WOMEN'S WORK
The story of the workers-rights movement in America is, for the most part, a sad one. It has inspired a lot of downbeat – and famous – novels, such as The Octopus, Frank Norris’s epic of California wheat farmers fighting an effort by the Pacific & Southwestern Railroad to take possession of their land, In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck’s tale about an activist trying to organize impoverished and mistreated California fruit pickers, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s story about poor and abused workers in Chicago’s meat-packing industry, and many others. As in most other avenues of American life, the women who have written novels about the struggles of the working class have generally gotten less attention, less credit, and, presumably, less money than their male counterparts. Most of the best-known novels about working-class Americans, even working-class females, are the work of male writers, men like Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, etc.), Stephen Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), and David Graham Phillips (Susan Lenox: Her Fall andRise). On this Labor Day, I’d like to take a small step towards correcting that historic wrong by recognizing five excellent novels about the labor struggle written by women. All of these books were published between 1979 and 1992, an era roughly concurrent with the Reagan-Bush years. While the largely masculine Republican Party of the time was working to weaken workers’ rights, these five women pushed back with novels that dramatized exactly why those rights were so essential.
Call the Darkness Light by Nancy Zaroulis
Set in industrial Lowell, Massachusetts, in the days before the Civil War, this novel demonstrates that many of those enlightened 19th Century New England freethinkers who were patting themselves on the back for their opposition to slavery in the South weren’t nearly as progressive as they liked to think. Under their noses they allowed a form of indentured servitude that was little better than what the slaves endured below the Mason-Dixon line. In the early 19th century, Lowell became known as The City of Spindles, because of all the textile mills in the city. Thousands of girls (some as young as 10) were recruited from farms and villages all over New England to come work at the mills in Lowell. Many of them came in desperation, escaping from poverty or an abusive father. In Lowell, they worked on average 73 hours per week. They were paid three or four dollars a week but the companies charged them about a dollar a week to live in the overcrowded boarding houses they maintained near their factories. The landladies who oversaw these boarding houses often squeezed extra money out of the girls’ by blackmail, threatening to report them to the company if they came in after curfew or were caught with liquor in their rooms. Zaroulis does a good job of capturing this dynamic, showing how the girls were preyed upon not only by the wealthy textile companies but by everyone above them on the corporate ladder. The girls were preyed upon sexually by their male supervisors. They were fired if they married or became pregnant. They were forced to sign contracts obliging them to remain with the mill for a period of several years. If they broke the contract they were blackballed. Thus they had no bargaining power, no ability to seek a better position at another mill. All this occurred at a time when the mill owners were enjoying an average annual return on their investment of 14 percent, and could easily have afforded to pay better wages and provide better working conditions. Appallingly, the factory girls of Lowell were regarded as beneficiaries of enlightened American capitalism. Charles Dickens visited the city’s factories in 1842 and proclaimed them a vast improvement over English factories, which was no doubt true but a sad commentary on the lives and conditions of the working people of the “civilized world.”
Lowell’s reputation for enlightened capitalism took a hit on January 10, 1860, when the famous Pemberton Mill collapsed, killing 145 workers, most of them girls, and injuring another 166. It remains the worst industrial “accident” in Massachusetts history. But it was really no accident. The factory collapsed because its owners, in order to increase profits, crammed more heavy machinery into the mills’ upper floors than the structure was designed to handle. Zaroulis dramatizes the disaster and its aftermath in brutal detail. Her book was published in 1979, just a few months after the release of Martin Ritt’s film Norma Rae, which dramatizes a female textile worker’s battle for fair labor practices. The film became an instant classic, earning four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and winning two of them (most famously a Best Actress Oscar for star Sally Field). The book, on the other hand, received little fanfare upon publication and hasn’t garnered much since. But in a fair world, it would be as celebrated as Norma Rae is and as widely read as The Grapes of Wrath.
Emmeline by Judith Rossner
Published just one year later, Rossner’s novel covers much the same ground as Zaroulis’s. It takes place in pre-Civil War Lowell, MA, and its heroine is a 13-year-old female mill worker. At roughly half the length of Call the Darkness Light, Emmeline can’t provide the same kind of immersive experience as the former novel, but in its own terse way it manages to be just as compelling. As you might expect from the author ofLooking For Mr. Goodbar, Rossner applies a pulp-fiction sensibility to the plight of Lowell’s largely female workforce. But the world these women and girls occupied was so lurid and brutal and savage that, as it turns out, pulp fiction – with its tortuous plot twists, sudden shocking revelations, and merciless gaze into the abyss – was exactly the right choice for this novel. In 1996, composer Tobias Picker and librettist J.D. McClatchy turned this lowly pulp fiction into, of all things, a critically-praised opera!
The Midwife by Gay Courter.
This novel has been credibly put forward as possibly the first ever written on a word processor – and it is without a doubt the first-ever commercially successful novel written by a woman on a word processor. If that were its only claim to fame, however, it would not be worth reading. Fortunately, the book has a lot more to recommend it. It is the tale of Hannah Sokolow, a Russian Jew who emigrates from Odessa to New York City following the horrific pogroms of 1905. Hannah was a medical student in Russia but, in New York, due to her poverty, her imperfect English, her gender, and other handicaps, she has no chance of becoming a doctor. To keep her family from starving, Hannah pursues a career as a midwife. In the early 20th century, childbirth was something that usually took place at home. Doctors, most of them male, thought it beneath their dignity to deal with the birthing of babies. Thus, a subterranean network of midwives thrived for decades. But, as the professional medical associations began to see how much money could be made by forcing pregnant women to deliver in hospitals, they went about lobbying for public health ordinances that would discourage home births and place onerous restrictions and licensing requirements on midwives. Most of these doctors were less skilled at delivering babies than an experienced midwife. And many of their deliveries in those early days, even when they weren’t fraught with difficulty, were done without much concern for the comfort or health of the mother. Courter documents all this brilliantly in a long novel whose eight major sections each revolve around a dramatic natal delivery.
Despite being about labor, in two different senses of the word, the book isn’t about any specific labor union. Nonetheless it comments frequently on the class struggle in America.
Rivington Street by Meredith Tax
In many ways Meredith Tax’s novel reads like, if not a sequel to The Midwife, at least a companion piece. The two books have a lot in common. The Midwife was published in 1981; Rivington Street was published in 1982. The Midwife begins in Russia in 1904 and is the story of a young Jewish woman named Hannah forced by anti-Jewish violence to emigrate to New York City with her family. Rivington Street begins in Russia in 1903 and is the story of a young Jewish woman named Hannah forced by anti-Jewish violence to emigrate to New York City with her family. Despite the similarities, Rivington Street differs from The Midwife in many ways. For one thing childbirth is only a minor issue in Tax’s novel. Also, Tax’s novel specifically engages with the history of the American labor movement. Actual historical figures, such as American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, appear as characters in Rivington Street. The pivotal event in the novel, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, was a pivotal event in the history of the American labor movement. It was a horrific fire, the deadliest industrial “accident” in the history of New York City, which claimed the lives of 146 low-paid garment workers, the vast majority of them Italian and Jewish immigrant women ranging in age from 14 to 23. The men responsible for the disaster, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the owners of the factory, were charged with numerous counts of manslaughter but were acquitted by an all-male jury. Later, in a civil suit, the ruling went against Blanck and Harris and they were required to pay the families of each of the deceased $75.
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
To find a larger armed uprising on American soil than the Battle of Blair Mountain, you’d have to go back to the Civil War. The battle was fought in late August and early September of 1921 and pitted roughly 10,000 striking West Virginia coal miners against roughly 3000 well-armed law-enforcement officers and strikebreakers hired by the mine owners. For at least four decades prior to the battle, the coal companies had been using heavy-handed tactics to seize land from the occupants of West Virginia’s Mingo, Logan, and McDowell Counties and then forcing the people there into a form of indentured servitude.
The Battle of Blair Mountain, though seldom mentioned in school history textbooks, has been the subject of songs, poems, novels, and films. But it is never likely to receive a more eloquent treatment than it got in Denise Giardina’s 1987 novel, Storming Heaven. The plot summary on the back of my paperback copy notes that the first-person narrators of the novel “all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain – when the United States Army greeted 10,000 unemployed pro-union miners with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. It was the first crucial battle in a war that has yet to be won.” Given the current state of union membership among the American working class, it may be time to admit that the war is over and the working class lost.
The era that stretches from the late 1970s to the early 1990s was a sort of Golden Age of labor fiction written by women. Call the Darkness Light, Emmeline, The Midwife, Rivington Street, and Storming Heaven were all published during those years. Alas, the only labor-related novel of the period to win a Pulitzer Prize was William Kennedy’s Ironweed, published in 1983. Here’s what Laura Hapke had to say about Ironweed in her 2001 book Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction:
William Kennedy’s Ironweed…approaches the rueful 1930s militant through the consciousness of Francis Phelan, an alcoholic derelict who superficially rekindles the persona of the ubiquitous Depression era forgotten man…Phelan parts company with any labor-literary fixture, whether survivalist hobo or mining camp martyr. Phelan neither reproaches society for the injustice of unemployment nor echoes the old IWW hobo refrain “Hallelujah on the Bum.” His constant question is the self-absorbed “How will I get through the next twenty minutes?” A survivor, Phelan writes his own labor history, but it is one in which he does little work and takes less responsibility. Despite his proletarian credentials, Phelan’s fall is willed, not economically determined.
Thus, in an era rich with positive portrayals of American working men and women written by female authors, the only fictional protagonist connected in any way to the labor movement that the Establishment gatekeepers who hand out Pulitzer Prizes deemed worthy of honoring was a narcissistic alcoholic murderer who rarely did any real work. I understand that the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is meant to honor literary achievement and not solidarity with the working class, but it’s hard for me to believe that anyone could find Ironweed a better-written or more stirring novel than, say, Storming Heaven. And if you’re only going to honor one of them, why not pick the one that doesn’t disrespect the American worker?
Happy Labor Day.