The Fruits of Her Labor: Women, Children, and Progressive Era Reformers in the Pacific Northwest Canning Industry

Abstract

GREG HALL The Fruits of Her Labor Women, Children, and Progressive Era Reformersin the Pacific NorthwestCanning Industry "GIRLS MAKE FOOD FIGHT WAS the Portland News headlineat the outset of a 1913Oregon Packing Company strike. Women at the plant had had enough of low pay, poor working conditions, and an unsympathetic cannery management. The strikers quickly garnered the attention of local socialists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, religious lead ers, and area residents. Still, the newly formed Oregon Industrial Welfare Commission (OIWC) had themost influence in resolving the strike and addressing the concerns of women workers at the cannery and elsewhere in Oregon. The OIWC ? an institution that epitomized the Progressive Era? and its sister agency to the north in Washington dealt with a host of issues regarding women and children in theworkplace. Studying the rather underdeveloped history of the formative phase of thePacific Northwest can ning industry, itsworkforce, and the Progressives who sought to reform it offers a unique perspective on the changing role ofwomen as wageworkers in society, growing public concern about child labor, and state governments' evolving social and labor policy.1 At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first few decades of the twentieth, fruit and vegetable canneries in states on the Pacific Coast became primary employers of female workers ? adults and children. Canneries, which tended to hire females rather than males formost jobs, were major sources of employment forwomen and girls.At the same time, Progressives sought to improve working conditions, stabilize wages for women in canneries, and end child labor in the industry.2Pacific Northwest Progressives improved conditions, but, in the process, they undermined women's empowerment aswage laborers; whether they did so intentionally 226 OHQ vol. 109, no. 2 ? 2008 Oregon Historical Society IS Oregon was a battleground statefor theeight-hourdayforwomen. Here,Marie Michaels poses inan apron advertising thecauseforworkingwomen. The photographer,Franklyn Sowell,worked inPortland between 1911 and 1915. Hall, Progressive Era Reform in thePacificNorthwest Canning Industry 227 Women tookon temporaryand seasonal work inall sectorsof farm production, especiallyduring harvest.Sorting and packing apples ? such as in this photograph ofwomen and a man taken inYamhill County inabout 1902 ? was a common feature of rural life. or not isunclear in the historical record. They fostered a form of paternal istic government intervention that,on the one hand, helped eliminate child labor in canneries but, on the other hand, sought to discipline women into a compliant and domesticated workforce. Progressives generally assumed thatwomen wage workers would even tually become wives and mothers and leave theworkforce and, therefore, tended to think of them only in terms of temporary workers. They did not encourage women to organize their own unions, seemingly basing their work on the premise thatwomen and children could not defend themselves in theworkplace as well as men could. Labor laws protecting men were sporadic around the country and apparently lacked the comprehensive logic forwhich Progressives advocated regarding women's and children's labor laws. Progressive reformersworked to protect and preserve what they saw as women's femininity and maternalism. In The Wages of Motherhood, Gwendolyn Mink explores the concept of maternalism, an ideology that assumed thatmen (husbands) earning a familywage would solve the prob lem ofwomen having towork forwages. She also explains how Progressive Era reformers chose to lament, rather than to seek empowerment for, wage working women ? that is, they supported paternalistic state intervention 228 OHQ vol. 109, no. 2 rather than clear unionization. One of themost ardent groups associated with such maternalist orientation was theGeneral Federation ofWomen's Clubs, which "opposed the employment of mothers of young children." Operating under similar ideals inOregon was the Consumer's League, an organization that "lobbied for improvements" inworkplace protection forwomen and children, but not formen, in order to preserve "the future health of the race."3 In their efforts to regulate workplaces, western Progressives were follow ing national trends that have been outlined by Susan Lehrer inOrigins of Protective Labor Legislation forWomen, 1905-1925. Progressives, according to Lehrer and other scholars, thought of themselves as bringing order to industrial work life and rationalization to the labor process by demanding an end to the exploitation ? that is,underpayment and long hours ? of...