Women in Labor History

Rosie the Riveter Trust
"Honoring those who toiled in the Arsenal of Democracy," Rosie the Riveter honors and commemorates the contribution of women to the home front in World War II.

Harriet Robinson: A mill girl in the Lowell Mills
Harriet Robinson worked the Lowell Mill in the early 1800’s. Her life and the lives of the women who worked in the Mills at Lowell Massachusetts in the early 1800’s are portrayed here.

Lucy Parsons
In the 1920s and '30s, the Chicago Police Department described Lucy Parsons as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters." She was a wife of one of the Haymarket Anarchists.

Mother Jones: The Miners Angel
"Mother" Jones was American Labor's best know "agitator" in the turn of the century era. She was especially close to the coal miners whom she referred to as her "boys," but she went anywhere when called on for help.

Fannie Sellins: In the Midst of Terror She Went Out to Her Work
Fannie Sellins was a famous labor organizer of the early 20th Century, killed by deputies during a Pennsylvania coal mine strike.

A Wartime Poem and a Recipe
The poem, The Welder, part of the larger Rosie the Riveter website, commemorates those women who toiled in the "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II.

Harriet Robinson: Lowell Mill Girls
In her autobiography, Harriet Hanson Robinson, the wife of a newspaper editor, provided an account of her earlier life as a female factory worker starting in 1834 at the age of ten. She worked in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Lowell Girls Art Gallery
This part of the Lowell Girls site has images of the women who worked at the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mill.

When Women were Knights
In the 19th century, the Knights of Labor adopt equal rights in the union for women.

Uses of Liberty Rhetoric Among Lowell Mill Girls
An online archive of women’s poetry, letters, images, songs, and speeches can be used to gather information about the ways nineteenth-century women used "liberty rhetoric" to argue for changes in their world. "Liberty Rhetoric" is a tradition of speaking about the relationship between the state and the citizen. In addition to sources there are questions to ponder to help understand the rhetoric.

Inside a Sweatshop: An Eyewitness Account
Olivia Given, the author, thought the sweatshops of my great-grandmother's day -- New York tenements where women toiled away in filthy, cramped rooms sewing dresses with children at their feet -- were long gone; done away with by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the rise of trade unions in the 1950s and '60s. But one bright Saturday morning in late July, two sweatshop workers, took a group of other students and Ms. Given to a modern day sweatshop in New York.

Heaven will Protect the Working Girls
Early in the twentieth century, the arrival of millions of immigrants, many from southern and eastern Europe, changed life across the United States. Framed by the 1909 shirtwaist workers’ strike, the video that this site accompanies, tells the story of two fictional NYC immigrant teenagers who worked in the garment industry in the first two decades of the twentieth century. There is a great deal to be found here without the video. The Timeline, the documents, photos and lesson plan are still useable without the video.

The Triangle Factory Fire
The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 young immigrant workers, is one of the worst disasters since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The website contains speeches, photographs, political cartoons, oral histories, lesson ideas and much more.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Building
This building is one of the "Places Where Women Made History", this one page gives a good synopsis of the importance of this place in labor history.

Triangle Fire: Photo Gallery
A collection of photos from this historical event in 1911; the workers who died were women and young girls.

Bread and Roses
Bread and Roses is the not-for-profit cultural arm of Local 1199, the National Health and Human Services Employees Union. Its 220,000 predominantly Latina and African American women members are employed in all job categories in health care institutions throughout the metropolitan area, New Jersey and Florida. Bread and Roses was founded in 1979 as a cultural resource for union members and students in New York City who would otherwise have little access to the arts. Special emphasis is given to programs that signify and interpret their history while generating new artistic expression.