Then came a big strike. About 100 girls went out. The result was a victory, which netted us - I mean the girls - $2 increase in our wages on the average.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing.
At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence.
The prevailing view was that girls were outside of school because of the resistance of families to their education. But when I visited a local village, what everyone told me - the chiefs, the parents, the children - was that girls weren't in school because it was the boys that had a better chance of getting paid work in the future.
The women's movement in the 1970s led more women into the workforce and got them closer to pay equality.
I was a union member in my youth as well and I went on strike, and I don't think it solved anything. It only made the situation worse for everyone involved.
Educating girls just one year beyond the average fourth grade education increases their eventual earnings by 10 to 20 percent. Every additional year of secondary education can increase future wages by 15 to 25 percent.
I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.
If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.
I was reminded that when we lose and I strike out, a billion people in China don't care.
Compared to today's salaries, our cut was minuscule but it was very good for the time.
No opposing quotes found.