t give into those agitators.”

I said, “We are out for justice, not charity. Here is your check.”

Miss Gertrude Barnum, who at that time belonged to the “Perfect Lady” class, and who was assisting us for the first time, was indignant. She said to me, “How dare you refuse that check and insult a gentleman?”

“Pardon me, Miss Barnum, you are mistaken; I have never insulted a Gentleman.”²³

Despite all Mary Kenney’s organizational successes, her job lasted only six months before members of the AFL executive board charged that her work had been futile, and that the AFL “is not in a condition financially to keep a woman organizer in the field without better hope of success than at present indicated.”²⁴ Mary Kenney returned to Chicago, taking the job of factory inspector that she had been denied a few years before. The tireless agitation of the LFLU and the Illinois Woman’s Alliance and the recent election of the reform Governor John Altgeld, had resulted in the appointment of Florence Kelley of Hull House as chief factory inspector. She appointed all labor people to her staff, including not only Mary Kenney but also Alzina Stevens and Abraham Bisno.

Mary Kenney did not stay long in this job, however. While organizing in Boston she had met Jack O’Sullivan, an active trade unionist and the labor editor of the Boston Globe. In 1894 they were married and she moved to Boston, where she continued her union organizing despite four pregnancies, and also did further settlement work. Her enduring concern about the conditions of working women led her to become one of the founders in 1903 of the National Women’s Trade Union League.

Meanwhile in Chicago the trend towards separate women’s unions which she exemplified became increasingly strong, and the AFL executive board’s gloomy predictions of the impossibility of organizing women were belied by the successes of the women’s labor movement. In 1903, ten years after Mary Kenney O’Sullivan was fired by the AFL, a reporter for Leslie’s Monthly Magazine was sent to Chicago to investigate the remarkable record of working women there. She found that, building on the early work of such organizers as Lizzie Swank Holmes and Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, “the Woman’s Labor Movement developed in Chicago as nowhere else in the country,—developed into a complete and powerful system, comprising an overwhelming majority of the workers in twenty-six different trades, and embracing an aggregate membership of thirty-five thousand women.” There were unions in almost every trade in which women worked. Further, the gains made by these locals were enormous; women’s wages in Chicago had gone up between 10 and 40 percent with unionization, while their work week had dropped from sixty to fifty-three hours with extra pay for overtime. Child labor had been nearly eradicated. Each union had its shop stewards—“walking delegates”—who helped union members struggle with their foremen over arbitrary dismissals and unjust hues. In short, “the working women of Chicago … [had] evolved step by step, to the cool sanity of a complex, splendidly organized system of individual trade-unions, recruited exclusively by feminine wage-earners, and controlled by ‘lady’ bosses and ‘lady’ walking delegates.”²⁵

No longer were women organizers isolated mavericks, so highly motivated they seemed superhuman. Their example had taken root and a high degree of organization had produced large numbers of women who were willing to become leaders in their local unions. The female part of the labor movement was beginning to mature.