Hellraisers Journal – Thursday November 21, 1912 Photograph of Anna Rudnitzky of the 1910 Chicago Garment Makers’ Strike
From The Progressive Woman of November 1912:
From Life and Labor of April 1912:
Time Is Passing
[by Anna Rudnitzky]
Anna Rudnitzky
I HAVE so much I want to say. What bothers me most is time is passing. Time is passing and everything is missed. I am not living, I am just working.
But life means so much, it holds so much, and I have no time for any of it; I just work. Am I not right?
In the busy time I work so hard; try to make the machine run faster and faster because then I can earn some money and I need it, and then night comes, and I am tired out and I go home and I am too weary for anything but supper and bed. Sometimes union meetings, yes, because I must go. But I have no mind and nothing left in me. The busy time means to earn enough money not only for today but to cover the slack time, and then when the slack time comes I am not so tired, I have more time, but I have no money, and time is passing and everything is missed.
Romance needs time. We can think about it, yes, but to live it needs time. Music I love, to hear it makes me happy, but it is passing. The operas and the theatres and the dramas, they are here but for me they are just passing. To study, to go to high school, to the university, I have no time and I have no money.
Then the world is so beautiful. I see the pictures of the trees and the great rivers and the mountains,and away back in Russia I was told about Niagara Falls. Now why if I work all day and do good work, why is there never a chance for me to see all these wonders?
I have been thinking. First we must get a living wage and then we must get a shorter work-day, and many, many more girls must do some thinking. It isn’t that they do not want to think, but they are too tired to think and that is the best thing in the Union, it makes us think. I know the difference it makes to girls and that is the reason I believe in the Union. It makes us stronger and it makes us happier and it makes us more interested in life and to be more interested is oh, a thousand times better than to be so dead that one never sees anything but work all day and not enough money to live on. That is terrible, that is like death.
And so now the Women’s Trade Union League has helped me so much, and the Union has helped me so much, and I want to help others, and so we must have “Life and Labor” written in Yiddish too so that all the Jewish girls can understand. And then I think we ought to have it in Polish and Bohemian and Lithunian and Italian. Can you do this? How can I help you to do it?
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