![]() ![]() Loom operators were paid less than $10 a week - for 56 hours of work. The mortality rate for children under six was fully 50%. Hard as it is for us to imagine today, the men and women who worked in them, mostly non-English speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe and Quebec, died at the average age of 26. The woolen mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts were by all accounts horrific places. Our favorite version is by the great Utah Phillips. The poem was set to music in 1974 by Mimi Farina and has since become a labor-folk standard. The Lawrence Strike has come to be known as the “Bread And Roses Strike,” because young women strikers were seen carrying banners that read, “We Want Bread, but Roses Too!,” quoting a line from James Oppenheim’s poem “Bread and Roses” (though labor folklore has attributed the source of Oppenheim’s poem to the Lawrence strike, it was actually written a year earlier, to commemorate the struggles of Chicago women workers). history to be carried out primarily by and on behalf of immigrant women. This was the strike that put the IWW on the map, the strike that invented the moving picket line (to get around anti-loitering laws) and, most importantly, the first successful, large-scale strike in U.S. January 11th marks the 101st anniversary of the beginning of the Lawrence Textile Strike, one of the signal events of 20th-century American labor history. ![]()
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