Women of Achievement: Written for the Fireside SchoolsBrawley, Benjamin Griffith
History
Women of Achievement: Written for the Fireside Schools
Brawley, Benjamin Griffith
African American women -- Biography; Women -- Biography
Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely. It is not only in such
spheres that the worth of the Negro woman has been shown, however.
Daily, in thousands of homes, in little stores and on humble farms,
effort just as heroic has been exerted, though the result is not always
so evident. On their own initiative also women are now engaging in large
enterprises. The most conspicuous example of material success is
undoubtedly Mme. C. J. Walker, of the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing
Company, of Indianapolis and New York, a business that is now conducted
on a large scale and in accordance with the best business methods of
America. Important also in this connection is the very great
contribution that Negro women--very often those without education and
opportunity--are making in the ordinary industrial life of the country.
According to the census of 1910, 1,047,146, or 52 per cent. of those at
work, were either farmers or farm laborers, and 28 per cent. more were
either cooks or washerwomen. In other words, a total of exactly 80 per
cent. were doing some of the hardest and at the same time some of the
most necessary work in our home and industrial life. These are workers
whose worth has never been fully appreciated by the larger public, and
who needed the heavy demands of the great war to call attention to the
actual value of the service they were rendering.
The changes in fact brought about within the last few years, largely as
a result of war conditions, are remarkable. As Mary E. Jackson, writing
in the _Crisis_, has said: "Indiana reports [Negro women] in glass
works; in Ohio they are found on the night shifts of glass works; they
have gone into the pottery works in Virginia; wood-working plants and
lumber yards have called for their help in Tennessee." She also quotes
Rachel S. Gallagher, of Cleveland, Ohio, as saying of the Negro women in
that city: "We find them on power sewing-machines, making caps, waists,
bags, and mops; we find them doing pressing and various hand operations
in these same shops. They are employed in knitting factories as winders,
in a number of laundries on mangles of every type, and in sorting and
marking. They are in paper box factories doing both hand and machine
work, in button factories on the button machines, in packing houses
packing meat, in railroad yards wiping and cleaning engines, and doing
sorting in railroad shops. One of our workers recently found two colored
girls on a knotting machine in a bed spring factory, putting the knots
in the wire springs."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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