The murder of union militant Alberta Bachman, striking the Mammoth Hosiery Mills in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania on February 24, 1931.

‘Stroudsburg Mill Owners Murder Woman Striker’ from Working Woman. Vol. 2 No. 3. March, 1931.

STROUDSBURG, Pa. A young woman striker of the Mammoth Hosiery Mills was murdered, last Tuesday, and three other strikers seriously injured. They were shot by gunmen hired by the mill owners.

The murder of the 20 year old hosiery striker Alberta Bachman is similar to the murder by mill bosses’ thugs of Ella May Wiggins in the Gastonia strike. Alberta and seven fellow-strikers were fired on by the company gunmen as the car in which they were riding stopped in front of a house occupied by hosiery workers whom the strikers were trying to get to join the strike.

Alberta was one of 35 pickets arrested the week before for militancy. The strikers have been so militant on the picket line that state troops were sent in at the request of the mill owners. The. Full Fashioned Hosiery Federation fakers have unsuccessfully tried to prevent the strikers from carrying on such a militant struggle.

The scabs went back to work in the mill, and a great crowd of angry strikers gathered outside and notified the sheriff that unless he arrested the killers, the strikers would go in and take them. Three scabs were arrested.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v2n03-mar-1931-WW-R7524-R2.pdf