Who Is Your Female Labor Hero?

by Jen Nedeau

category: Feminism

Published September 07, 2009 @ 04:51PM PT

In honor of Labor Day, I wanted to post a list of female labor heroes. Throughout history, women have played a significant role in transforming workers' lives - and what better day to honor those achievements than on Labor Day. Check out this list of historical moments and historical women and add your own labor hero in the comments below:

• The Uprising of 20,000 and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: In the early 1900s, young women shirtwaist makers-mostly Jewish immigrants, still in their teens-were a powerful force for change. They brought together women's rights activism and union power and ignited sweeping changes to worker safety laws.

• Atlanta's Washerwomen Strike: With slavery less than two decades behind them, thousands of black laundresses went on strike for higher wages, respect for their work and control over how their work was organized. In the summer of 1881, the laundresses took on Atlanta's business and political establishment and gained so much support that they threatened to call a general strike, which would have shut the city down.

• Mother Jones : At a time when most people believed women should stay at home or considered them surplus labor, and only one in 34 women belonged to a union, Mother Jones was one of the greatest union leaders of her era.

• Esther Peterson: Esther Peterson's courage and vision have shaped our daily lives, as workers, women and consumers. She was honored as "one of the nation's most effective and beloved catalysts for change" by the National Women's Hall of Fame.

• Leonora Barry: As the only woman to hold national office within the Knights of Labor, she brought attention to the conditions of working women through her involvement in the labor reform movement while also furthering the progress of woman's rights during the period following the Civil War and Reconstruction.

• Mary Kenney O'Sullivan: Co-founder of Women's Trade Union League and first salaried woman organizer for the American Federation of Labor.

• Dolores Huerta: Labor leader and organizer and social activist who is the co-founder of the United Farm Workers.

• Karen Nussbaum: A clerk-typist who turned her grievances about low pay and low respect for women into a national effort to organize women office workers. She is the founder of 9to5 and served as director of the 9to5 district of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), director of the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor under President Clinton, and director of the AFL-CIO Working Women's Department. You can read her writing over at Huffington Post.
  

• Lucy González Parson: Early socialist activist "of color" who was a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the "Wobblies").

• Fannie Sellins: An American union organizer who worked in a garment factory to support her four children and helped to organize Local # 67 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in St. Louis, where she became a negotiator for 400 women locked out of a garment factory.

• Emma Tenayuca: A labor organizer for pecan shellers in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s and beyond. She led Mexican workers' movements in Texas.
  

• "Rosie the Riveter": Rosie the Riveter was most closely associated with a real woman, Rose Will Monroe, who was born in Pulaski County, Kentucky in 1920 and moved to Michigan during World War II. She worked as a riveter at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, building B-29 and B-24 bombers for the U.S. Army Air Forces.