September 1918 by Skip Desjardin

Author:Skip Desjardin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery History

CHAPTER 11

DON’T NAG

SEPTEMBER 6–16

In American society at large, another issue was bubbling to the surface: the role of women. The state of Massachusetts had been at the forefront of change for women more than seventy years before the war, when large textile mills located in cities along the state’s power-generating rivers recruited young women from around New England to fill factory jobs. This migration from the region’s rural farms and small towns resulted in women living on their own, away from their families, and with income they earned themselves. The resulting independence elevated women to a new societal position, and they soon used their leverage to better their lives even further. Living in company-owned housing, the “mill girls,” as they came to be called, organized an all-woman union to demand higher pay and shorten the workday from twelve to just ten hours. In one of those factory towns, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association helped women flex their new political muscles to push for governmental investigation of working conditions and bargain for financial benefits.

During the Great War years, when demands on American industry increased dramatically at the same time that huge portions of the male population were exported to fight in Europe, women suddenly composed an even larger percentage of the workforce. These were not just administrative jobs of the sort traditionally filled by female workers. More and more, these were hands-on technical roles in complex manufacturing settings.

“The women of the United States are willing and capable of anything and everything they may be called upon to do, I believe,” said the chairman of the War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch. “The time is fast approaching when they must be mobilized more effectively than at present.”1

Maud Wood Park could easily have settled into a life typical of so many educated and financially stable women in the early twentieth century; one filled with society gatherings and philanthropy. From early adulthood, however, she showed a propensity to go against the grain.

Born in Boston, she attended the prestigious St. Agnes School in Albany, founded for the stated purpose of teaching upper class young women about a woman’s rightful place in the home and the skills she would need to thrive there.

Apparently, it didn’t take.

After several years as a schoolteacher, she enrolled in another staunchly anti-suffrage institution, Radcliffe College in Cambridge, the female school associated with the all-male Harvard College. In 1898, after just three years, she graduated summa cum laude. Two years later, she was a delegate to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) convention and dismayed with what she found. The meeting was held in the dingy basement of a church, and members seemed to have no seriousness of purpose, with one state committee report actually delivered in rhyme. At age twenty-nine, Park was the youngest woman in attendance. The movement was no longer moving, having largely stalled in its efforts to gain voting rights for women since the days of pioneering suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony. So Park went home and

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