for larger pay and fewer hours.”
“Arturo, I thought I told you to leave!”
“If he goes, I go,” said Angela.
Folding her arms, Gina stared them both down.
“Wait till Mimoo hears about this!”
“You don’t want to know what Mimoo thinks about this, Angie,” said Gina.
“I can’t wait to ask her. She always supports me.”
“Not in folly.”
“This isn’t folly!”
“Well, too bad she can’t hear about it because, oh, that’s right—she’s still at work.”
“Wait till Salvo hears.”
“He’s also working. And staying far away.”
“Sometimes,” Arturo said, “you’ve got to not work to fight for what is right.”
“Get out!”
“Let’s go, Arturo,” said Angela. “I know where we’re not wanted.”
That night Harry told Gina what happened when he spoke with Mother Jones. Harry and Joe made a personal plea to the woman to join the coming strike, but she, despite being co-president and co-founder of the IWW with Big Bill, refused to stand with her own fair sex, pronouncing Lawrence a city headed for disaster. She would not support the women’s right not to return to their slave wages. She said all her life she had petitioned for men, not women. “Men work,” she told Harry. “Women work for the family.” Before she ended the conversation she said that Big Bill, whom she had known for years, was a cheap tightfist of a man, but Harry should ask him for a raise so his wife, too, could stay at home.
Gina was pretending to read and only half-listening. “Oh yeah? What did Bill say about that?”
“Publicly, not a word,” Harry replied. “But to us he said he will not rest until that traitor is purged from the IWW for good.”
“I mean about the raise.”
“I didn’t ask him.”
Gina shrugged her indifference. “Then all I want to know is whether come seven-thirty tomorrow morning I’m going to the mending room.”
Harry sat quietly. “No,” he said at last. “You aren’t.”
“So we’re deciding to lose me my job? My easy, well-paying, skilled-labor job that other women wait years to get?”
“I don’t want you to lose it,” he said. “But you were going to quit anyway when the baby came …”
“Seven months from now.”
“So, it’ll be a little sooner than we planned. The baby came a little sooner than we planned. It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”
“If I can’t work, then I’m going on the streets, Harry. With Angela, Pam, Dona, Elda. I have to, or they’ll never forgive me.”
“You can’t,” he said. “Gestation keeps you from other activities ending in tion. Like demonstration. It’s pandemonium out there.”
“It’s chaos in here, too. How do you propose we pay the rent? Buy food? Put money into the electric lamp you’re sitting by as you write your slogans and glue your pamphlets?”
“Mimoo is working,” Harry said.
“Don’t even think about my money,” Mimoo bellowed from upstairs. “Pretend it doesn’t exist.” How did her mother have such good hearing now, and yet was deaf when you tried to ask her all the important questions?
They lowered their voices.
“We’ll use kerosene if we can’t afford the electricity,” Harry said. “And Big Bill pays me.”
“Are you sure about that? I haven’t seen anything since before Christmas.”
“Yes. We’ll be fine. The strike will last but a few days. A week at most. I know how these things shake out. The factory will cave. William Wood needs to make money. The mill must operate. Production can’t stop. They always cave when somebody has to make money.”
“No kidding,” said Gina. “Someone like me. Can I cave?”
Three
AFTER GINA LOST HER JOB, she went to work with her mother cleaning houses in Prospect Hill while Arturo and Joe organized rolling walkouts across the mills to disrupt operations as much as possible. They knew the looms needed (wo)manning, and without an adequate workforce, fabrics would not be made, and 600,000 pounds of sheep fleece would remain unspun.
Smiling Joe, no stranger to oratory, collected a thousand women right on the Common, hopped up on a soggy bench, and started shouting Harry-written bromides. “If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, another man has a dollar he didn’t get!” One minute it was about two unpaid hours, the next it was about equality and economic freedom and brotherhood of man.
The ladies got revved up like little runarounds after hearing Joe yell for an hour. The next morning, two thousand women descended on Essex and Union. By the third morning, there were three thousand women on the streets. They interlocked arms and paraded on Merrimack and Water, across the bridges, and down Broadway. They hurled stones through mill windows, chanted and yelled, and exhorted all the workers to walk off their jobs.
Big Bill arrived for a brief visit. He praised Joe’s and Arturo’s efforts, commended Harry’s speechifying, approved of the protesting women, advised Joe and Arturo to urge them to be louder and more violent, and went on a speaking tour around the country lauding the IWW’s efforts in the Lawrence strike.
The walkouts rolled on through all eight mills in Lawrence. By the end of the second week, ten thousand people, mostly women and their children, were on the streets. The looms stopped spinning completely.
When Joe saw how many women were in his corner, he raised his demands, calling for a blanket fifteen percent increase in wages, double overtime pay, and a fifty-three-hour week. It wasn’t just about American Woolen anymore.
Harry built Joe a special platform, four feet off the ground, which he and Arturo set up on the Common. Arturo extravagantly praised Harry’s work. “You write speeches and build platforms? Where did you learn to do that, Harvard man? You’re like the future hero Engels was talking about. You can be architect for an hour, but also push a wheelbarrow, if need be. I’m looking at you, Harold Barrington, and the future is here.”
Onto Harry’s platform, Joe hopped every day and denounced the mill owners, shouting Harry’s penned words until he was hoarse.
“Labor produces all wealth! All wealth belongs to the producer thereof!”
The
