A Union Woman from Way Back

When i was a child i got extremely interested in women's rights because my mother was working for women's suffrage and she was also working for what you now call planned parenthood but they called it birth control in those days. Oh now, what time period what that? Well, it was when I was five years old that it began Yes? Did you ever hear Emma Goldman speak? Yes. In Portland? Ah, no, she stopped in Eugene once on, that was, we were living there then. It was a good stopping off point on your way to Seattle or San Francisco if you were going north or south. And Dr. Marie Eckway who was a militant woman doctor and believed in what you now call Planned Parenthood. I put my mother in touch with Margaret Sanger. And Margaret Sanger sent these birth control leaflets

to my mother from New York and she, somebody ripped off envelopes at the chamber of commerce office in New York because it was illegal to distribute these leaflets and you could be sent to jail. Dr. Eckway was sent to jail. Margaret Sanger was sent to jail. Emma Goldman was, too. Emma Goldman was sent to jail. My mother just barely escaped. She was distributing leaflets in Springfield, Oregon and she used to dress in her oldest clothes and take some eggs in an egg basket. But she didn't want to take eggs over to Springfield for fear she'd break them on the trolley car. So, she tried to get my grandmother to give her some but my grandmother didn't grasp what it was all about and wouldn't give her any eggs. So, my mother would, she hid them under eggs and she'd go to the door and ask if anyone wanted to buy some fresh country eggs. But my grandmother wouldn't give her any. So, she had to start out with me, about so high, trailing at her

skirt and she rapped on the door of the chief of police which is a great mistake. Oh no! That's right. That's what she did. And she hated it. Well, but she grabbed it away and tore it up and stuck it inside her corset. Oh, great! But what he thought she'd come there for he thought she'd come there to accept some moons (moonshine) because that was going on at the same time, too. Oh! So, i don't think he really grasped what she was doing but she was very frightened. Her face turned white, i remember that. I was frightened, too. But that's the only time she had a narrow escape. Oh yes, I always did. I was interested in all that stuff. My father was an IWW and I used to go with him to the street meetings. They had a big IWW local in Eugene because they were building a railroad down to Coos Bay. So, the local was headquartered in Eugene and I was permitted to pass the hat to take up the collection when i was small.

Now, the IWW didn't believe in voting, they only believed in economic action at the part of production; slowdowns and strikes. But my mother believed in voting and she told my father in 1912 you better get with it and vote for women's suffrage or not to bother to come home. Alright! So, that was the year he voted. So, I always got the idea that women had rights and that they were vitally important. And i guess this business about Planned Parenthood stuck because I only had one child, although I've been married three times. And, um, when women's lib began, first i thought it was kind of silly because i had always regarded myself as a liberated woman. But some friends of mine invited me to come down to the Park Blocks to a demonstration they were going to have and they were going to march. This is a couple years ago so I must've been sixty seven or sixty eight even then. They were going to march over to Planned Parenthood and of course that was

??? and I really didn't intend to march but nevertheless I was asked to come so I went there. But when they stepped off and started to march, I'd been in so many marches, I automatically joined in and I was very glad I did because while we're going to the downtown business district, all those heavily made up office workers that work for very little, and they don't have any ideas of any kind that I could ever see, all coming out to lunch and they looked at us with such revoltion. We were all dressed in such poor clothes straggling along the street. And I was, uh, from then on I was an ardent woman's lib'r. And, uh, when we got to the bridge over the river, you know Planned Parenthood, do you know where it is? It's over northeast. No. Well, it's a heck of a long walk. My, uh, back gave out. I'd been beaten up on so many picket lines by cops

and scabs, it is not in very good shape. So, I waited until I saw a reporter coming along in a car that I knew and I hailed him and hitched a ride over to Planned Parenthood. Oh, great! So, anyway that's how I originally got interested in these things. And then of course I grew up, my father was a working man. So, I was, we were involved in the efforts to get the eight hour day. My mother had been a teacher in a big city school in Ohio and she had taught in a slum school, as it was called, in which the children of the glass workers, that was a leading factory in that town, came to school. And in that big families she noticed when they didn't have enough to eat they couldn't learn. They had had no breakfast. They couldn't learn. So, she got interested in reducing the hours of labor. They worked ten hours a day for a dollar a day and they were skilled workers, heavens only knows what the unskillked workers got in those days.

I suppose she came from the opposite side of the tracks for my father because he had always come from an extremely working class family but they hit it off quite well except on voting. But anyway, I got interested in these things when I was quite young and my ambition, when i was a child, was to become a soapboxer. So, we discussed it in the executive board of the huge auxilliary. We had the largest women's auxilliary in the CIO. And we decided we'd go and we set up a committee to go and see Trent Phillips and see what you did to get people's lights and water turned back on; get people on welfare. And he told us we should go to the Panama Building and that's where welfare was headquartered in those days and take some of our children with us and that we should go to some union like the seamen and bum some money and buy some bananans and crackers and make some sandwiches and take a few blankets and sit down on the all the stairs

on all the welfare offices until we got some of our grievances taken care of. So, we did. And he also said it'd be a good idea if we sang out the windows and attracted a lot of attention, so we did. Ah, songs out of the little red songbook, the Wobblies, which I had, um, got a ??? on. We got a mimeograph. Well, solidarity forever. For the union makes us strong. I've got a copy here I'll show you. Is Union Maids in that? I don't think so but I know that song and that's one we got to singing later. So, we get some of our worst cases taken care of because some of the children had typhoid because they had to drink water out of a rain barrel and it was had typhoid germs in it. So, we got some of the worst cases taken care of. But there were about ten thousand persons in this area who are

dependent upon the lumber and Selma workers or wood workers as they then were called more for their livelihood and so it just barely scratched the surface. So, we decide we better go back and see Trent Phillips and say what are we going to do to get everybody on welfare. At first we had just gone around to different unions and we had asked for money to buy food. Mooching is what it's known as in a strike but after all we'd gone CIO and a great many unions hadn't. So, the seamen and longshoremen and textile workers that are done CIO were about the only ones we could get any money from and after while they have no money left in their treasuries. And the AFL-CIO, many those unions wouldn't help us because they were thought we shouldn't have gotten CIO. Trent Phillips said we'd have to get our husbands to help us and we'd have to get all of the lumber workers

in this area to march around the courthouse. The county commissioners were the ones that had control of the welfare purse. We had to take all of our children out of school and take them with us and march around and around the courthouse until they agreed to put us on welfare. So, we didn't know what the men would think about this because we knew they were terrified of being called red and as I say to this time we didn't give a hoot what the labels were. Was the red scare happening then? Was there a lot of fear during this time? No, no but the employers have always used that device from ever since I could remember they used the device when I was quite small in World War One they called people that were militant 'bolsheviks.' They always used that to scare workers and split them apart, just a device of the bosses. And the leadership of our union believed it. They were really afraid. They thought that this would hurt the union. So, we went before their executive board, our

committee, and I forget if we told him where he got the ideas from or if we just made them think we thought this idea up ourselves. But anyway, they thought it was a good idea. So, all the men and most of us took our children out of school. I took my one out. I only had one to take out. And we all went down there and we marched for some hours around and around the courthouse. How many? Well, there were five thousand or five or six thousand of us all together and we had banners and placards. It was quite something, believe me. So, after a while the county commissioners sent out and said they would negotiate if we'd send in a group of, I believe it was, ten or fifteen or ten or twelve something like that. And so we elected a committee and I was elected a member of the committee to go in and entreat with the county commissioner. And when we came out of there we were all on welfare and that is how we won the lockout. That and one other thing. And that brings up another woman that's

one of the great heroines of my young womanhood. She was a Japanese woman. Her husband had worked on the green chain at the West Oregon Mill where my husband worked. And the, um, stooges of the lumber operator at West Oregon had gone to the Japanese, there were quite a few Japanese working there, and said they'd have them all deported if they didn't scab. And they refused to scab. And she testified at an NLRB hearing, um, what the, ah, this stooge had done; he'd come and threatened to deport them. And she pointed him out in the courtroom she said he's a no good, no truth man. I'll never forget that. She won that NLRB hearing for us. And between being able to get our people fed and between her testimony, uh, we won the lockout and went and retained the CIO. So, I'll never forget that.

you were a... ...world. World. Well, they had asked me and two other women, a waitress in one of the logging camps named Pearl Wright and the wife of one of the union officials, her name is Helen Helmick, they'd asked three of us to organize the auxilliary and they give us the membership list and so we went around and called on them, those that had phones we phoned to. We sent letters to others. And at the first meeting I was elected the chairman; the president. And that's when we were still AF of L and then I was reelected twice under the CIO setup. I spent three years as president of the auxilliary. I learned a lot from those women. And I learned that education doesn't make you intelligent. Unless your educations come from the university of hard knocks because one of the most intelligent women I ever met had only

finished the third grade. Her name was Jenni Hillke. She was one of the heroines in the lockout. The plywood plant was locked out two years and eight months. But the other was all in it we lost that one. No, the, um, scabs came in and the people, after the lockout of that duration, they went other places to work. and but none of the real leaders in that outfit there went in to scab. That was lost. But in the West Oregon set up there were about well a number of people had gone in to scab including the foreman in the planning mill but he stayed out six months before he went in.

Well, of course I've always had unorthodox ideas and I feel there are scabs and scabs. And some people can hold out for ever and some people can hold up quite a while and he held out for six months and he lost his furniture, most of us did, I lost mine. They lifted me right out of my bed when the word came in the working class neighborhood I lived in that the repossessors were coming down with their truck. I jump with my shoes in all my clothes onto my bed. They just lifted the blankets out put me on the floor. Took all the furniture away which we were buying from Monkey Wards or some place like that. Most people lost their furniture, some people lost their husbands, and some their wives. And I might mention that the wife of this, ah, planning mill foreman packed her suitcase she had one son and she came over to my house and she said she didn't want to leave the auxilliary and her husband was going in in the morning to scab and she asked if she could stay there.

so I said well he's not a bad cookie he stayed out for six months and he's lost his car and you're about to lose your house and most of us lived in rented places but they were buying a house so I said I think you better go home and she did but she didn't want to. There was several women like that. Some women left their husbands because they wouldn't go and scab. Well, when I... was when we were talking... today I said... tell the whole truth... Oh, well I'll tell you a little bit about it but it's really not too important because one of the unions that booted me the worst is now one of the best unions in existence, AFSCME. So, I certainly wouldn't want to say anything to hurt it because it's not like it used to be and I'll tell you why it changed. It got out from under the

domination of man. Well, see... it's one of the fastest growing unions. Well, that's the reason Which union is this again? AFSCME: the american federation of state, county, and municipal workers. So, ...organizing work for those unions. Well, between the time when I was working for the woodworkers union newspaper and was chairman their auxillary and the time when, uh, my first marriage broke up and, ah, I went to work by the ILWU as, ah, secretary to Matt Mahan and began to write a great deal for the dispatcher. I spent five years working as MED division secretary at the public welfare commission. And there was a union called AFSCME: the american federation of state, county, and municipal workers and there wasn't anyone in the

welfare set up that belonged. I was the first one that signed up and then I set out to organize the caseworkers and clerks and stenographers. The clerks made ninety bucks a month isn't that sickening. And then, um, in nineteen forty eight the Vanport flood came along and the people living in Vanport there were twenty four thousand people and a fourth of them are on welfare. You see after the shipyards closed in world war two they tried to force the negroes to go home. They didn't need them anymore. They'd brought them here from the south and east. But a lot of them wouldn't go. An they had a perfect right to stay here too and a lot of return soldiers from the war were living out so the housing authority didn't give a hoot. They knew that dykes were going up there and they did nothing about it. They moved out the housing authority records in the supermarket out there moved out. The safe's full of money and that crap but

they didn't move out the people. Some drowned and everyone living out their lost all, everything they possessed. Some drowned?! Yes, they did. They didn't even tell them about it?! No, and they... if it wasn't for the firefighters union a lot of people would have drowned. They warned the housing authority the dykes were going. They had water and sand boils inside the dykes. They paid no attention. So, then the firefighter's union organized flotillas of boats. Some of them belonged to a commercial fishermen, Gill Matters. I later worked for their union. A good union. and some of them were other persons that owned boats on the river and they sent word to those people and they came right in and they plucked people out of the water and out of windows and off of rooftops The wall of water was twenty foot high it was a railroad embankment that gave and, um, so i had some time coming at public welfare. You couldn't get overtime if you worked

overtime and I often did because I was an MED division secretary. You could take time off so I applied for some time off. And I was on Sunday that the dykes broke. Memorial Day Sunday nineteen forty eight, I went out there and I saw what was happening and I started to write all this, these stories up for federated press which AF of L and CIO papers both took. So, then I criticized the role that welfare played. They cut all the people that were on welfare and half of them, or a fourth of them were because they said it was a national disaster. The Red Cross should feed them. The Red Cross refused to feed those people. They said it was up to welfare to feed those that were on relief. So, no one was feeding them? Well, yes they were taken into the churches the schools opened their doors and people living in town took them into their homes and that's how they existed for three days until the red cross was forced to do something about it. But welfare was trying to find out who wrote these articles because they were

picked up by Drew Pearson. And so eventually they found out was me, so I got fired. So, I lost the civil service hearing. And then I went to ASCME which was dominated by men in high echelons and two other agencies. They had very few members and they were men, almost exclusively, and they were the higher salaried ones and in any union you'll find that usually those that are the best union people are those in the lower brackets; the lower wage brackets. And these were men. So, instead of them... I asked them for help in winning the civil service hearing because I had a permanent civil service status but instead of their helping me, they went to the FBI to see if i was a 'Red.' It's true. And then they had an international vice president come out from wherever their international office was, I

forget now, to interview me. He was extremely sympathetic. And he intonated to me that these men, this top officers of ASCME in Portland, as it was then. It's not that way today, I want to make that very clear. That they didn't know what they were talking about. That they didn't really understand what unionism was all about. ...work? But he couldn't, he was only an international representative, so they didn't help me. Ah, some of the AF of L officials did testify for me at my hearing and a man, a black man named Estes Curry testified there too but I lost it anyway and was permanently fired. So, that was the end of my career at the state public welfare commission. However, quite a few longshoremen lost there, were living out there and many other workers. And, ah, as I say the firefighters union saved a lot of people's lives and the men that belonged to the, ah,

streetcarmen's union did, too, because they ran buses in there and took children out of playgrounds and took people out until water came up so high that it stalled the engines and they saved lives. And they were real heroes. So, I did have some people testify for me. But anyway, I was out of work for awhile and then the longshoremen sent to me and suggested I come to work for them from Mount ANS' secretary. So, I did was very happy to do so. And, um, So, I had, um, written a number of stories about their nineteen forty six strike here. It was a maritime strike for federated press, I knew some of them. And I was on the publicity committee in the nineteen forty eight strike. And that was the beginning of my connections with them and I want to again say that the American Federation of State, County, and Municiapl Workers Union got out from

under the domination of those high echelon male chauvinist officials they had at that time and the women working for low salaries in the white collar brackets began to organize in droves and that's the fastest growing, one of the most militant unions there is today. You know, they've all been on strike over there in Vancouver. It was recently settled. And they been on strike all over the country. They're on the move. They're on the march. It's very happy to see that those women are marching because when I worked at public welfare when the clerks were getting ninety bucks a month, the elevator operators belonged to the building service employees union, they made twice as much but the white collar clerks looked down on them because they thought they were some kind of white collar workers and the elevator operators, the women, weren't. And it makes a great deal of difference if you belong to a union. Take for instance one of the last bastions of 'only men'

workers has been the waterfront. But in the, um, we now have women birth agents in the union and there, most people think there's only one longshore union. That that's the longshoremen, that's the big one in Portland but there's also the clerks and super cargos and there's the walking bosses they have their own union. And the waterfront guards are in a union of their own and they now have six women members. And I want to read you what one of them said. I have a story in the last issue of the dispatcher. There's two of them. Here, it's only twenty... she said she works swing, usually at terminal four and she says not afraid of being down there after dark. You know, in those big warehouses and down on the waterfront terminal four. And she said it's not her

first stint in security work because she worked for a private security agency and when she was a private security guard without a union she got three dollars and eighty three cents an hour. And she said one agency, the Burns agency pays only two thirty to two fifty an hour but now that she's in a union she gets six dollars and seventeen cents an hour. Another thing that's changed is that they now have women pallbearers. And Mr. Mahan, the dock leader, was buried from St. Mary's Cathedral. And, um, one of the women pallbearers was Mary Jackson, who in the nineteen thirty four longshore strike maritime strike, was a member of the waitresses union and a friend of Agnes Quinn, one of the most colorful and flamboyant women labor leaders that ever came down the pike. She was the secretary of the waitresses union and after, four of the strikers were shot by police at pier park

she and Matt Mahan took the bloody shirt from one of them and went to the city hall where a council meeting was in session and marched down the aisle, Mary Jackson was with them, and they went right up and threw the blood soaked shirt on the desk and Matt said 'his blood is on your hands, Joe.' And ever afterwards they called Mayor Carson Bloody Shirt Joe. ...did sort of... ...brought the black people from the South... ...was all over, I mean, did the women go back to their homes? A few of them did because they took what I think was the mistaken idea that they should go back to work and not ask to hire out of the electrician or boiling makers halls

so that the returning soldiers would have jobs but it upset... Yeah. And, um, they had a fairly valid point there but there were a number of women that were the breadwinners in their families who expected to stay on and that they'd get a fair shake with the men out of the union hiring halls. They didn't. Several of them were close friends of mine. They didn't. What jobs did they do? Well, I knew a woman that's one of the most brilliant women I've ever known in my life she worked on the graveyards, the shipyard, out at the end of St. John's Oregon ship and she became foreman of the electrical shop. There wasn't anything she couldn't do. But she could never get another job after the war was over and they belonged to, they were taken into the boilermakers,

taken into the electricians, they were taken in... no, they didn't. They didn't offer... It didn't occur to them. It didn't occur to them to do that. But I argued with her. I said, 'do you think you're going to be an electrician and in that union? You're not. You'll find those male chauvinists are gonna dump you.' and they did. Well, a great many women that were actually the breadwinners in their families, either by divorce or by death, ah, that's what happened to them. Some women like Lois Stranahan, a close friend a mine who's an activist in the longshore auxiliary and very active in the democratic party, she had a husband, Jess Stranahan, and so she thought it would be a patriotic thing to go back home and let some returned war veteran have her job. I think she belonged to the boilermakers. And, uh, the blacks who had worked out there, some of them were in Jim Crow Auxiliaries, they weren't allowed into the union itself. They were called Jim Crow Auxiliaries? Yes.

So, it's, um, quite an effort and still is to get that discrimination broken down in some of the unions. I'm happy to say that the chairman of the longshore auxiliary Clarif Embril is black and that during a nineteen seventy one nineteen seventy two strikes she was extremely active in the country store co op in the basement of the longshore hall, which is how we fed the strikers because that strike lasted about three months too. And she was on the, ah, food committee with an equal vote with the men who were on it. ...you were talking about earlier was, um, you said that your... ...by police and, um... No, I was beaten up first by a scab in the nineteen thirty five lumber workers' strike. Ah, very badly beaten up. Was on crutches quite awhile. Were you...

were you marching and picketing at the time? No, the union, ah, we lived in company houses at Lenton, ah, near the West Oregon mail and some people lived in company houses near the Clark Wilson Mill and the union asked me to go to all the houses and find out who'd received these letters in which the mill owner who owned the company shacks had ordered all of us to be out inside of a weeks' time because they were going to get the union lawyer as if, you know you're supposed to have thirty days notice. So, when we, we didn't even know this man was scabbing when this this other woman and I, ah, came to this man's house, he ordered us off his porch. And, ah, I was so surprised because we didn't know he'd gone in to scab, he'd sneaked in and I said 'why John Helky, you talk like a scab.' So, he pushed the screen door at me and I went down the steps. They were quite high wooden steps, fell on the walk, and I jumped up and he jumped down the

steps and, ah, hit me and I didn't have any better sense. He weighed two hundred and twenty pounds and was over six feet tall and I only weighed about ninety five pounds in those days and was only half an inch taller than I am now, so I wasn't very big. But I tried to fight back and tore his shirt pocket. So, he knocked me down repeatedly and finally I got my foot caught in some steps that went up to the highway and that's how my ankle got broken. And then he started kicking me. Well, the woman that was with me had been standing there screaming. I passed out. Fanny, she told me the rest of it. Everything blacked out for me. She said he started to kick me in the face and she was, uh, very powerfully built, strongly built woman and tall, she grabbed hold of him and she said 'have you lost your mind?' or I would've had my whole face smashed in. As it was, I got all my front teeth kicked. So, she picked me up under her arm like a sack of meal and

ran down the highway with me screaming and he ran behind us, she said. And there was some police down where the tramway went into the, ah, where the pickets were they couldn't see what was happening because of a curve in the road but there was some police down there where the pickets were. And he was screaming arrest these two women. They called me a dirty son of a, a cowardly son of a bitch then I got beaten up during a peace march in Portland. Whoa! What a picture! Dragged in the street by cops. Oh, the cops went wild over there. When was this? Um, oh, it was during one of the first peace marches. It was over at the, um, we were picketing the, um, let's see, somebody had come to speak. Johnson. Let's see, was it Johnson? Or no. That man that

never did make it, Hubert Humphrey. ...but he wouldn't disavow the war effort. So, we were picketing. He was speaking... He was at a hotel? Yeah, at the Sheraton Motor Inn. And there were a lot of students picketing over there and I was over there with my grandson and we were picketing and they started to, ah, knock the students around and I thought oh God and gonna be knocked down in the street. So, I sat down. I thought then I won't have so far to fall. So, then a whole lot of people sat down in the street and some of the students were very badly beaten and later I passed out was loaded onto a stretcher and then I came to and I wondered what happened to my grandson and there was a big long row of ambulances and I ran out and started looking and I saw this boy with dark hair and jeans and his hair was all

matted with blood. And I thought it was my grandson. I was trying to get into the back of the ambulance to see how badly he was hurt when this cop came and grabbed me and he said 'I'll fix you.' And he took me down to where there was a police car and he started to throw me into it, but although I didn't weigh very much, I weigh more than I appear to weigh now. And so his aim was bad and I fell into the street and knocked the breath out of me again. He ordered me to get up. I couldn't because the breath was knocked out of me, so he went off to grab somebody else and arrest them, and some women that were just bystanders helped me up and I faded into the crowd. Then I was going to tell you about, um, the biggest peace march they had here during the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Our union, the longshore union, was opposed to the war. And the auxiliaries were very much opposed to it. We were always passing resolutions. And we had one peace march here that had ten thousand

people and all kinds of people; students and professional people, auxiliary members and some longshoreman and, well, just all kinds of people and it was led by one of our black members, Dorothy Haim. She walked down Broadway leading ten thousand people. This is when a friend and I sat down at the PP and L building to protest the increasing rates, the rate gouging. Oh, a couple years ago. Well, she's a woman artist. She is quite famous. Her name is Martina Gangle Curl and some of her sketches are up at timberline lodge. That picture over there she did, it's storm in the hop yards and, um, she wanted to go with me, she's the same age I am. We

borrowed sleeping bags and we took a thermos of coffee and, ah, my neighbors gave us two sacks full of food because they were, couldn't pay their exorbitant light rates, you know, they kept going up and up and they're still going up and up. So, Lois Stranahan and, ah, some other people were outside with a supported picket line on and, ah, one member of our auxiliary is a powerful woman of vast courage named Doris Thoralson was inside standing there to see that the police didn't beat us up. So, they, we were ordered to leave and refused and then at just before closing time, they had sent over town for one of their top officers PPNL and he said that he was going to make a citizen's arrest and called police if we didn't get out of there. So, I laid down on the sleeping bag, Martina didn't have presence enough of mind to lie down

so she just got dragged out and her new boots got wrecked. I mean that all the leather was scuffed off. But I was carried out just like I was in a hammock and we are put into a police car and taken over to what's left of the old county jail and, ah... Was that the first time you'd ever been in that jail? The county jail. You'd been in city jail, though? Well, I was arrested for calling John Helky a dirty a cowardly son-of-a-bitch, yes. Oh, that's right. But, um, It's the first time I'd been in the county jail and they took, I knew we'd go to jail. Martina knew it too so she took her sketch bag, pad and I took a notebook. I thought I could take time out and write a few sonnets. I always wanted to be poet, you know, but there's never any time to write poetry with all that's going on. They took everything away including my asthma pills, i can't breathe without them. And they took our sacks of food away. So, it was very dirty in this cell.

Ventilation is dreadful. Pretty soon I began to wheeze. And you know I knew we were locked in with one level of my mind but with another level I didn't really know it because I thought I've got to go out to the desk and get my purse, it's got my pills in it. So, I tried the doorknob and it wouldn't turn and I thought oh my god I'm locked in. But while this was going on, it seems that some of the police were quite sympathetic; their light bills had gone up, too. So, they were out looking for the recog man. And he, it was his day off and he was on a a date with his woman friend and they were having dinner someplace but these policeman found him and brought him down there. So, in the meantime the woman jailor got to thinking it over and I guess her light bills were too high so she came to the door, she gave me one of my pills and part of our food and a knife to cut the apples and oranges with. One of the things the auxiliaries do in between periods of strikes, the auxiliaries are not as

important as they used to be because so many women now work even longshoremen's wives work that they have their own unions that they belong to and their own union meetings to go to. But whenever there is a beef that's when the auxiliary comes back and big membership and prominence because they're things they can do. yes i do have I think that, ah, it's quite necessary for women to continue their efforts for equal rights and I don't happen to be one of those people that's opposed to the equal rights amendment. I thought it was fabulous that the house the other day reaffirmed its support for the equal rights amendment and the five members of the house that voted against it were all men. Now, there are several unions, ah, with predominately women members that have taken the position the equal rights amendment is hurting them and you know why that is? No. Well, in a way they have a valid argument because you see

women were able to get through various deals protecting, um ah, the loads that women would be required to lift in getting various types of breaks so they wouldn't be working, you know, steady. They'd have breaks and things of that kind but I feel that the only way, that what has to be done is to write those rights into union contracts so that they are extended to men, too. And I don't think you can hold back, ah, the entire effort for women's rights by, um, i think that is wrong. Because there were women who opposed the eight hour day. They felt that women never could command the pay that men did and they would have to work longer than men did in order to make any money at all. Oh, I was going to tell you another, the one of the first strikes of women was the strike back in, ah, when this century was in its teens of women cannery

workers. They were striking to reduce their hours and they were charged by the horse cops, women cannery workers. Many of them were Indian women. And Dr. Marie Eckway went down on the picket line to help them and when she saw that they were being charged by the cops, she took her hat pen out and stabbed one of the cops with it. Of course, I'm a pacifist myself. Well, it was. So, they said since she was a qualified medical doctor and quite well known in her field, that the only explanation of why she would go down on a picket line of such poor women, many of them illiterate, that she must have lost her mind. So, they talked about putting her to a sanity hearing and they deported her across the river into the state of Washington. Is she still there? No, she's dead but she returned the next day.

The next day. She was one of the, really the most colorful and sensational p, person, woman that ever came down the pike Dr Marie Equi. Thanks a lot, Julia. You're so welcome.