Trade Union Woman, The.
[Labor]. Henry, Alice. The Trade Union Woman. Illustrated. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915.
8vo.; illustrated with six black and white photographs; blue cloth, spine stamped in gilt; spine rubbed; upper panel spotted; hinges tender.
First edition of Henry’s handbook on the evolution of the woman’s labor movement, published “to supply in convenient form answers to the questions that are daily put to the writer and to all others who feel the organization of women to be a vital issue.” Topics covered include early women’s unions, women’s participation in men’s unions, in various industries, and in strikes; “The Working Woman and Marriage”; and “The Working Woman and the Vote.” Two appendices, bringing the text up to the moment of composition, are devoted to the Agreement between the Hotel and Restaurant Employés International Alliance Affiliated with the American and Chicago Federation of Labor; and to The Hart, Schaffner and Marx Labor Agreements. Henry also includes a seven page bibliography crediting over a hundred books, periodicals, and reports.
In 1906 Alice Henry (1857-1943), who practiced what one biographer called “a gentlewomanly Marxism,” came to America, where she devoted the next quarter-century to woman’s labor issues and other Progressive causes. Henry was born to middle-class parents in Melbourne, Australia, where she forged a career in journalism focusing on women’s rights, prohibition, and labor issues for the Melbourne Argus and the Australian. After emigrating to the United States she met with leading feminists and Progressives like Catherine Spence, Anna Garlin Spencer, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Addams. (She would support Addams during her deeply unpopular stand against U.S. participation in the Great War.) In 1911 she started her own journal, Life and Labor, which mixed labor reportage with articles about suffrage, homemaking, and even included serial stories.
In 1915 Henry left Life and Labor to write this book, in which she stressed the cultural as well as political benefits of trade unionism. In one anecdote she cited a group of Irish workers who transformed their Maud Gonne club into Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union. Their new collective venture imbued the women not only with a sense of economic empowerment, but with a new broadness of spirit as well. Henry watched one night when the first black woman tried to gain admission to the Local. The member at the door called back, “A colored sister is at the door; what’ll I do with her?” The Local president, Mollie Daley, who “had been brought up to think of colored folks as ‘trash,’” called back, “I say admit her at once, and let yez give her a hearty welcome.” Henry noted that “the girl, who was very dark but extremely handsome, had been not a little nervous over the reception that might await her. She was quite overcome when she found herself greeted with hearty applause.” In keeping with her platform, Henry is identified on the title page as not only the former editor of Life and Labor but also a member of the “Office Employés Association of Chicago, No. 12755.”
Henry was part of the trans-Atlantic community of Progressives in which ideas from British, Australian, American, and German thinkers traveled back and forth between continents, enlivening debates about housing, health, trade-unionism, and other reform issues. Her transnational bent found literary expression when she translated a Gabrielle D’Annunzio play—Figlia Iorio (The Daughter of Jorio)—in 1907. In 1923 she published Women and the Labor Movement, and ten years later, when Franklin Roosevelt launched his New Deal, she thought her ideas about peaceful, evolutionary Progressive change were finally being put into practice. But she had to admire the American president from afar; in 1933 she returned to her native Australia, where she worked to improve the health, education, and civil rights of aboriginal people. She died in a Melbourne rest home in 19
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