You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday September 28, 1916
Denver, Colorado – Jane Street on Housemaids’ Union
The Denver’s Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union, Local No. 113 of the Industrial Workers of the World was founded last spring by Miss Jane Street. Today we offer part two (of two parts) of an article about that union and its tactics from The Washington Post of September 24, 1916:
How A Cold Storage Egg Started
The Servant Girls Union (Part II)
—–Miss Jane Street, organizer of the Housemaids’ Union, speaking of its purposes, said for publication in this newspaper:
Of all the abused people on earth none is worse treated than the general housemaid. The majority of housewives follow an aged tradition of looking down on those who serve them and their families and refuse to practice patience or give counsel or regard the women they hire as human beings with like impulses, like passions, like aims and hopes as their own.
No Money for Extra Work.
Can you tell me why, when the eight-hour law was passed for women, the housemaids were not included? A big, stout man will work for eight hours and quit, while a poor, frail housemaid works fourteen. If she gets through her housework she must answer doorbells, she cannot go to her room and rest.
The girl must be on her feet all day long, and frequently until 9 or 10 o’clock at night. Few women express appreciation or add a little money for the extra work done. We are going to try and correct such conditions. We will demand $12 a week and no work on Sundays, shorter days and better treatment. The average house servant has no leisure time, for cultivation nor rest during the day. Generally she cannot receive any friends she may have, and not infrequently she is looked upon more in the light of a slave than a self-respecting servant.
We intend to change this by a system of our own. You may call it sabotage or what you please. We will not poison food nor resort to any crude methods of violence. Members of the Housemaids’ union will resent ill treatment and quit. Yes, there will be a blacklist of Denver mistresses who ill treat their servants and eventually those women will not be able to get any servants. We hope to get the employment agencies to act with us.
“Here are some of the don’ts for the Housemaids’ Union,” she continued as she checked them off on her fingers:
Don’t wash the dog or the windows.
Don’t ‘tend furnace.
Don’t answer the door bell if you are the only maid in the house.A general housework maid is hired to do kitchen work, not to be a parlor maid. Every girl should have one day for herself. She should have a pleasant room, a good bed, good food; not left-over scraps, and, above all, she should be considerately treated as a human being.
Denver’s society leader, Mrs. Crawford Hill, holds much the same view as Jane Street, servant girl organizer, regarding the treatment of servants by their mistresses, Mrs. Hill says:
The Power of the Union.
Girls should be provided with a sitting room for the reception and entertainment of their friends. I hope that the union will correct the abusive treatment accorded many servants.
The only way to arrive at a practical understanding is for the girls to become more intelligent and for mistresses to become more humane, and for both to remember that any labor, however humble, may be dignified by the laborer.
However, not all of Denver’s housewives have much sympathy with the alleged ill treatment of servants and the plans of the union. One of the members of the housewives’ assembly, giving her unofficial opinion, said:
The average girl hiring out knows as little about her business as a Hotentot [Hottentot]. Many of them can’t cook; they know nothing about cleaning; waiting on table is an unknown art to them; as laundresses they are jokes, and from every point they fail. Yet they demand big wages, and become abusive when they are corrected or asked to do better than they are dong.
Anther prominent Denver society woman, Mrs. G L. McCord said:
Good heavens! We poor housewives of Denver can cry, “Help, Help.” Since the union started my cook has become so independent that we have been afraid to speak to her. She informed me this morning that she was going to leave. She said that she would get $55 a month in a smaller family than mine. She has worked less than eight hours every day; has had all her afternoons off, also her Sundays off; has been given a vacation in summer, and has had her own room and bath.
Mrs. Jasper Writer, another very wealthy Denver society woman, said:
I think the union will not be able to solve the “servant problem,” but if it can I will be for the union. Mistresses and servants should each try to be just to the other, and perhaps the mistresses should oftener consider the servants’ side of the case.
Mrs. H. A. Winter, president of the mothers’ congress, said:
I do not think the union will be the best thing to solve the difficulties between mistresses and servants. The different conditions existing in homes make it too difficult to establish any ironclad rules of conduct or even pay. There must be heart in housework to make it successful, and that condition must be established between individual mistresses and maids. I think the union will have the effect of making many girls too independent.
The charter members of the Housemaids’ Union are confident of the success of their plans, however. They have established headquarters in one of the business blocks, and in a few weeks plan to open a housemaids’ home, where members out of work or between jobs can stay. Its backers are a group of girls and and women who would dignify domestic labor by rewarding it with good pay and leisure for cultivation and enjoyment. The girls at the recent meetings who complained of their ever-lasting work, poor pay and inhuman treatment did not murder the king’s English when they got up to speak. They stated their wants in a straight forward, intelligent manner. Their clothing was not smart, but their faces were the faces of intelligent, determined American women.
The members declare that they will demand references from mistresses as soon as their organization is strong enough.
The kind of sabotage used will be for domestic workers to quit without notice, at the most opportune times: Serving meals late and general contrariness, wearing on the nerves of mistress until the employer is “trained.”
A long train of maids, who leave once a week, take no back-talk and demand the privileges they have long asked for in vain, is part of the program expected to bring about the desired results.
There will also be a secret blacklist on which the peccadilloes of harsh, niggardly and nasty tempered mistresses will be recorded.
Finally, the mistresses are perfectly free to order cold storage eggs-for their own consumption.
—–
SOURCES
The Washington Post
(Washington, District of Columbia)
-Sept 24, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/28842206/
Women and the American labor movement: from colonial times to the eve of World War I
-by Philip Sheldon Foner
Free Press, 1980
https://books.google.com/books?id=3vQEAQAAIAAJ
IMAGES
Jane Street, Baltimore Sun, Sept 24, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/214644123/
Jane Street, Blacklist, W(DC) Post, Sept 24, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/28842206/
Sabotage by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015079021849;view=2up;seq=1;size=75
See also:
Hellraisers Journal: How A Cold Storage Egg Inspired Organization of Domestic Workers’ I. U. (Part One)
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-how-a-cold-storage-egg-inspired-organization-of-domestic-workers-i-u/
Hellraisers Journal: Denver Housemaids’ Union, Led by Jane Street, Keeping a List of Unfair Mistresses
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-denver-housemaids-union-led-by-jane-street-keeping-a-list-of-unfair-mistresses/
Note: “Hottentot” is an offensive term for Khoikhoi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoikhoi
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Housemaids’ Defiance by Denver Housemaids’ Union
Lyrics & links to sheet music & karaoke download:
http://politicalfolkmusic.org/wordpress/denver-housemaids-union-the-housemaids-defiance/
We are coming all together;
We are organized to stay.
For nigh on fifty years or more,
We’ve worked for little pay.
But now we’ve got our union,
We’ll do it never more.
Chorus:
It’s a long day for housemaid Mary;
It’s a long day’s hard toil.
It’s a burden too hard to carry,
So our mistress’s schemes we’ll foil.
We’ll be silent no longer.
We won’t be kept down.
And we’re out for a shorter day this summer,
Or we’ll fix Denver town.
We’ve answered all your doorbells,
And we’ve washed your dirty kid.
For lo these many, weary years,
We’ve done as we were bid.
But we’re goin’ to fight for freedom,
And for our rights, we’ll stand.
And we’re goin’ to stick together
In One Big Union band.
We’ve washed your dirty linen,
And we’ve cooked your daily foods.
We’ve eaten in your kitchens,
And we’ve stood your ugly moods.
But now we’ve joined the union,
And we’re organized to stay.
You’ve paid the going wages.
That’s what kept us on the run.
You say you’ve done your duty,
You cranky son-of-a-gun.
We’ve stood for all your crazy bunk,
And still you rave and shout
And call us inefficient
And a lazy gad-about.
Tune: It’s a Long Way Down to the Soupline
-performed by Lucas Stark