A born rebel from a mining camp near Terre Haute; the story of Jane Roberts’ participation in 1931’s National Hunger March.

‘Jane Roberts from Indiana Mine Camp Tells How She Joined Fight’ by Ann Barton from Working Woman. Vol. 3 No. 1. January, 1932.

Leaving cookstoves and dishes, woman’s traditional heritage, arranging for the safe care of babies, the women took off their apron, and alongside their men piled into the long line of cars and trucks wending their way into Washington to demand Unemployment Insurance on December 7th.

Women from every section, of every age, nationality, Negro and white were in that mass on December 7th, thundering into the ear of President Hoover and the rest of the bosses’ crew making the laws there, the demand for Unemployment Insurance so that their babies might be fed.

In all the rigors of the long trip, traveling in small trucks during the day, sleeping on cold floors at nights, protesting in Pittsburgh and at Washington, the inconveniences heaped by a defiant though nervous city government–the women showed an endurance and militancy unexcelled by the men.

Jane Roberts came all the way from Terre Haute, Ind., where she is organizing the women into the Unemployed Councils. Jane is 28, married, with little children. She has some Cherokee Indian in her blood. Her story is perhaps very little different from the stories of the other working-class women who went along.

“It’s more important for me to be here now, than to do anything else I’ve got to do,” Jane said. “Maybe I’ve always been a rebel, but I can’t believe men and their children got to starve when there’s so much, I just packed up my babies and took them to my mother in-law. I told her it’s for them I’m going to Washington.” She gazed up at the walls of the Salvation Army flop-house, and across the street, where the 1600 were ready to again mount trucks and return to their respective places to tell that the President, the White House, the Senate refused to see the representatives of the unemployed, that Green of the A.F. of L had dismissed their claims by calling them Reds.

Jane told her story:

“I was brought up in a little mining camp outside Terre Haute. We sure lived a hard life. My mother died when I was a growing girl. So I had the job of taking care of the younger ones. I was going to school. I had my lessons to do. Then I had to get up not very long after daybreak to cook breakfast  for my daddy, to straighten up the house and get the kids off. I wanted badly to go to school. But it was too much for me. I broke down. I had to give up school. I always felt things weren’t as they should be. Daddy and I used to talk it over his working hard in the mines, getting little enough for it we used to think and hope for the time the poor man would get together and get what was coming to him.”

Jane spoke of her early marriage–the one way out for a girl in a mining camp. Then of course she finds out it is only a continuation of the same life, with the additional care of babies.

“Girls sort of drift into marrying in mining camps,” Jane said; “they marry their next-door neighbor or something like that.”

“Yes, I was always a rebel–I remember dad’s forbidding me to go swimming with the boys once because I was a girl–I just could not get over that–it made me so mad. Why couldn’t I do the things I wanted to just because I was a girl? I remember I went anyway.”

Jane married again. More hard times, her husband lost his job. He began reading the Daily Worker received daily by a neighbor. The questions Jane and her father asked themselves were answered there. Jane and her husband talked it over. He found out about the Unemployed Council from these neighbors. Her husband joined, then explained to Jane that her place was also in that organization. Jane went to a few meetings, heard some speeches, then after thinking about it. for a few days, decided this was her fight and turned in her application to join.

“The women got to be organized,” Jane said. “Often they can make or break a man if they get into the fight alongside their men, there’s nothing to hold the both of them back. I’m going back to Terre Haute and busy myself with getting women into the Council.

“It was a great thing I saw here. I’ll never forget that the President of the United States wouldn’t even see us–that he’s a boss too. I’ll tell it to every family, to every woman, to every person I talk to–well, goodbye, as the truck, looking like an old covered wagon of the pioneering days made ready to leave.

Jane and the other women of the Hunger March are the women of today, putting by their pots and pans to second importance, considering their main task, the organizing of the women who will take part in the coming struggles of the working-class and help to lead them.

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/v3n01-jan-1932-WW-R7524-R2.pdf