Women, Immigrants, and the Working-Class Battle in Little Falls, New York

Description

The Textile Strike of 1912-1913

By J.N. Cheney
Algora Publishing

The Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913 was a pivotal but long-neglected event in American labor history. This book offers a groundbreaking corrective, as it chronicles the dramatic struggle of immigrant women against powerful mill owners, brutal police repression, and a hostile press as they fought for their dignity and survival. Drawing on extensive archival research, Cheney resurrects a forgotten history and provides a pioneering theoretical framework for understanding class struggle, nativism, and labor organizing in the Progressive Era, restoring a vital local struggle to its national importance.

This study reconstructs the dramatic fight of immigrant women workers from Poland, Italy, and Slovakia against powerful mill owners in New York’s Mohawk Valley. The book details the horrific conditions they endured—dangerous, unsanitary factories, rampant tuberculosis, and dilapidated tenement housing—which were courageously exposed by social reformer M. Helen Schloss. When the workers organized with the help of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), they were met with a brutal campaign of repression. The narrative exposes the police violence, the suppression of free speech by local authorities, and the hostile media coverage that sought to demonize the strikers as dangerous agitators.