The Organizing Power of Everett’s Women
Rose B. Moore reflects on a summer of mobilizing union women and shares a vision for the future of social labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Since this is my last week in Everett, I am going to use the allotted space given our Women's Department to send a personal message to those among whom I have been working for the past two months. Visiting you in your homes as I have, I can get a perspective on the existing conditions and potential possibilities as no one else can. The campaign has only just begun. When I came, the active membership was very small indeed, and now we have a splendid organization of earnest women, each one of whom is going to constitute herself a self-appointed organizer. The men and women in the ranks of labor in Everett are thinking; they know there is something wrong in society and they are finding out what it is. Here in Everett the feeling of fellowship is so strongly implanted among the workers it seems that men are patient with those who are only beginning to accept the new. If the women do not enter into the new kingdom, the trouble is all with the perverted creature herself. I feel sure the Everett Spirit will prevail, that these women have caught the inspiration of a new purpose—a purpose which serves to minimize the individual difference of opinion and temperament and weld into one great compact whole the strength of the many for social service.
“We have still the heavy legacy of the years behind us, the weak and innumerable little women with the aspirations of affectionate guinea pigs.”
This reflects the early 20th-century labor movement's intense focus on grassroots organizing and the domestic sphere as a political arena. Today’s Everett activists continue to balance the 'Everett Spirit' of solidarity with the modern realities of economic precarity, mirroring the same calls for collective agency.
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