Over the years, thousands of valiant women have risked their livelihoods—and sometimes their lives—to agitate for better pay and decent working conditions. For her 2012 Labor Day post in Women’s Voices, historian Janet Golden selected these eight as particularly staunch, fearless, and effective advocates—women who have made a difference. How many of us even know their names? To learn more about them, see Golden’s article. —ED
FRANCES PERKINS
What a woman! Regrettably, very few people these days have heard of her, but as the first female presidential cabinet officer—Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor—she helped to craft, and zealously promoted, such New Deal legislation as unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and the Social Security Act.
ROSIE THE RIVETER
This U.S. postal stamp honors “the Janes who made the planes,” the 8 million to 16 million women employed in factories, shipyards, and other workplaces during World War II. They did make the planes—and the ships and the tanks and the trucks and the ammunition so essential to allowing the Allies to win the war.
ROSE SCHNEIDERMAN
“There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death [in the Triangle fire],” lamented Rose Schneiderman, another labor heroine who deserves the honor of a stamp. She was an immigrant labor leader active in organizing with the International Ladies Garment Workers in New York City, where she led the strike of shirtwaist makers known as the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” in 1913. (Photo: Kheel Center)
MOTHER JONES
Mary Harris Jones was so formidable an activist on behalf of beleaguered American workers in the 1870s that a United States Attorney reportedly called her “the most dangerous woman in America.” She earned the epithet for her years traversing the nation to aid striking miners, machinists, streetcar workers, and garment workers.
ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN
“That’s the rebel girl, that’s the rebel girl/For the working class she’s a precious pearl.” So went a song by legendary labor activist Joe Hill. That rebel girl was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a firebrand with the Industrial Workers of the World, who helped lead the famous “Bread and Roses” textile strike, “the strike that shook America,” in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and strikes in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913.
Two contemporary labor leaders should also be honored, when the time comes, with postage-stamp fame: Lillian Roberts and Dolores Huerta.
LILLIAN ROBERTS
Lillian Roberts, 87, one of the few African-American labor leaders, “wrestled with the mayor” as director of New York City’s largest public-employee union, District Council 37. Before she took that post, she served as a New York State Labor Commissioner and as a union leader, as well as working in the private sector. She spent 60 years fighting for workers; she retired from the District Council only last year, at 86.
DOLORES HUERTA
Dolores Huerta, 85, co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez; as a BlogHer post notes, Herta “brought the Farm Workers’ plight to America’s consciousness in the early 60’s.” Since then she has maintained an active career as a labor leader. She now leads the Dolores Huerta Foundation in its work in community social justice organizing. Several years ago she was awarded the Medal of Freedom. At the ceremony, President Obama acknowledged that he had stolen her slogan: “Yes, We Can!”
