This week, as Cambridge joins the rest of the country in marking the Labor Day holiday, we also mark the anniversary of an industrial raid that challenged the city’s notions of “suitable” work for women and the role of government in regulating working conditions, hours and wages. At the beginning of the 20th century, women in Cambridge and across the nation had a secure foothold in the paid labor force through their employment in factories making everything from textiles to shoes to rubber goods to metal tools. Many of these women were recently arrived immigrants, some of whom had experience in skilled industrial labor in their home countries, making them a valuable asset to Cambridge factories.
Not everyone saw the participation of women in this skilled-but-demanding work as a positive, especially when their employment threatened male workers in the same industries.
The trade union journal The Carpenter expressed outrage in 1911 at the condition of female workers at Blake & Knowles Steam Pump in Cambridge, as featured in a report by the American Federation of Labor. Even more offensive than the arduous tasks they were required to perform was the purported state of undress to which the extreme heat often drove the women, leading them to “work with their charred and grimy bodies bared to the waist.” Describing the owners of Blake & Knowles and other such factories as “silk-stocked parasites and other exploiters and degraders of womankind,” the report’s author urges all readers concerned not only for the physical safety of women workers but for their virtue to rise up and overthrow the barons of industry.
Indeed, in September 1911, Massachusetts governor Eugene Foss declared his support for a raid on the ironworks of East Cambridge to remedy “unsanitary” working conditions and excessive work hours. Despite support from the governor and Cambridge’s mayor, the investigation was short-lived, as there was no evidence of a violation of existing law at Blake & Knowles. A Cambridge Chronicle article in February 1912 attributed the reports that sparked the raid to “yellow journalism, overzealous labor agitators, selfish politicians and sensational preachers,” and asserted that multiple witnesses had testified that there was no threat to either the health or propriety of the women foundry workers.
The Chronicle article included excerpts from the testimony of Mary Mardini, a forewoman at Blake & Knowles, before the Massachusetts legislative committee on labor. Mardini asserted that “stories of the seminakedness of workers there are entirely untrue and that, as a matter of fact, each woman is furnished with a double service apron. She said she had never known a girl to be overcome with either heat or gas fumes, and that the girls are ill very seldom.” Mardini testified that visiting social workers had declared the women’s foundry labor “preferable to laundry work, and the wages are higher than in most other employments.” She denied requirements for women to engage in grueling, heavy lifting as part of their jobs and cited her own eight years of work in the foundry without illness or injury as evidence of its safety.
Local minister O.P. Gifford also testified before the legislative committee that he had visited Blake & Knowles’ core rooms in winter and summer, and that “he asked the girls if they found the work hard, and that they ‘gave him the laugh.’ Asked if they liked it, they replied that it was so attractive that there are at least twenty looking for work each morning.” Asked by the committee whether he thought the women’s work was “proper from a moral standpoint,..the reply was that Mr. Gifford had seen much worse conditions in ball rooms and at society functions.”
Yet, in 1912 the state passed the Employment of Women in Core Rooms Act, which regulated the structure and location of the rooms, the emission of gases and fumes from ovens and the size and weight of equipment with which the women were allowed to work. The year 1912 also saw Massachusetts enact the nation’s first minimum wage law, which applied only to women and children under age 18. Although in theory this law was designed to ensure adequate wages for these vulnerable groups, it instead served as a “wage ceiling,” effectively locking women into low-paying jobs without the ability to negotiate for higher wages.
It is no coincidence that the raid on Blake & Knowles and the ensuing legislative curtailing of women’s labor occurred at this point in the city’s history. From the earliest days of industrial production in Cambridge, the question of who was qualified to perform such labor loomed large in the public imagination. While in theory women’s work should be centered on the home and family, poor and working-class women had always needed to work for wages and, by the late 19th century, much of that labor was taking place in factories or other industrial settings alongside men. Some of these women possessed specific skill sets that rivaled those of men, as was the case for the women foundry workers, many recent Polish immigrants who had engaged in similar work in their home country.
Although the Employment of Women in Core Rooms Act was touted by its supporters as a protection of women’s health and virtue, its effect was to limit the kinds of jobs women could hold, curtail their hours and wages and limit their earning potential. By the early 20th century, women had proved themselves to be capable of skilled industrial labor, but their presence on the factory floor threatened the status and earning potential of male workers, as well as the domestic ideal of women as the keepers of home and family. Through the Core Rooms Act and other similar legislation, male laborers and factory owners sought to assert their control over Cambridge’s industrial landscape and to limit women’s participation in the city’s paid workforce.
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