Women labor union members; Women labor union members -- United States
For four years Mrs. Barry did fine work. She combined in a remarkable
degree qualities rarely found in the same individual. She followed in
no one's tracks, but planned out her own methods, and carried out a
campaign in which she fulfilled the duties of investigator, organizer
and public lecturer. This at a time when the means of traveling were
far more primitive than they are today; and not in one state alone,
for she covered almost all the Eastern half of the country. We know
that she went as far west as Leadville, Colorado, because of the
touching little story that is told of her visit there. In that town
she had founded the Martha Washington Assembly of the Knights of
Labor, and when she left she was given a small parcel with the request
that she would not open it until she reached home. But, as she tells
it herself,
My woman's curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the
package, and found therein a purse which had been carried for
fifteen years by Brother Horgan, who was with us last year,
and inside of that a little souvenir in the shape of five
twenty-dollar gold pieces. You say that I was the instrument
through whose means the Martha Washington Assembly was organized.
This is partially true, but it is also true that the good and true
Knights of Leadville are as much the founder as I am.
She possessed a social vision, and saw the problems of the wrongs of
women in relation to the general industrial question, so that in her
organizing work she was many-sided. The disputes that she was forever
settling, the apathy that she was forever encountering, she dealt with
in the tolerant spirit of one to whom these were but incidents in the
growth of the labor movement. In dealing with the "little ones" in
that movement we hear of her as only patient and helpful and offering
words of encouragement, however small the visible results of her
efforts might be.
But towards those set in high places she could be intensely scornful,
as for instance when she is found appealing to the order itself,
asking that "more consideration be given, and more thorough
educational measures be adopted on behalf of the working-women of our
land, the majority of whom are entirely ignorant of the economic and
industrial question, which is to them of vital importance, and they
must ever remain so while the selfishness of their brothers in toil
is carried to such an extent as I find it to be among those who have
sworn to demand equal pay for equal work. Thus far in the history of
our order that part of our platform has been but a mockery of the
principle intended."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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