Ella Prisco
This essay is a part of a 2-part collection. The second put up might be revealed subsequent week.
Relying on who you requested, Winnipeg on Could 15, 1919 was both a metropolis in chaos or on the precipice of a courageous new world. It was the primary day of the Winnipeg Common Strike, the fruits of weeks of stress between employers and unions, and upwards of 25,000 employees deserted their posts.[1] Over the following six weeks, this quantity grew to almost 30,000, encompassing all kinds of employees, from transit employees to these within the steel and constructing trades, in addition to postal service employees. The sheer variety of these on strike shut the town down – outlets had been empty, eating places had been closed, the water provide was restricted, and milk and bread deliveries had been halted.[2] The strikers’ calls for had been each easy, calling for collective bargaining rights and a residing wage, and transformational, calling to reorient society round individuals’s wants, hanging worry into the hearts of the town’s higher class, and evoking the spectre of revolution, societal upheaval, and uncertainty.
Amidst the widening ranks of hanging employees, girls performed a major function and did so in ways in which transgressed predominant gender norms. By stepping out of their assigned roles within the personal sphere to hitch the combat for a residing wage and collective bargaining rights, working girls actively contributed to the strike in some ways. As leaders, newspaper saleswomen, and hecklers, hanging girls had been a drive to be reckoned with. Their contributions, typically characterised as hostile and aggressive, diverged vastly from present gender norms that highlighted girls’s passivity and caregiving nature. Finally, this transgression of gender norms contributed to a broader characterization of the strike as a menace to the established order and probably a revolutionary motion. Certainly, as hanging girls took up public roles that countered conventional expectations for girls, they contributed to the rising picture of upheaval within the metropolis.
However simply who had been the hanging girls?[3] It’s a frequent false impression that ladies weren’t a major a part of the workforce till the mid twentieth century, however that is merely unfaithful—decrease class girls have all the time labored as a matter of necessity, as wage labourers or in any other case. In consequence, working girls have lengthy had their very own labour points, pursuits, and desires. It ought to be no shock, then, that ladies had been effectively and diversely represented among the many strikers as they had been deeply affected by employees’ points. In reality, working girls had been extra typically engaged in low-paying work than males. A 1914 examine completed by the College Girls’s Membership of Winnipeg discovered that ladies required 8-9 {dollars} per week to cowl the price of residing, but many employers paid much less.[4] Waitresses averaged 7 {dollars} per week plus two meals, whereas junior employees at department shops (cashiers, messengers, inventory women) obtained wherever within the vary of 5-8 {dollars} per week, with the highest finish of the vary solely paid to employees at choose shops.[5] Along with wages that had been largely unlivable, girls had been additionally subjected to lengthy hours, poor working circumstances, questionable well being protections and may very well be fired with little to no discover.[6] Working girls thus confronted their very own set of challenges that inspired them to hitch the strike.
In all, roughly 2,000 of the 30,000 employees on strike had been girls. They had been phone operators—referred to as ‘hi there women’—retailer clerks, waitresses, and garment employees.[7] In reality, it was the phone operators who led the Common Strike at 7 AM on Could fifteenth, 4 hours earlier than the prescribed begin time, unplugging phone traces and never wanting again.[8]
When it comes to their precise participation within the strike, working girls took on numerous roles, together with harassing strike-breakers, encouraging employees to strike, promoting the Strike Committee’s newspaper, the Western Labor Information, and creating help networks for hanging girls. Some girls additionally took on vital management roles—each Helen Armstrong and Edith Hancox had been cited as influential feminine figures inside the strike motion.[9] For her half, Armstrong created the Labor Cafe, which offered meals to hanging girls with little means to help themselves.[10] Hancox, too, performed a necessary function as one of many motion’s main feminine orators, talking to massive crowds in regards to the significance of the strike and labour motion.[11]
In taking over these front-facing roles within the strike, girls had been typically portrayed as uncharacteristically assertive. To that impact, many newspapers of the interval depicted hanging girls as lively, confrontational brokers who had been prepared to brazenly advocate for themselves. In a single version of the Western Labor Information, the creator recounted the story of a hanging lady who offered their paper and was confronted by a person who referred to as her a “poor, depressing, ignorant idiot.”[12] In response to this slight, the lady demanded that he withdraw the insult, and may he refuse, she threatened to strike him throughout the face.[13] This incident is each indicative of how hanging girls asserted themselves and made their presence identified within the public sphere and of how girls had been perceived as aggressive in selling the strike.
Along with this incident, there are a lot of different articles that depict hanging girls as confrontational brokers. Most of those articles described hanging girls discouraging or stopping strike-breaking. One such article within the Toronto Star illustrated how crowds gathered on the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian Nationwide Railway outlets, stopping males from scabbing by hurling stones at them.[14] Importantly, this text described girls as being within the majority of the discouraging group.[15] In one other excessive case, reported by The Enlightener, two hanging girls had been fined for ripping newspapers from the palms of a Winnipeg Tribune saleswoman and tearing them to shreds on the street.[16] Each of those examples illustrate the methods during which girls not solely participated actively within the strike, however did so in a hypervisible, public and assertive method.
This type of confrontational participation within the strike by girls considerably contributed to the understanding of the strike as not solely a name for collective bargaining rights and higher residing requirements, but additionally as the start of a revolution in Winnipeg. The narrative of revolution was distinguished amongst those that opposed the strike within the center and higher courses. For them, the picture of empty outlets, eating places, and factories, in addition to the short-term cessation of providers so simple as milk and bread deliveries, was an awesome image, and one which incited worry.[17] Coupled with large employee unrest, they perceived the opportunity of revolution as a believable one. You will need to word the historic context right here. Students of the Winnipeg Common Strike have linked the nervousness surrounding social upheaval in Winnipeg to the disruption brought on by different modern occasions, such because the Russian Revolution, which started with profitable mass labour demonstrations by socialists.[18] Consequently, the achievements of those different actions made revolution in Winnipeg appear fairly believable, giving the Strike a degree of credibility and energy that it might not have had in any other case.[19].
This characterization is current in newspapers of the interval. It’s particularly distinguished within the Winnipeg Citizen, a newspaper revealed by an anti-strike group composed of the town’s political and financial elite referred to as the Residents’ Committee of One Thousand. In a single version, the creator addressed Winnipeggers with a way of urgency, writing that “we converse, in stating with out equivocation that this isn’t a strike in any respect, within the abnormal sense of the time period – it’s Revolution.”[20] On this local weather, girls’s violation of gender norms within the identify of the strike added to burgeoning fears about revolution.
Articles of the interval are proof of this phenomenon. Most anti-strike articles had been fast to name strike members ‘Reds,’ or ‘Bolsheviks,’ girls included, however some particularly disparaged hanging girls, tying their participation within the strike to Bolshevism, revolution, and immorality. One article from the Winnipeg Telegram described hanging girls who assaulted constables as unclean, spiritually incestuous (referencing a supposed alliance to socialism), and “unsexed.”[21] Certainly, this text described girls’s participation within the strike as such a deviation from gender norms that not solely did these girls lose their morality (or ‘cleanness’) but additionally their womanhood.[22] All this to say, the characterizations of ladies on strike to how offensive their participation really was to many in Winnipeg and the way it contributed to fears of social change.
Thus, it’s unsurprising that in becoming a member of within the strike and transgressing social mores, girls had been labelled as immoral, unsexed, and revolutionary for the menace they posed to the social order and elementary character of Winnipeg. Transferring past their assigned roles within the home sphere to grow to be lively members within the strike motion, these girls challenged social expectations that inspired them to embody passive and nurturing qualities. In doing so, they contributed to a broader characterization of the strike as a harmful and immoral menace to the town of Winnipeg itself. To make sure, in transgressing the predominant gender norms of the interval, hanging girls contributed to the rising local weather of uncertainty in Winnipeg.
Ella Prisco is a current graduate from the BA historical past program at McGill College. The vast majority of her work has centered on adjustments in girls’s standing and labour from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, spanning completely different worldwide and cultural contexts. She hopes to additional her analysis in a graduate program.
This put up was edited underneath the auspices of the challenge Historicizing Our Instances: Histories of Migration and Local weather within the Digital Area, which is supported partly by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Analysis Council.
[1] For the title quote, see “Girls Attend Troopers’ Parliament,” Western Labor Information, June 13, 1919; Mary Horodyski, “‘That Was Fairly a Strike Alright…:’ Girls and the Winnipeg Common Strike of 1919,” Fireweed 26 (1988).
[2] Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Residents’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg Common Strike (College of Toronto Press, 2010), 10.
[3] Horodyski, “‘That Was Fairly a Strike Alright…’.”
[4] Civic Committee of the College Girls’s Membership of Winnipeg, The Work of Girls and Ladies within the Division Shops of Winnipeg (1914), 19; Horodyski, “‘That Was Fairly a Strike Alright…’.”
[5] Civic Committee of the College Girls’s Membership of Winnipeg, The Work of Girls and Ladies, 15.
[6] Civic Committee of the College Girls’s Membership of Winnipeg, The Work of Girls and Ladies, 4, 8-9, 12; Janice Newton, The Feminist Problem to the Canadian Left, 1900-1918 (McGill-Queen’s College Press, 2014), 81, 87.
[7] Linda Kealey, Enlisting Girls for the Trigger: Girls, Labour,and the Left in Canada, 1890-1920 (College of Toronto Press, 1998), 223.
[8] Harry and Mildred Gutkin, “Girls on the Barricades: Helen Armstrong and Others,” in Profiles in Dissent: The Shaping of Radical Thought within the Canadian West (NeWest Press, 1997), 235.
[9] For extra data concerning Armstrong and Hancox, see Gutkin and Gutkin, “Girls on the Barricades,” and David Thompson, “Extra Sugar, Much less Salt: Edith Hancox and the Passionate Mobilization of the Dispossessed, 1919-1928,” Labour/Le Travail 85 (2020): 127-163.
[10] “Girls Open Consuming Home in Strathcona Resort, Cor. Fundamental and Rupert,” Western Labor Information, Could 23, 1919; Gutkin and Gutkin, “Girls on the Barricades,” 238.
[11] James Naylor, Rhonda L. Hinther and Jim Mochoruk, eds. For A Higher World: The Winnipeg Common Strike and the Employees’ Revolt (College of Manitoba Press, 2022), 9.
[12] “Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander,” Western Labor Information, June 9, 1919.
[13] “Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander.”
[14] “Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander.”
[15] “A lot Noise and Discuss in Strike Parades.” Toronto Star, June 4, 1919.
[16] “Circumstances in Courtroom: J.S. Woodworth Remanded – Mrs. Armstrong Dedicated for Trial,” The Enlightener, June 26, 1919.
[17] Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 10.
[18] Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 23.
[19] Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 23.
[20] “The Strike Scenario in Winnipeg,” The Winnipeg Citizen, Could 21, 1919.
[21] “Girls Constables Wished,” Winnipeg Telegram Strike Editions, June 11, 1919.
[22] “Girls Constables Wished.”
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