Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter

Workers in sewing factories everywhere continued to toil 10 to 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week for $1.50 in pay, $34 in today’s dollars. The next year they were fined again for locking factory doors. The owners were fined and ultimately paid the families of the workers a few dollars, but their insurance paid out more than their costs. The youngest, Kate Leone and Rosaria Maltese, were 14 years old. 146 workers were dead, most were Italian or Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The streets filled with relatives, the press, horrified neighbors. Fire companies put up their ladders, but none could reach the eighth and ninth floors where the workers struggled to escape. The one narrow fire escape could not carry the workers to safety. The fire started in a fabric waste bin and spread quickly through the rooms crowded with sewing machines and fabric.

More alarms sounded, smoke quickly filled the factories and tenements where thousand of immigrants lived and worked, and drifted a few blocks west to fashionable Washington Square, where some of the city gentry lived in beautiful town houses. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which was located in the crowded Lower East Side of New York City, was on fire with the employees still inside. The first fire alarm sounded at 4:40 pm on Saturday, March 25th, 1911. International Women’s Day programs around the world commemorate the victims of the fire with theater, poetry, lectures, and remembrances. It was the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in Manhattan on March 25th, 1911, that brought the conditions in factories into American and world-wide consciousness. On March 18th, 1911, the 40th anniversary of the Paris Commune, the day was celebrated in Paris. In 1909 the day was celebrated in NYC, and in 1910 in Denmark. International Women’s Day was first celebrated in Chicago in 1908 as a Socialist Party event that focused on economic and political equality for women workers. The origins of International Women’s Day, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and Women’s history month.

Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter