You will hear arguments that labor unions are obsolete. Twenty-eight states have passed anti-union legislation.
Take one minute and watch the video below. Let Nancy inspire you! More than sixty-five million people in America work day in and day out as family caregivers, nannies, housekeepers and home healthcare workers—that's more than the populations of California and Texas combined. Yet, they are mostly invisible except to the families they serve. They work with many of our most vulnerable people, the elderly, the disabled, the very young. No surprise, our economy does not value this and they have few legal protections. Many tolerate low, or no pay and abusive employers. D’Rosa Davis is a member of the Atlanta Chapter of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which lobbies for workers rights and fair compensation. She told Caring Acros Generations, “I earn $9 an hour....I work 70 hours one week, and then around 45 the next week...Like any mom I wish I didn’t haven’t to work so much — but when at $9 an hour what choice do I have? Earning so little means I can’t do much with my kids — and that breaks my heart." Traditional labor union bargaining over wages and hours doesn't work between families and caregivers, inspiring young activists like Ai-jen Poo to be creative. (I told you about her here....) Ai-Jen Poo (left) works to bring together a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the community to work together to improve the lives of workers and change the way we as a culture perceive labor. She told me, "As inequality continues to rise & technology transforms jobs, we must reaffirm the value & centrality of work, and build a movement that allows workers to be a part of shaping the future of work." Again, not surprising, it's mostly women's work she's talking about. Ninety percent of home health aides and 95% of domestic workers are women. Women are 47% of our country's workforce, and nearly half of them contribute an equal share to the family budget or are the primary breadwinners in the family. Ninety percent of working women do not belong to unions. Another group of hard working, women who often live in poverty are restaurant servers. According to Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC) 70% of the people waiting tables are women, and they suffer “the worst sexual harassment of any industry in the United States.” Aisha Thurman, told ROC, male customers “think, you know, my body is for them to enjoy, to look at, touch, say what they want. They think if they throw me a couple dollars in the form of a tip, it’s OK.” Immigrants who fear deportation if they complain of abuse and women of color have it the worst. A recent report by the Institute of Policy Research, found that while black women vote at high rates, are increasingly earning college degrees and succeeding in owning their own businesses, they still earn less than white men and women. • Black women who worked full-time and year-round had median annual earnings that were 65% percent what white men earn. • Nearly a quarter of the nation’s black women,live in poverty, more than twice the percentage of white women. Then there's the hotel/motel industry... A study of phone calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline showed 124 reports came in concerning "slave" workers in the hospitality industry in the last nine years. (Non-sex related) Another 510 calls reported workplace abuse and labor violations. Calls to a hotline most likely represent the tip of an iceberg. At left, Sonia Guevara, employed at a downtown Seattle hotel, voiced support for Initiative 124 which assured hotel workers new rights related to assault and sexual harassment, injuries, workloads, medical care and changes in hotel ownership. Though some labor activist methods may be new, one part that doesn't changes is the importance of inspiring workers to believe they deserve better and to have the courage to take risks to better their situation. Some other women in the new labor movement you might like to check out are Saru Jayaraman who founded ROC to aid restaurant workers, Nadia Marin Molina who has a labor rights resume a page long, and Sarita Gupta at Jobs With Justice. These women are not afraid to take on company bosses. They are also working creatively to build broad support across communities for workers rights and greater justice in the lives of poor women and children. Plenty to think about and celebrate as we enjoy the last long weekend of summer. During my research into the American WWII Nurses captured POW by the Japanese, I learned they were the "first large group" of American women sent into combat. When I wrote PURE GRIT I didn't know about the Hello Girls, a group of American women, telephone operators, who volunteered for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War I. The terms "large group" and "combat" can be debated, but what's clear is that here is another group of brave women that have only recently begun to take their rightful place in history. Grace Banker (right) was one of 223 women telephone operators who shipped out to England and France with American troops to aid communication between commanders and soldiers on the battlefield. Grace was the chief operator of a small group sent to the front during the Muese-Argonne Offensive, the deadliest campaign in U.S. military history, killing 26,000 Americans in the final terrible onslaught that ended the war. The seven women operators worked near Verdun, France, connecting calls while German planes flew overhead and shrapnel landed close by. On October 30, 1919, two weeks before the war ended, a number of buildings housing American headquarters went up in flames. The women were ordered to leave the switchboard, but they refused, continuing to connect calls as the fire raged nearer and nearer. They refused to leave their posts until threatened with disciplinary action by their superior officer. When the fire was doused an hour later, the women returned to the switchboard, found some of the lines still working and picked up where they had left off. The seven women later received Distinguished Service Medals for their courage and dedication to duty. When U.S. troops arrived to join the war in Europe, they found the telephone service in France badly damaged by years of combat. Signal Corps crews quickly stretched a far-flung web of lines across Allied territory to hook up communication between units in battle, supply depots and military headquarters. General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces was frustrated with French telephone operators who didn't speak English and tended to spend time on social niceties before connecting calls. He sent an urgent appeal to American newspapers for women who could speak French, operate the complicated switchboards, and free up men for combat. Seven-thousand women applied. Only 450-were chosen for military training, and half of those deployed to Europe. Most were already trained operators employed by U.S. telephone companies, and dexterous enough to connect five calls in the time a man did one. During the Muese-Argonne Offensive, they connected over 150,000 calls a day. Identity papers for Blanche B. Grande-Maitre (above) show her to be five-foot-two and 110 pounds. The contracts the Hello Girls signed differed little from army enlistment papers, and they "signed up for the duration." hey were treated just like soldiers and subject to the same “discomforts and dangers” including unheated barracks, bombings and mortar fire, according to the Oct. 4, 1918 edition of the army newspaper Stars and Stripes. “According to their superior officers, both in the Signal Corps and on the General Staff, they have shown remarkable spirit and utter absence of nerves.” General Pershing praised the women's work, saying they had more patience and perseverance for the job than men, and other officers believed they played a crucial role in helping win the war. But like the nurses in Pure Grit, when the hostilities ceased and they returned home, because they were women, they were not given their due. The Hello Girls did not qualify as veterans, receiving no benefits, and only a handful were recognized with medals. It took an act of congress, and sixty years before the Hello Girls received their Honorable army discharges, veteran status and victory medals. Fifty of the women remained alive to enjoy the moment. First day of summer, I dragged out my bicycle, my wonderful husband pumped up the flat tires, and I vowed to start riding it more and driving the car less. To inspire myself, I'm writing the story of Gino Bartali, one of the greatest cyclists of all time and a genuine hero. “Good is something you do, not something you talk about. Some medals are pinned to your soul, not to your jacket.” So said this two-time winner of the Tour de France. Above, Gino Bartali in 1936. In between his cycling victories, Bartali helped save some 800 Jews from the Nazis. Gino Bartali grew from humble beginnings in rural Tuscany, his father a day laborer, his mother a lace maker. At age 11 he rode a bicycle to school in Florence from his village Ponte a Ema. Wheeling through the Tuscany hills, Gino developed a love for cycling, and a heart for tackling mountains. He won his first race at the age of 17, and at 24, rode to victory in the 1938 Tour de France, gaining international acclaim. Back in Italy, Benito Mussolini wanted to claim Bartali's victory as proof Italians were part of the master race, but in a risky move, Gino refused to go along with the fascist dictator. When World War II sidetracked Gino's cycling career, he found an even more valuable way to use his bike. In 1943, Germany occupied Italy and the Nazis started shipping Italian Jews to concentration camps. Bartali agreed to aid the Italian Resistance as a courier. Under the guise of long training rides and wearing an Italian racing jersey, Bartali risked his life transporting photographs and counterfeit documents in the hollow frame and handlebars of his bicycle. The photos and documents provided Italian Jews with false identity cards to protect them from the Nazis. People caught helping Jews evade capture were often executed immediately. Bartali saved a friend Giacomo Goldenberg and his family by providing food and hiding them in an apartment he owned in Florence. Without his help, the family would most probably have died in the Holocaust. At left, the Goldenberg family--Elvira and Giacomo with their son Giorgio and their daughter Tea. In July 1944, Bartali was arrested and interrogated at Villa Triste in Florence, where local Fascist officials questioned and tortured prisoners. Fortunately, one of the interrogators had known Bartali before the war and convinced the others he should be let go. When the war was over, Gino went back to racing, racking up a third career victory in the Giro d'Italia in 1946, shown above. Then he shocked the cycling world by returning to win the Tour de France again, ten years after his first victory. No other cyclist has achieved that feat.
Bartali was known as a fierce competitor up until he retired at age 40, after being injured in a road accident. He was somewhat of a loudmouth on the cycling circuit, but modest about the fact he's credited with helping save the lives of hundreds of people. The story did not come out before he passed away in 2000. Biographer, Ali McConnon told CNN, "He was very modest about it. He held a profound sense that so many had suffered in a much greater capacity than he had. He didn't want to be in the spotlight or diminish the contributions of others." Bartali rarely spoke of his actions in the war. When asked by another reporter to recount his greatest victory, Gino said, “I won the challenge of life, winning the love of the people.” Now, there's a man who's inspiring in a good number of ways!
Imagine devoting your entire adult life to a cause, living more than 90-years, and dying with unfinished business.
Alice Paul believed that men and women should be equal partners in society, and she was behind most 20th Century efforts for women's rights in the United States, including women's right to vote. Now, close to 100 years after Alice Paul started the fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, women in the U.S. are still second class citizens under the law. (See video below)
In October 1917, Alice Paul and three other suffragists were arrested for protesting at the west gate of the White House. She did not go quietly, believing that equal rights for women would not be gained without extreme measures.
Confined behind bars, her only power was refusing to eat. She had resorted to hunger strikes before when arrested in England. When the forcible feeding was ordered I was taken from my bed, carried to another room and forced into a chair, bound with sheets and sat upon bodily by a fat murderer, whose duty it was to keep me still. Then the prison doctor, assisted by two woman attendants, placed a rubber tube up my nostrils and pumped liquid food through it into the stomach. Twice a day for a month, from November 1 to December 1, this was done. ~Alice Paul Talks, Philadelphia Tribune, January 1910.
A new biography of Alice Paul brings the story of this less-well-known suffragist to teenagers in ALICE PAUL AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS.
Author Deborah Kops agreed to talk with me about Alice's passion and determination. Deborah Kops: I am awed by Paul’s courage and her willingness to risk her life to help women win the vote. Her health was fragile, and she jeopardized it on a regular basis when she was young. Paul went on her longest hunger strike, which lasted three weeks, in 1917, when she was in jail in Washington, D.C. (she went on three hunger strikes years before in the UK). For most of that time, she was force fed, which is very painful. A hunger strike was her only means of fighting her imprisonment and reminding the public that women wanted the ballot. She and the other Woman’s Party members who went without food (more than twenty) got plenty of coverage in newspapers around the country, which embarrassed Woodrow Wilson. Less than two months after Paul’s release, Wilson finally announced his support for the woman suffrage amendment. The amendment was ratified August 18, 1920.
Above: Fellow Suffragists protesting Alice Paul's arrest and incarceration for picketing the White House. Photo courtesy of the Historic National Women's Party, Sewell-Belmont House and Museum, Washington D.C.
Deborah, this book seems personal to you. (Author pictured below)
I became a feminist during the women’s movement of the late sixties and early seventies, which historians call the second wave. And I assumed that the Equal Rights Amendment, which we were fighting for, was written in the sixties. I learned that the amendment was Alice Paul’s idea and that she wrote it in 1923! A century later, when Hillary Clinton made her acceptance speech as the first woman nominated by a major political party for the presidency, I was very touched to see her wearing white, the color that suffragists often wore beneath their sashes. When I joined the Women’s March in Boston in January, I was very proud to wear a sash with the National Woman’s Party colors—purple, white, and gold—over my jacket. Thank you for taking time for this interview, Deborah, and for writing about this courageous woman! You can see all of Deborah Kops books at her website here, including The Great Molasses Flood: Boston, 1919 which Kirkus Reviews calls A fascinating account of a truly bizarre disaster. Back to the Equal Rights Amendment. If you know anyone living in the states colored yellow below...ask them if they know their state has not ratified the ERA. Then check out the video below (it's less than two minutes long). Feel free to forward this newsletter. Thanks www.equalrightsamendment.org for the map. Just three weeks ago Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the ERA (45 years to the day after Congress passed it). This year ERA bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. So excited today to interview Author Kate Moore talking about courage, and her soon-to-be-released-in-the-US book THE RADIUM GIRLS: THE DARK STORY OF AMERICA'S SHINING WOMEN. (Audio Book cover below) Young women hired to paint glow-in-the-dark numbers on wrist watches in the 1910-20s were (in)dispensable to United States Radium, a manufacturer of one of the hottest new products of the era. 'The first thing we asked was, “Does this stuff hurt you?” And they said, “No.” The company said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we didn’t need to be afraid.’ Catherine Donohue and co-workers died of that "stuff." Their courage established a precedent that led to workers' rights to hold their employers accountable when their job makes them sick. I asked Kate Moore, what was it like to uncover the details of these women's fight for acknowledgement of their suffering? Kate Moore: "Well, it was extraordinary. And a real privilege – to feel like I was learning what they’d been through. It was particularly striking because for nearly a century no one had listened to their voices and words that were there in the archives all along. It was shocking to realize how cruelly they had been treated. It was sobering to uncover what they’d suffered physically. And it was inspiring to learn that despite all this they never gave up fighting and were always there for each other." During WWI, U.S. Radium produced a high-tech paint containing radium called Undark which allowed U.S. soldiers to read their wristwatches and instrument panels at night. After the war the company used Undark to manufacture a variety of products from buckles on bedroom slippers to gasoline gauges. While scientists began to learn more about the dangers of radium, the corporation continued to tell the public it was safe in small quantities. But the factory women were exposed to much higher levels. Their clothing often glowed when they arrived home from work, and some women painted their fingernails with the fizzy, shining paint. When they began to sicken and die, nobody believed them when they said Undark was killing them. New hires at U.S. Radium, many of them teenagers, were trained to suck the tip of their paintbrush to achieve a fine point in order to coat radium on the tiny numbers of wrist watches. Like clockwork, they painted hands and digits on some 200 watch faces a day at five cents a piece, a good income at the time. The tiny amounts of radium they swallowed before painting each numeral acted like calcium stored away in their bones, except it didn't strengthen their bones, it diseased them, bombarding radiation throughout their bodies. Kate (right) learned in her research that male lab technicians working in the very same company must have known something the women didn't. Company chemists used lead screens, masks, and tongs when working with the paint. Five women won their lawsuit against the company in the 1930s, but they were shunned by neighbors, and forty years later men at the company still believed the women had been lying. Kate Moore: I tried to empathise with the women as deeply as I could. Their letters and interviews obviously give an incredible insight into them. So I did feel, as best I could, that I knew Catherine. I had to, in order to write her story. There were two things that struck me. The first was how ordinary she was, in a way: a mother, a wife, a friend. A woman who got lonely when no one could visit her in a distant hospital. A woman who got worried when her husband couldn’t find work. The second, of course, was how extraordinary she was: the way she kept fighting for her children, her husband, her friends. Catherine Donohue fainted during a court hearing when a doctor described how she had no hope of recovering from radium poisoning. Later lawyers visited her at home, as she testified from her deathbed. www.amazon.com/Fannie-Never-Flinched-Struggle-American/dp/1419718843Kate Moore:The photographs of her from June 1938, shortly before her death, show how emaciated she was, yet her spirit burned so strongly inside her, despite the weakening of her body. She was determined never to give up. Journalists talked of their surprise at the passion in her voice because of the frailty of her body. She fought to the death for this cause. Catherine said her faith sustained her. I think a lot of it was also to do with friendship. She had seen friends die from the same cause that had made her sicken and I think she was determined to hold the company to account. What these women went through physically was horrific: losing their teeth and jawbones, constantly pus-seeping mouths, broken limbs and backs, huge tumors. They were crippled and killed. And they knew the company was to blame. So I think the sheer injustice of it also fired their courage. Thank you, Kate! I appreciate you taking the time for an interview. Five dial painters sued the Orange, New Jersey defense contractor for $250,000 each, but couldn't wait for trial delays and roadblocks engineered by the company. They were dying. After initial hearings in 1927, the women accepted a mediated settlement, $10,000 per woman, plus legal and medical expenses, and a $600 per year annuity for as long as they lived. U.S. Radium ended up paying few annuities. You can pre-order the book here... Reminder: In celebration of Women's History Month, I'm giving away a copy of Fannie Never Flinched, a CD of Labor Singer Anne Feeney and a free Skype Author visit to your book group, union meeting, library or school. Enter here... |
I'm fascinated to discover little-known history, stories of people and events that provide a new perspective on why and how things happened, new voices that haven't been heard, insight into how the past brought us here today, and how it might guide us to a better future.
I also post here about my books and feature other authors and their books on compelling and important historical topics. Occasionally, I share what makes me happy, pictures of my garden, recipes I've made, events I've attended, people I've met. I'm always happy to hear from readers in the blog comments, by email or social media. Archives
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