Founding mothers of social justice: The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, 1877-1892

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Harth, Erica

The life span of Harriet Clisby (1830-1931), who founded the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) of Boston in 1877, coincides almost exactly with that of Mother Jones (1830-1930). Neither woman was born in the United States; both strove to intervene in the social conflicts of developing industrial capitalism in that country. Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was one of the few women active in labor struggles dominated by men. She signed the manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905, led miners' strikes, and was a founding member, with Eugene Debs, of the Socialist Party of America. Mother Jones was the daughter of an activist Irish construction worker; when her husband died she supported herself as a dressmaker. Harriet Clisby was a physician whose father had left the English middle class to try his hand at farming in Australia. If Jones pioneered a leading role for women in the working class, the far lesser known Clisby charted a path for middle-class women in the struggles for social justice that traversed both women's lives. Clisby and the early WEIU cannot be written off as a group of elite women dabbling in urban reform. In pursuing a vision of social justice for both poor and middle-class women, the founding members defined a new place for "ladies" as social activists.

Like many other women's institutions of the late nineteenth century, the WEIU got a big boost from the Civil War. It was a conflict that gave American women an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate their social usefulness at home and on the battlefront, and it ended by propelling them headlong into the modern era. In the flurry of women's institution-building and renewed battles for the vote that marked the postbellum decades, women swept onto the public stage as never before. The history of the WEIU has tended to become lost in the welter of women's associations formed in the women's club movement of this time. Historians have paid it scant attention. Two organizations that preceded it by almost a decade, the New England Woman's Club (NEWC) and Sorosis in New York, have gotten much more notice, perhaps because the WEIU, arriving in their wake and borrowing heavily in personnel from the NEWC, has been seen as less original.' Even the historical record slights it, with astonishingly little in the way of personal correspondence.

Yet the WEIU was an historically pivotal organization, combining spirituality, self-improvement and social activism in a blend strong enough to span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 It has lasted to the present day, having become a fixture on the Boston scene, so well known to locals that almost everyone to whom I have spoken about it responds with a personal anecdote. The NEWC, on the other hand, is still in existence but with little presence or renown.

The longevity of the Union, as it is commonly known, may have something to do with its relative neglect by historians. For in its beginnings, it does indeed seem to boast few firsts. The initiatives of a central meeting place for working women and strangers to Boston, of an employment bureau, and of a "protective" service for working women, for example -- all of which were fundamental to the Union's identity -- had earlier been taken by the YWCA or by the NEWC and by "Protective Unions" in other cities.

During the first year of its existence, at just about the same time that the New York Exchange for Woman's Work was started in Manhattan, the WEIU opened a consignment shop for crafts and food produced by women. Both organizations charged a 10% commission on consignments, rolling back the profits on sales to the needy suppliers. Through quality control of articles submitted, the two organizations established shops on sound business principles and helped women to develop saleable skills.3 There has been some debate about which organization was started first. However, when the Union's shop was detached from the Employment Bureau as a special department in 1879, the WEIU's Committee of Industries looked to the New York Exchange as a model.4

The WEIU often succeeded better than other women's associations engaged in similar projects, because its membership was fluid, its purpose manifold, its strategies adaptive. It did, as it happens, initiate important ventures, but it also had a knack of knowing how to grasp what was in the air. If its "ladies" sometimes verged on a caricature of the white, classbound reformer, they were also often energetic, bold and courageous. In the well-negotiated border between benevolence and social activism, which defined the organization at its origins, lies a clue to its endurance.

The WEIU's founding generation of leaders reveals a diversity, if not in social class or ethnicity, then in political perspective and personal style. From Harriet Clisby, the founder and first president of the WEIU, to Mary Morton Kehew, its third president, the organization's language appears to have shifted its center of gravity from a spiritualized, nineteenth-century ideal of "union" (in the sense of the "Women's Christian Temperance Union," or "Protective Union") to something approaching the idea of a trade union. Early women's "unions," like the WCTU, were built on the principle of unifying women around a single issue. A Christian ideal of sisterhood in a hallowed cause was evident in the mass women's "Crusade" against intemperance in the winter of 187374, which resulted in the organization of the WCTU in 1874. As the "first mass organization of women in the United States and probably in the world,"5 the WCTU may have provided a model for Clisby. But the unity of women that she was seeking was not in the cause of a single issue and so was more elusive. A closer look at Clisby and her associates in the early years reveals not so much a shift of meaning toward a more labororiented association as it does a layering of meanings, reflecting the coexistence of the older idea of Christian benevolence with the newer, secularized movement for social justice.6