Outside of a very few industries, Black women did not get industrial employment in any appreciable number until the First World War, and then only precariously. Grace Lamb on the changed place of Black women workers.

‘Negro Women In Industry Are Facing Many Tasks’ by Grace Lamb from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 60. May 17, 1929.

PRIOR to the World War, Negro women were employed but little as factory workers. Their largest field of occupation was that of domestic and personal service and home and laundry work.

In the agricultural districts of the South, they were largely engaged in cotton picking and many assisted their husbands in independent farming, share cropping and tenant j farming. But as factory workers they were almost entirely limited to the tobacco industry, with the exception of women working in canneries in Southern states and in West Virginia.

Women Drafted in Industry.

With the coming of the World War and the virtual secession of European immigration and at the same time with the increased demands being made for goods and war munitions for use in Europe, the then existing factories were enlarged and new plants sprung up, especially in the South. During this period, young men, both Negro and white, were being drafted into the service of the army and navy by the thousands. The shortage of man power soon became acute and also the need for a greater number of skilled workers arose, hence, the necessity for women workers and literally thousands were called to fill places made vacant by the men.

Semi-skilled white women workers were promoted to the positions made vacant by skilled white men workers and Negro women were sought to replace them. Ere long, however, Negro women were employed in every branch of the textile industry, and worked peacefully besides white women workers. Many were being drawn into quilt factories, hosiery and knitting factories, in shirt factories, in paper box factories, in leather goods, as toy makers, flower and novelty workers.

Unemployment.

With the close of the war and the return of the soldiers to civil life, many manufacturers closed down, their plants while others curtailed their output, thus throwing out of employment thousands of women workers. The Negro women naturally suffered most. When they did not lose employment entirely they were frequently offered less desirable work and at lower wages with longer hours. Yet factory bosses did not entirely dispose of their labor. They preferred to use the Negro woman worker to crush all woman workers. They were even retained in the south.

In 1922 the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, reported that 33 1-3 per cent of Negro women included in their survey were working for 10 or more hours a day; 27.4 per cent worked 9 hours a day and only 20 per cent worked 8 hours a day. Three states in the union had legal working hours for women of 10 hours a day, one state had working hours of 11 hours a day and 2 had unlimited legal working hours. In the southern states all women in the peanut industry work 10 hours or mere per day. Women in the tobacco industry work 10 hours or more a day.

Works 21 Hours.

One colored woman, a tobacco worker, is quoted as saying, “If I have something to buy this week, I start at 6:30 in the morning and work and work until late at night.” In order to make enough to live, this survey continues, women were found working all through the lunch period.

The worse conditions were found in the glass factories in a state which has no laws to protect its working women. Here these women frequently work in two shifts of 8 hours each or 16 hours a day. One woman said that she on one occasion worked 21 hours continuously. In some factories, in order to prevent secession of working during work hours, water was passed to the women by a water carrier in a bucket with a common drinking cup. Besides the long hours of factory work the working day of the majority of Negro women workers is lengthened by home duties. For example, a woman having five small children, stated that she’ rises at five o’clock in the morning, dresses and feeds her children, and is on the job by seven, returns from work at six, does laundry, cleaning and cooking at night and retires past midnight, frequently too weary to sleep.

Unsanitary Factories.

The standard of working conditions in the factories employing Negro women is low. Toilet facilities are usually inadequate and unsanitary. Of fifty-nine southern factories which in all employed 5,447 Negro women, there were inadequate toilet accommodations. Three plants had only one toilet for 125, 109 and 100 persons respectively. The sanitary conditions were intolerable. In three plants employing close to five thousands women, the toilets had no outside windows. In tobacco factories, on account of the heavy dust and the strong fumes, the workers suffered from nausea and loss of appetite. In cement bag mending factories the dust is suffocating.

The Boss Talks.

A southern factory boss speaking to a federal investigator said: “We keep our Negro labor as bound and subservient as possible, because it does not pay to do otherwise. There is no need of giving them decent wages because they do not know what to do with them. Whenever they give us trouble we give them tough treatment, and that quells them for awhile. Rough treatment is the only thing that they can understand.”

The Worker Talks.

To such brutality and exploitation e is but one answer. The Negro women workers, together with the negro and white men and white women workers, employed in an industry where a militant left wing union already exists, must join it. There they must all together form shop committees and organize their locals. They must form new locals of the American Negro Labor Congress as the leader of the Negro workers. They must see to it that they are represented at the epoch-making Trade Union Unity Convention to be held in Cleveland June 1.

Most of all, they must join the party which leads the struggles of the working class for better conditions, the Communist Party of the United States.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n060-NY-may-17-1929-DW-LOC.pdf