‘Girls Strike in Minersville–I.W.W. on the Job’ by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from Solidarity. Vol. 2 No. 23. May 20, 1911.

Minersville, Pa., May 14. Pennsylvania is so generally regarded as a mining and steel producing state that little attention is paid the great army of women enrolled as toilers. Their long hours and miserably inadequate wages bear mute testimony to this neglect on the part of the movement. Pennsylvania ranks second in the number of women workers, New York coming first and Massachusetts third. There are over $400,000 women workers, and of these. 300,000 are in the textile industry.

Capitalists from New York and Philadelphia have enacted factories throughout the mining and farming regions and employed the surplus labor of the miners’ and farmers’ wives, daughters and sisters–paying them a lower wage scale than that required in the city on the sup- position that they lived cheaper at home, until you can find girls of 14 and 15 years earning only $1.50 and $2.00 per week and forewomen working for $9.00. The establishment of the textile mills and garment factories tends to reduce the wages of the men, on the grounds that the women are “self-supporting,” and tends to employ children of tender years, until the blight of women’s labor, child labor and miserably underpaid male labor reduces the community to a grinding struggle for bread, a mere animal existence.

In Minersville, Pa., a man named Coombs started such a factory, employed girls making men’s underwear. Business progressed and he built one in Tremont and a third in Mahoney City, until today, 12 years after his business career commenced, he is a comparatively wealthy man, owning houses in Minersville, a beautiful residence and automobile.

The girl operators worked originally for 12 1-2 cents per dozen pieces, but were cut to 10 cents, then to 8 cents. Twenty-six of them struck 10 weeks ago against this wholesale reduction and have made a splendid struggle ever since. They are entitled to much commendation, as many of them have worked in the factory for 12 years and never heard of a labor union.

On April 10th I was in here and held a street meeting with the object of closing down the factory and we succeeded beyond our expectations. Two hundred and fifty employes came out, including the pressers, cutters, binders, etc., closing the factories completely.

Then Coombs, anxious to head off a strike in Tremont, voluntarily raised the wages from 8 cents to 9 cents, and sent many of his Minersville orders there to be filled, virtually buying the Tremont girls to scab on the Minersville strikers.

On Monday I returned to this region and held a meeting for the benefit of the girls in mine workers’ hall. Over 800 tickets were sold and the affair was a great success. But just as I commenced speaking the fire whistle (which is located on the roof of Coombs’ factory) went off with a piercing shriek and the meeting was temporarily demoralized.

A committee was sent out to investigate, but no fire could be found, so the crowd calmed down and the ruse failed. The next day I learned that Coombs had been held responsible for the false alarm and had been fined accordingly.

Yesterday I went to Tremont to hold a street meeting with the object of inducing the girls to refuse to do scab work and to demand the 10 cent scale.

At about two minutes to six, while I was talking to the miners and some girls from another factory, Coombs rushed by in his automobile, looking very much excited.

He went into the factory, where he detained the girls for over five minutes, finally dismissing them in groups of three and four. He must have intimidated them drastically, for they went quickly past the meeting and home.

They could not be induced to remain while Coombs’ eagle eye was on them. It was an intensely dramatic, yet very pitiable spectacle, to see girls marched, convict style, afraid to stop a moment on the street corner, even after factory hours.

Never have I seen capitalism so raw in its brutal, bullying abrogation of workers’ rights.

But we are returning to Tremont Friday and intend to go regularly until success crowns our efforts.

I will keep Solidarity readers posted on developments. I am hopeful that this strike will be the beginning of a widespread rebellion among the women wage slaves of this vicinity.

ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1911/v02n23-w075-may-20-1911-Solidarity.pdf