raising the minimum wage, and held aloft a tattered Woolworth’s bra. She was speaking not just for
Woolworth workers as Myra Wolfgang did in 1937 but for Woolworth shoppers. Yet she too identified as
a social justice feminist, and she too was a veteran of the 1930s and the upheavals that followed. Many
women today, given their paltry income, could afford at best one bra every couple of years, she informed
the state commissioners. This one, sad to say, lasted six months. It was time for a raise.
As the next chapter tells, a new women’s movement famously stuffed bras, girdles, and other intimate
items in a “Freedom Trash Can” on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1968 as they demonstrated against the
Miss America Pageant. They wanted the freedom to define their own sexuality and beauty and not have it
determined by the judges. But for Draper and those she represented, the bra was a potent symbol as well.
Women deserved better than a tattered bra, she argued, whether they sewed it or bought it.
Today’s low-wage workers shop at WalMart. The last Woolworth’s closed in 1997. And while the
issues of Woolworth’s workers and shoppers could be dismissed as belonging to another era, they remain
far more relevant than often realized. Anne Draper’s call for a living wage still resonates in the twenty-
first century, as does the larger reform agenda of her generation of social justice feminists. They believed
in sex equality and would have applauded the progress women today have made toward that goal. At the
same time, they remind us that the women’s movement needs to be about more than sex equality. Economic
disparities among women are extreme in the twenty-first century, and without decent jobs and sufficient
income, dignity and real freedom for most women will remain elusive. They wanted to make it possible
for women and men to have fuller, more satisfying lives at home and on the job. It’s still not too much to
ask.
- Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1991), 97–98; Dana Frank, “Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big,” in Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, and Robin D. G. Kelley, Three
Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 57–118,
quote 98.
- Quotes from Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2–3, and Jean Maddern Pitrone, Myra: The Life and Times of Myra Wolfgang, Trade
Union Leader (Wyandotte, MI: Calibre Books, 1980), 124.
- Interview with Caroline Davis by Ruth Meyerowitz, July 23, 1976, Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change
Oral History Project, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Michigan–Wayne State University (TUWOHP), 83, 112–
14.
- “Lady Labor Leader: To Keep Labor Peace and Prosperity in an Indiana Factory, the Boss of Local 764 Just Acts like a Woman,” Life,
June 30, 1947, 83–85.
- Quote from Addie Wyatt, “ ‘An Injury to One Is an Injury to All’: Addie Wyatt Remembers the Packinghouse Workers Union,” Labor
Heritage 12 (Winter/Spring 2003): 27. See also interview with Addie Wyatt by Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, January 30, 1986,
United Packinghouse Workers of America Oral History Project, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, and Cobble, The Other
Women’s Movement, 31–33, 201–03.
- Mary Anderson, “Should There be Labor Laws for Women? . . . Yes, Says Mary Anderson,” Good Housekeeping, September 1925,
52.
- The identity of the child’s father is not known. At times the two women spoke of their daughter as adopted, but other historical documents
point to Miller’s pregnancy.
- Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the US, 1913-2002,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–
41.
- Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 34; Esther Peterson with Winifred Conkling, Restless: The Memoirs of Labor and Consumer
Activist Esther Peterson (Washington, DC: Caring Publishing, 1995), 13–15; Esther Peterson, “The World Beyond the Valley,” Sunstone
15:5, issue 85 (November 1991): 23.
- Interview with Maida Springer, TUWOHP, 141–42.
- Rita R. Heller, “Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921–1938” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers
University, 1986), 70–73.
- Slogan from U.S. Employment Service War Manpower Division recruitment poster designed by Vernon Grant, 1944.
- Carmen R. Chavez, “Coming of Age During the War: Reminiscences of an Albuquerque Hispana,” New Mexico Historical Review 70,
no. 4 (October 1995): 396–97.
- Wyatt, “ ‘An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,’ ” 26–27.
- In the documentary film by Connie Field, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, Clarity Productions, 1980.
- Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, 121–22.
