What About the Ladies?

Consumers' League Of Ohio

Goodrich-Gannett Neighborhood Center, Goodrich House

The most politically active women's reform organization was the Consumers' League of Ohio founded in 1900 at the Goodrich House.  Affiliated with the National Consumers League, the organization was dedicated to improving the working conditions of women and children.  All but a few of the officers and executive committee members of the Cleveland league were women.

National Consumers League

Consumers' League of Ohio

National Cash Register Factory Lock and Drill Department

Members of the CLO investigated women's working conditions and wages trying to determine if factories and department stores should be patronized or boycotted by the CLO members.  Employers appeared on the league's "white list" when they met acceptable standards, which in 1902 meant a six dollar a week minimum wage for experienced department store saleswomen, a ten hour work day and a safe and sanitary workplace and lunchroom. Since women and children often worked in the same places such as department stores, paper box factories and candy factories, the CLO also endorsed safe and healthy working conditions and hour limitations for working children.The CLO published its findings in hopes that employers would want to avoid unfavorable publicity.

Women Consuming America

With the beginning of WWI in 1914, thousands of women entered the industry.  The Women's Division of the State-City Labor Exchange found that 54 iron and steel plants employed 2575 women before the war.  By 1917 the number of women employed rose to about 4165.  Women worked in hardware and munitions plants, as telegraph messengers, elevator operators and freight checkers.  Many companies violated child labor laws and the fifty-hour-a week law for women in industry according to the CLO.  The league bulletin noted with dismay the dangerous conditions in which women worked: 'colored women, dressed in overalls and high heeled shoes, employed as engine cleaners and engine pullers in the railway yards. In one scrap iron yard, Slavic and Italian women sort iron, stooping, lifting and throwing heavy pieces of iron.' Most upsetting of all, women were paid less than the men.

Cleveland Street Railway Company Strike

Wartime workers prompted a controversial strike in Cleveland.  In 1918, 190 women were hired, 64 as streetcar conductors by the Cleveland Street Railway Company, to fill the vacancies left by men who had gone off to war or who had taken other wartime job opportunities. The association's national officials passed a resolution agreeing with President Woodrow Wilson's request in supporting the use of women workers.  However, the president of the Local 268, of the Amalgamated Association of Street Electric Railway, and Motor Coach Employees of America, fearing competition for its male members, threatened a strike and called for a federal investigation if the women were not fired.

The U.S. Department of Labor quickly dispatched two officers and sided with the Union and recommended that all the women be dismissed. Ignoring the Labor Department and the local union, CSR's president John J. Stanley, kept the women on the streetcars.  The union responded by calling a strike.

President Wilson's Labor Board was sent to arbitrate the case.  In November of 1918, the board upheld the company's right to hire women, but also ruled that since the war emergency was over, there no longer was a "necessity" to employ women conductors.  The women conductors having formed their own union, the Association of Women Street Railway Employees, hired Frank P. Walsh and they filed an appeal. 

In March, 1919, the War Labor Board reversed its decision.  Unfortunately, with the war over, the ruling was ineffectual.  President Stanley responded that he would now ignore the board's directive because the company could not afford another strike.  The Association had won.  Experiences like this showed AFL unions that they could successfully resist gender changes on shop floor, an important lesson and precedent for the WWI period.   However, over time and with the help of many women reform groups and organizations, these changes did eventually take place helping to level the playing field for women in the work force.