Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 444

period. I'm not in a position to say definitely with regard to the date at which there began to be an effort to organize women's trade unions, but my immediate acquaintance with it was sometime around 1906. ‘07 or ‘08. I ran into it while I was still in Chicago. A woman named Gertrude Barnum was organizing, or trying to organize, women into a trade union, or bring into the regular trade union women who worked in the needle trades. It was then an undifferentiated union. That is, it didn't have shirtmakers, pantsmakers, lady garment workers - it was everybody. The head of that union was a man named Abe.

In Chicago Gertrude Barnum was making speeches. I didn't know her in any personal way at that time. She came to Hull House and somebody went out on the highways and byways and we brought in people to a meeting, who worked in the needle trades, as you used to do in those days. They were mostly sweat shop workers in that Halsted Street area where Hull House is. They were the bundle women who took bundles and did the finishing at home. Also they worked in a little sweat shop where there were a couple of machines and half a dozen people - just a little tenement or basement place, which was a true sweat shop, although the home work premises were often referred to as sweat shops.

We went out and dug up a large number of people in





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help