Born: Unknown (1800s), Ireland or United States
Died: Unknown (1900s)
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from The Trade Union Woman, by Alice Henry, published in 1915.
At this time, in the fall of 1902, the oldest and best workers were Irish girls, with all the wit and quickness of their race. Especially was Maggie Condon a favorite and a leader. She was an extremely quick worker. With the temperament of an idealist, she took a pride in her work, liked to do it well, and was especially successful in turning out a great amount of work. Quicker and quicker she became till, on the basis of the good wages she was making, she built up dreams of comfort for herself and her family. One of her choicest ambitions was to be able to afford a room of her own.
But just so surely as she reached the point where such a luxury would be possible, just so surely would come the cut in wages, and she had to begin this driving of herself all over again. Three times this happened. When her well and hardly earned twenty-two dollars was cut the third time Maggie realized that this was no way to mend matters. The harder she worked, the worse she 54 was paid! And not only was she paid worse, she who as one of the best workers could stand a reduction better than most, but the cut went all down the line, and affected the poorest paid and the slowest workers as well.
Hannah O’Day was not of the quick ones. Her strength had been too early sapped. There was no child-labor law in Illinois when she should have been at school, and at eleven she was already a wage-earner. Along with the rest she also had suffered from the repeated cuts that the pace-making of the ones at the top had brought about. It was evident that something must be done. Maggie Condon, Hannah O’Day and some of the others, began, first to think, and then to talk over the matter with one another. They knew about the Haymarket trouble. There were rumors of a strike the men had once had. They had heard of Knights of Labor, and wrote to someone, but nothing came of it. So one day, when there was more than usual cause for irritation and discouragement, what did Hannah O’Day do but tie a red silk handkerchief to the end of a stick. With this for their banner and the two leaders at their head, a whole troop of girls marched out into Packing-town.
The strike ended as most such strikes of the unorganized, unprepared for, and unfinanced sort, must end, in failure, in the return to work on no better terms of the rank and file, and in the blacklisting of the leaders. But the idea of organization had taken root, and this group of Irish girls still clung together. “We can’t have a union,” said one, “but we must have something. Let us have a club, and we’ll call it the Maud Gonne Club.” This is touching remembrance of the Irish woman patriot.t.
Time passed on, and one evening during the winter of 1903 Miss Mary McDowell, of the University of 55 Chicago Settlement, was talking at a Union Label League meeting, and she brought out some facts from what she knew of the condition of the women workers in the packing-houses, showing what a menage to the whole of the working world was the underpaid woman. This got into the papers, and Maggie Condon and her sister road it, and felt that here was a woman who understood. And she was in their own district, too.
So it came about that the Maud Gonne Club became slowly transformed into a real union. This took quite a while. The girls interested used to come over once a week to the Settlement, where Michael Donnelly was their tutor and helper. Miss McDowell carefully absented herself, feeling that she wanted the girls to manage their own affairs, until it transpired that they wished her to be there, and thought it strange that she should be so punctilious. After that she attended almost every meeting. When they felt ready, they obtained the charter with eight charter members and were known as Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.
Little by little the local grew in numbers. One July night the meeting was particularly well attended and particularly lively, none the less os that the discussion was carried on to the accompaniment of a violent thunderstorm, the remarks of the excitable speakers being punctuated by flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. The matter under consideration was to parade or not to parade on the coming Labor Day. The anxious question to decide was whether they could by their numbers make an impression great enough to balance the dangers of the individual and risky publicity.
The vote was cast in favor of parading. When the day came the affair was an entire success. Two wagons gaily trimmed were filled with girls in white dresses, 56 carrying banners and singing labor songs. The happy results were seen at subsequent meetings of the union, for after that other girls from other than the Irish group came in fast, peasant girls, wearing their shawls, and colored girls, till, when the union months old, it had five hundred members. The initiation of the first colored girl was a touching occasion. Hannah O’Day had been present at one of the men’s meetings, on an evening when it had been a colored man who at the ceremony of initiation had presented white candidates for membership, and the sense of universal brotherhood had then come over her as a sort of revelation. And there were others who felt with her. One night, Hannah being doorkeeper at her own union meeting, a colored girl applied to be admitted. Hannah called out: “A colored sister is at the door; what’ll I do with her.” It was the young president herself, Mollie Daley, though she had been brought up to think of colored folks as “trash,” who, with a disregard of strict parliamentary law, but with a beautiful cordiality, broke in with: “I say, admit her at once, and let yez give her a hearty welcome.” The girl who was very dark, but extremely handsome, had been not a little nervous over the reception that might await her. She was quite overcome when she found herself greeted with hearty applause.