Feminism Unfinished

fairness for women. She quit her Winsor School job and for the next few years traveled across New
England organizing for the teachers and garment workers union. She also spent many of her summers
teaching drama, popular economics, and dance at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, a
residential leadership program for wage-earning women staffed by university social scientists, labor
organizers, and progressive educators that operated for seventeen summers, from 1921 to 1938. In 1939,
she joined the Education Department of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), a key
union in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the dynamic labor federation founded in 1937,
which would organize millions of workers over the next decade.
Like many other young activists in the 1930s, Esther and Oliver Peterson found socialism’s emphasis
on a more cooperative, egalitarian society appealing, and in 1932, Oliver Peterson campaigned for
Norman Thomas, the Presbyterian minister running for president on the Socialist Party ticket. Soon,
however, they threw in their lot with the Democratic Party, as did the vast majority of the country. By
1936, they backed Roosevelt and saw themselves as part of a broad New Deal coalition whose primary
aims were preservation of democratic governance, opposition to the rise of fascism in Europe, and reform
of the capitalist system. They had found their life’s political course and they stuck with it. Firm gender
egalitarians and deeply in love, they also struggled with how to help each other develop as individuals
and reform leaders while sustaining their relationship and caring for their growing family. The challenges
were formidable: their first child arrived in 1938; three more followed over the next eight years. What
social justice feminists called the “double day” would remain a central and abiding concern for Peterson
and many other activists of her generation.
Peterson and most other social justice feminists worked in organizations and reform coalitions that
included Communists as well as a heterodox mix of other reformers, secular and religious. A legitimate
political party in the 1930s with some seventy-five thousand members at its peak in 1938, the Communist
Party (CP)attracted well-known artists, writers, and reformers from all walks of life by its embrace of
economic and social justice.
Tillie Lerner Olsen, who would later achieve fame as the author of Tell Me a Riddle (1961) and other
critically acclaimed novels and short stories, was one of them. Born on a tenant farm in Nebraska to
Russian-Jewish socialists, Olsen joined the Young Communist League, the CP youth organization, in 1930
after dropping out of high school and leaving home in search of a job. The CP’s bold advocacy of labor
and civil rights impressed her as she crisscrossed the country in the early 1930s, agitating alongside
packinghouse workers in Kansas City and striking longshoremen in San Francisco. Like other labor
feminists close to the Communist Party, such as United Electrical Workers leader Ruth Young or Luisa
Moreno, who organized Mexican pecan shellers in Texas before becoming a national officer in the Food,
Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers, Olsen made her most public contributions to the movement
before Cold War hostilities erupted in full force in the late 1940s.
Panamanian-born garment leader Maida Springer took a different route to labor activism than either
Esther Peterson or Tillie Olsen. Inspired by a mother who identified as a follower of Marcus Garvey, the
Jamaican black nationalist leader who attracted millions of black Americans to his cause in the 1920s,
Springer saw herself as a Pan-Africanist as well as a feminist. Like Packinghouse leader Addie Wyatt,
she also straddled the two worlds of labor and civil rights. Refused a job as a New York City telephone
operator in the early 1930s—because, as the AT&T interviewer explained, “What white mother do you
think would want you to sit beside her daughter?”—Springer finally found work as a seamstress.
Distressed by the grueling work pace and arbitrary management practices in the garment shops, she
convinced her co-workers to sign up with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. On the local
union’s executive board by 1938, Springer became its education director in 1943 and its first black