Jane Little Botkin

The history of the labor movement in the United States is typically one dominated by men, either in terms of biographies of male leaders or histories of the organization of workplaces dominated by men. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most important ones is the traditional difficulty in organizing women in low-skilled fields with decentralized workplaces. These were particularly frustrating for male labor organizers, who were more accustomed to dealing with industrial workforces concentrated in mines and factories.

This is one of the things that makes Jane Street’s story so noteworthy. In 1916 she undertook a remarkable campaign to organize the female household workers in Denver on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). To do so she employed a number of innovative approaches that challenged the local social order, yet in the end her efforts were frustrated by the sexism of her male counterparts in her own union. In this book Jane Little Botkin tells the story of Street’s inspiring life, one that details the challenges she faced as both a woman and an organizer in her efforts to win justice for the housemaids of one American city.

From an early age, Jane Street defied the expectations for the women of her era. Born Jane Tuttle, she demonstrated both organizational skills and a talent for writing, both of which would be put to good use in her subsequent career as a labor organizer. After a failed marriage to a bigamist and sexual predator, Jane followed her sister west, first to California, then to Denver. Upon her arrival she sought employment in housework, which she used as an opportunity to collect the names of co-workers who might be receptive to joining a union. Her weapon was public humiliation: elite households that refused to improve wages and working conditions would be publicly outed, embarrassing the socially sensitive women who ran them. Coupled with records of working conditions provided by the members (an inversion of the approach used by the employment agencies through which housemaids found employment) Street threatened to disrupt the social order in Denver.

While Street was able to withstand efforts by Denver’s elite women to oppose her activities, a far more formidable challenge came from the men of her own union, the IWW. For all of their rhetoric of equality, the male leadership of the IWW viewed Street’s activities through a patriarchal lens. When Street faced charges of turning the Housemaids’ Union Clubhouse into a house of ill repute, the men of the IWW used the opportunity to storm the building and take away her charter. Though Street fought against the charges leveled against her, the lynching of her most prominent advocate in the IWW leadership, coupled with the growing persecution of the IWW by the federal government, deprived her union of any hope of success.

Thanks to her assiduous research and evocative writing, Botkin succeeds in bringing Street’s story to life. It’s one of hope and determination that is frustrated by sexism and politics yet never entirely extinguished by it. It’s especially valuable as a corrective to the male-centric history of the American labor movement, showing how women were equally as determined as men to fight for better pay and working conditions. In that respect it serves as an inspirational tale of an overlooked aspect of American history, albeit one tempered by a sobering appreciation of the challenges they faced even from their ostensible allies.… (meer)