Chicago Working Women’s Struggle for a Shorter Day, 1908–1911

Abstract

If Agnes Nestor and her fellow workers had not been on the job continuously, forcing the men to do what they had promised ... daily and hourly watching every turn of that bill, would have been defeated long ago.-Margaret Dreier Robins, President, Chicago Womens Trade Union League, June 2,19091IN 1909, FOUR WORKING WOMEN from Chicago attracted widespread notice for their success in securing passage of a law that made ten hours the maximum legal working day for a large number of Illinois women. The four who led the effort, according to the local press, not only ran a but also put the lobby of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association to rout. These girls, representing their unions of glove makers, laundresses, and waitresses, were active members of the Chicago Women's Trade Union League (CWTUL) and committed to improving in essential ways the lives of women workers. Although young (in their late twenties and thirties), all four-Agnes Nestor, Elizabeth Maloney, Anna Willard, and Lulu M. Holley-were earnest, determined, and tenacious. They bore little resemblance to the anarchists involved in the 1886 Haymarket bombing, which for decades had made it possible-even patriotic-to denounce all those connected with a demand for shorter But their class consciousness and their experience as workers set them apart from middle-class reformers. A Chicago contemporary described the trade unionists as industrial feminists. Practical activists, they wanted shorter hours, higher wages, and safer working conditions: in short, a fuller and more secure life.2The girl lobbyists achieved a significant, although incomplete, victory in 1909. They failed to obtain the eight-hour law they sought, and the new ten-hour law covered only those employed in factories, laundries, or mechanical establishments-women who worked in a gendered ghetto of unskilled, low-paying, dead-end jobs. Waitresses, who had helped spearhead the legislative effort, were not included. But, two years later, Maloney and Willard, officers of the Chicago Waitresses' Union (Local 484), returned to Springfield as part of Nestor's advance guard to broaden the scope of the law to cover workers like themselves and to limit a full workweek to fifty-four hours. Once again in 1911, their victory was only partial. To win protection for nearly all the state's women workers, they sacrificed the fiffy-four-hour restriction. And so it would remain for over a quarter of a century. Not until 1937 did the Illinois state legislature pass an eight-hour-day law.3The efforts of these trade unionists to obtain an eight-hour day have received scant attention from historians of labor or women. The success of thousands of male skilled workers in securing the eight-hour day for themselves through organization and combination during the 1890s seems to have rendered the fewer, less skilled female workers invisible. Yet they-regularly referred to as since most were young, unmarried, and firstor second-generation immigrants-were among the least powerful in the labor market. They continued to toil long, arduous days of between twelve and fourteen hours. As late as 1908 and 1909, in candy factories, a six-day-week was the rule and, during the busiest seasons, many women worked eighty or ninety hours a week. The same hourly practices governed other jobs in laundries, restaurants and hotels, factories, elevated roads, and department stores. And the attitude of employers was frequently contemptuous-like that of Clarence A. Knight, president of the Oak Park Elevated Road, who boasted that we give our girls no vacations... [and] if the hours of their labor are shortened they are likely to get a permanent vacation.4Knight's callousness regarding women workers was not unusual. It was remarkably similar, in fact, to the general attitude of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, which since its founding in the 1890s had successfully blocked a series of progressive labor reforms. …