by Helen Ramirez – Odell

Published by Working Women’s History Project

Helen Ramirez – Odell school nurse with the City of Chicago Public Schools for over 34 years, has written a book containing 86 stories, brief and extended, based on interviews of Chicago school nurses, going back to the beginning of the program in 1951.

Nurses provide health care and health education to children in schools, ranging from prevention and control of contagious diseases to making referrals and health management plans for children with serious health problems. They have stayed on the front lines from the time of polio and tuberculosis scares to the modern crisis of AIDS. Not many people know the story of their work, but the book will change that and give us an inside view. “Our work as school nurses makes a profound difference in the lives of Chicago children,” she said.

Helen described her own interest in the history of her profession. She has been involved in the Chicago Teachers Union as a School Nurse Delegate and headed the union’s Women’s Rights Committee from 1984-2001.

“I was struck by the concept of ‘writing women back into history’ when it was first presented by the National Women’s History Project. I knew women were so often left out of history and I knew this was something I wanted to do.”

“The backgrounds of the women who became school nurses are fascinating and diverse. They are World War II veterans and civil rights activists as well as public health nurses, mothers and teachers. Being a part of the Working Women’s History Project helped me to gather a group of people to obtain the interviews and find resource people to help with other work necessary to the project. I think it’s important to research the lives of women who do traditional work and non-traditional work.”

Karen Egenes, a Loyola University Nursing Professor with an interest in nursing and labor history wrote the Introduction. She also obtained historic photographs for the book and archives. Peggy Lipschutz provided original drawings to illustrate the nurses’ stories. Effie Mihopulos was editor. Dorothy Marks produced a video for the anniversary.

((( REVIEWS ARE IN )))

Alice Dan - Director of Center for Research on Women and Gender at University of Illinois at Chicago:
“Working Without Uniforms: School Nursing in Chicago 1951 – 2001″ is an important historical document with vital relevance for school health issues today. Personal stories of certified school nurses over the past 50 years make a lively source of information on promoting health for children.”

Rima Lunin Schultz, editor, Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Indiana University Press, 2001).
“Working Without Uniforms: School Nursing in Chicago 1951-2001″ is an important book that historians of women’s history can read and use with great profit. Such a volume is fascinating in its inclusion of authentic women’s voices; it is a valuable primary resource that provides information for scholars interested in writing the history of gender, social activism and professionalization in the development of the field of school health and nursing. Karen Egenes’ introduction does a fine job in providing a historical context for the interviews. Helen Ramirez-Odell should be commended for her vision and talent in bringing this volume to fruition.”

Please email us for information on how to order this book.

Picture yourself being slowly poisoned to death at work. It was common in many dangerous trades at the turn of the twentieth century, the risk of taking an industrial job. There were no laws to protect workers in factories, no OSHA, no workers’ compensation. Dr. Alice Hamilton wanted to take on the problem of industrial poisoning. When Alice Hamilton began her work in the new field of industrial toxicology, few worried about chemical hazards at work. Many victims were recent immigrants afraid to complain. Most did not know the risks. “The poor must take dangerous jobs, or have no jobs at all,” she wrote.
Alice Hamilton was born in1869 and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, part of a generation of progressive women who took active roles in changing society for the better.  She had a medical education from the University of Michigan and a lifetime of 101 years to devote to it. First she taught women medical students, referred to as “hens” by male doctors at Northwestern Medical College. She spent over twenty years at Hull House, working with Jane Addams and Florence Kelley. She got involved in the labor movement, working with the Factory Girls. She recalled, “I began to see the working world through the workers’ eyes.” She joined union strikers on picket lines.  As a physician, she joined the birth-control movement through the Chicago Birth Control Committee.

Her first article on occupational disease was published in 1908. Dr. Hamilton was appointed in 1910 by the governor to a commission to investigate occupational diseases in Illinois. When she began her work with a small group of physicians and student assistants, she called it a journey of exploration. Her medical colleagues said she had feminine sentimentality about the poor. In Chicago, she went to watch workers sand-papering the lead painted ceilings of Pullman cars. In smelters on the south side laborers shoveled white lead from the drying pans and breathed the deadly dust. To prove these toxins killed employees, she visited 300 workplaces, interviewed workers, and went to their homes to speak to them or to surviving relatives. She researched death records. She found Cook County Hospital filled with victims of industrial poisoning. The American Federation of Labor helped pressure for safety and compensation laws.

American medical authorities had never taken this type of health problem seriously before. Employers too were ignorant and indifferent. Dr. Hamilton recalled the manager of a lead plant who was shocked when she suggested that he was responsible when workers got lead poisoning there. He thought of himself as an enlightened, caring employer.

In 1911 Illinois passed a first attempt at compensation for industrial diseases caused by poisonous gases, fumes, and dust. It required safer workplaces and monthly medical exams for lead and arsenic workers. The law was overturned by the Supreme Court and not replaced until 1936. The National Association of Manufacturers opposed safety legislation as they opposed shorter hours and ending child labor.

During World War I she investigated munitions plants and found them in constant danger of exploding. She discussed this with then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt. Munitions workers’ health became a matter of national concern.

With Florence Kelley in the 1920’s she worked with the Consumers’ League to help the “Radium Girls” who were dying from their work with radium-laden paint. These women asked for the League’s help when state health departments refused to do anything. They fought for compensation and safety regulations.

Dr. Hamilton investigated lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, radium, and solvent poisoning for the federal government. She crawled over open coal pits, rode down mine shafts in open cages, and climbed up ladders to inspect vats of boiling sulfuric acid in pursuit of more details about working conditions. She toured steel mills to explore carbon monoxide poisoning, then on to California to look at mercury poisoning in quicksilver mines. The mercury studies took her to the hat industry, where workers developed shakes and mental disease from mercury poisoning, suggesting the expression “mad as a hatter.” She identified problems and recommended protective measures.

In her scientific work she learned the value of careful critical inquiry before forming conclusions. She was an independent thinker who went right to the center of action to see and assess things for herself.  In 1924 she went with a group to Russia to see the new Soviet Union. She described a government that could “hold its own only by denying people all freedom.”  She said it reminded her of Spain under the Inquisition. In 1933 She went to Hitler’s Germany and was horrified by the rigid control and violent oppression.

She became the first female faculty member at Harvard. As a woman she was not allowed to march at graduation, belong to the faculty club, or receive sports tickets. But she served on the Health Committee of the League of Nations.

Dr. Hamilton became a committed New Dealer, serving as consultant to the United States Division of Labor Standards. Her work contributed to reforms in industrial hygiene laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act. Dr. Hamilton said she was most pleased that laborers were no longer submissive or ignorant about workplace hazards. They became willing to demand better conditions for themselves. She felt this attitude was critical in maintaining safety gains.

Shortly after her death at age 101 the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed in 1970, a culmination of protective labor legislation, one of organized labor’s greatest accomplishments.  This book is a fascinating story for anyone interested in labor history or women’s achievements. It shows the dogged persistence of a woman convinced she could use her scientific training to change society for the better.

Harvard Works Because We Do

by Greg Halpern, released September 28, 2003

A book of photographs and interviews, which started out as a collection of first-person narratives passed around by hand during the three-year struggle called the Harvard Living Wage Campaign between Harvard University and its employees who clean up, wash dishes. cook, and do security guard duty.

Dear Friends,
After all these years of work, I really did finish my book and it hit the warehouse last Friday! I am having a special event on April 25, 2003 on the IUN campus to celebrate. There will be a reception at 6pm outside the Savannah auditorium with food, to honor the freedom fighters I have written about. The USWA District 7 is a co-sponser. I will, of course, be signing books if anyone wants a signed copy. The real fighters will also be there to sign. Then at 7pm in the auditorium Fill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum, former assistant to John J Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, will be the keynote speaker on the Black Freedom Struggle today.

In solidarity,
Ruth Needleman

Thousands of African Americans poured into northwest Indiana in the 1920s dreaming of decent-paying jobs and a life without Klansmen, chain gangs, and cotton. Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism by Ruth Needleman adds a new dimension to the literature on race and labor. It tells the story of five men born in the South who migrated north for a chance to work the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the steel mills. Individually they fought for equality and justice; collectively they helped construct economic and union democracy in postwar America. George Kimbley, the oldest, grew up in Kentucky across the street from the family who had owned his parents. He fought with a French regiment in World War I and then settled in Gary, Indiana, in 1920 to work in steel. He joined the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and became the first African American member of its full-time staff in 1938. The youngest, Jonathan Comer, picked cotton on his father’s land in Alabama, stood up to racism in the military during World War II, and became the first African American to be president of a basic steel local union. This is a book about the integration of unions, as well as about five remarkable individuals. It focuses on the decisive role of African American leaders in building interracial unionism. One chapter deals with the African American struggle for representation, highlighting the importance of independent black organization within the union. Needleman also presents a conversation among two pioneering steelworkers and current African American union leaders about the racial politics of union activism.

((( REVIEWS )))
“This remarkable book reveals the hidden history of long-forgotten black steelworkers and their seminal role in the struggle for union democracy and workers’ rights on the shop floor. Ruth Needleman’s book is a critical text in the history of black industrial workers’ struggles and their contributions to working people regardless of where they may have toiled.” –Studs Terkel

“Black Freedom Fighters in Steel is a beautiful story of five black union organizers, long-distance runners who were indispensable to building the steel workers union as well as the civil rights movement in northwest Indiana. And they never stopped struggling, despite having to battle generations of white racism and intransigence in their own union. Ruth Needleman proves once again that African American workers have consistently sustained the most inclusive, radical vision of working class solidarity the U.S. labor movement has ever known.” –Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)

“Inspiring and thought-provoking, Ruth Needleman’s book reveals an often overlooked segment of black working-class history. This compelling analysis provides a foundation for considering strategies of labor renewal and black worker power. ” –Bill Fletcher, Jr. President, TransAfrica Forum. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

By Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler      Doubleday; ISBN: 0385496125; (June 18, 2002)

This is the story of a small group of women iron miners who took on a Minnesota mining company in a landmark civil suit: Jensen vs. Eveleth Mines. In 1975, Lois Jenson became one of the first women to work in the iron mines of Minnesota and she later became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Eveleth Mines. Jenson and other women miners underwent twenty-five years of harsh and cruel abuse. They received equally brutal treatment in the federal court system. Eveleth’s lawyers made a full assault on Jenson’s character during a deposition that inquired about the most personal details of her life. The plaintiffs pay in emotional pain despite the success of the lawsuit. The book shows the dangers and rewards of taking on a powerful institution through the justice system.

Florence Scala was born and raised on Taylor Street on the Near West Side of Chicago, but no life story begins and ends with a particular person and his or her period. Carolyn Eastwood splendidly follows this principle, starting with a neighborhood map and ending with a bibliography. In between are the oral histories of Harold Fox, whose grandparents immigrated to the Jewish Neighborhood; Florence Scala, who was born in Chicago shortly after her parents immigrated from Italy; Nate Duncan, whose family migrated to the Black Bottom; and Hilda Portillo, born in Mexico. All discuss their immigrant roots and Chicago neighborhoods, in addition to their personal stories.
Harold Fox grew up in the neighborhood, so his story begins with his many jobs as well as those of his father, uncles and relatives. They were tailors, salesmen, delivered matzos, sold toys, woolen goods, and seltzer. The story of Jewish Maxwell Street usually refers to bygone days, but as Nate Duncan¹s story illustrates, it could have continued. Duncan became the owner of Nate¹s Delicatessen, after learning the business from his Jewish employer. To see what they did, a parking lot there–incredible–to destroy the whole market–and people came from all over the country, all over the world, to Maxwell Street.

When reviewing Florence Scala¹s story, the reader is exalted by this wonderful woman, who is willing to challenge political leaders, whom she believes are unnecessarily destroying the neighborhood. After the announcement was made by Mayor Richard J. Daley that the land given to the University would be spread well beyond the original 40 acres, a woman came to her door while she was in the middle of mopping her kitchen. She said, “Florence, what are we going to do about our houses? Are we going to fight?” Florence accepted the challenge. Although she fought hard, including running for and losing, a bid for alderman, she never left the neighborhood. She and her brother opened an Italian restaurant in the former tailor shop of their father.

Her story does not have a happy ending. “I don¹t get mad walking through the university anymore [But after attending an event at Hull-House] I left the building, there was all of downtown lit up in front of me and for the first time in years I felt tear-eyed. I thought, you bastards, you took it all, we don¹t have anything. I¹m an alien person here.”

Hilda Portillo was a later arrival to Chicago, having been raised in Mexico, part of the time in a Catholic monastery. Therefore Eastwood includes information about Spanish speaking immigrants early in the century, many of whom settled in the poorest housing on the Near West Side. When Hilda Portillo came to Chicago in 1957, her most important connection was St. Francis of Assisi Church at Roosevelt Road and Newberry, the only Chicago church that had Mass in Spanish. Her story includes the fight to save the church. “St. Francis was unique and different from all other churches in the Chicago area because it was the first step for the new immigrants, just like for me . . . the port-of-entry.” Portillo fought hard to save the Church in which she had become involved.

Because Mayor Daley and other politicians attended annual banquets, they were unprepared. When the University announced plans to build, the Mexican parishioners who lived in the area were devastated. They were displaced from what they knew as their second home. That was the only Mexican neighborhood that had Mexican products. In 1994, she read an announcement in the newspaper about the closing of St. Francis. The article said that there was little objection to the closing. Her story includes fighting church officials as well as the city, but has a happier ending than that of Scala. They collected petitions, wrote the Vatican, and had a Mass outside St. Francis when the building was closed. Portillo occupied the church in 1996 when it was set for demolition. After an investigation they found that the reasons they used for closing St. Francis were false.

When ordinary people are heard, it is usually because extraordinary people lead the struggle and inspire innovative, fervent action that is sustained over a period of time. There is absolutely no guarantee of success and almost certain substantial costs in terms of time, money, comfort, and even safety, but these oral histories show that such people do exist and can fight, concludes Carolyn Eastwood.

As a new resident of Chicago’s Near South Loop, I find their attempts to affect development in the Near West Side discouraging, but as an historian, I find their stories extraordinary. Thank you Carolyn Eastwood for a wonderful job describing the neighborhood and the people.

The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends

Harmon Lisnow of the Institute for Career Development (ICD) at Merrillville, Ind.

poet author Jimmy Santiago Baca, edited with Stacy James and published in October 2001

Review from workingforamerica.org/

Steelworkers’ Book Is Hot

Grammar, spelling, reading and writing—these are not exactly the pursuits a steelworker would line up for after an overnight shift at the mill. Harmon Lisnow of the Institute for Career Development (ICD) at Merrillville, Ind., knew that when he set out to advertise a creative writing workshop to the 25,000 steelworkers of northwestern Indiana. He invited them to “tell their stories” for a possible book on life in the mills, and, to help them, chose poet author Jimmy Santiago Baca, who learned to read and write in prison and whose charismatic style, Lisnow knew, would put workers at ease. The first 20 middle-aged steelworking storytellers had a lot of cynicism, Lisnow recalls. “They didn’t expect much out of it,” he says. “They kind of laughed and said, yeah, right, my story.” But once Baca convinced them that grammar and spelling weren’t an issue, they were staying up nights (or days, as the shift might dictate) writing. Within three weeks, Baca had enough material to create The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends, which he edited with Stacy James and published in October 2001.

The book, which is going into its third printing, has been reviewed by several major newspapers and National Public Radio and is for sale on Internet book sites. Other unions are looking into replicating the workshops for health workers, rubber workers and Teamsters at various locations around the country. Colleges are using it as a text.

The ICD has run basic literacy courses since the 1980s to prepare steelworkers for careers in the steel industry or in other fields. It is a joint educational and training program of the United Steelworkers and 11 steel companies, with courses at 40 sites throughout the steel belt. They now use “The Heat” in their creative writing curriculum and attendance at courses was up 40 percent last year.

The steelworker authors have done readings around the country and “knocked listeners out,” says Lisnow. Always the educator, he notes that they are now very poised public speakers. His new dream has them doing theater in an off-Broadway café; he is seeking money to turn one worker’s stories into a screenplay. Ultimately, he would like to see the writing idea take root in unions worker’s stories into a screenplay. Ultimately, he would like to see the writing idea take root in unions and workplaces across the country so that there could be a Union Workers Writing Month culminating in a body of work about workers lives. Helping him to do that is the Association of Joint Labor Management Educational Programs, which held a workshop in November to train City University of New York adult education instructors on the design and implementation strategies for capturing the “worker’s voice” in creative writing.

For more information on how to create such a workshop for your union, call ICD’s Andy Smith at (219) 738-9029. To purchase a copy of Heat, call ICD at 1-888-291-8003.

By Suzan Erem

Erem has worked in the union movement for the past dozen years as an organizer, a union rep, and a communications director.  Her book is an account of the struggle to re-build a vibrant and powerful trade union movement.  She examines conflicting demands of race, class, and gender and, while never underestimating the obstacles, she makes a powerful and passionate case for organizing the disorganized and empowering the powerless.

From monthlyreview.org

Labor Pains is an insider’s account of the struggle to rebuild a vibrant and powerful trade union movement in the United States. It takes as its starting point the daily experience of a union organizer, and brings that experience to life. It enables us to grasp how the conflicting demands of race, class, and gender are lived in the new union movement.

The role of the unions is defined mainly by larger economic and political agendas. While keeping these agendas clearly in sight, Erem focuses primarily on aspects of the life of the union which often remain hidden. The personal crises of union members become entangled in the work of the union. The energies of the union are focused not only on winning gains from bosses but also on maintaining internal cohesion and morale among workers. Barriers of race, age and gender are constantly negotiated and overcome, and conflicts flare up across them at moments of tension. And union life goes on not only when the workers have made their point, or won a victory, but after defeat as well. The personalities and ambitions of union organizers converge at times and become a source of tension at others. Each individual within the larger collective has their own task of finding a viable balance between public and private selves.

These intersecting lines of force are imaginatively recreated in this book. Erem writes as a woman in a union movement which is dominated by men; as the child of immigrants in a movement whose members are increasingly immigrants themselves; as one who finds herself in the racial no man’s land between black and white. While never underestimating the obstacles in the way of the union movement, she makes a powerful and passionate case for organizing the unorganized and empowering the powerless.

((( REVIEWS )))

“A compelling narrative … [Suzan] Erem’s book is revealing and important, not only because it does a wonderful job of of actualizing working-class ideology and activity with the metaphorics of language, but also because it provides the reader with a sympathetic and hopeful view of society …”
—SCIENCE & SOCIETY

“I love it! It’s about time somebody wrote about union organizing as the adventure it truly is! I hope this is the beginning of a whole new era in labor writing, which has historically been all too dry. Labor Pains is a great read.”
— BARBARA EHRENREICH

“As a new generation of campus activists move into the labor movement, Labor Pains captures the complex hard love that working within today’s labor movement entails. Through Suzan Erem’s very readable stories we get a sometimes troubling, sometimes heartening, and mostly very real sense of the day to day struggles of a union trying to do right by its members and its vision, in an ever more challenging environment for workers and unions. It is a very personal story, framed by Erem’s unique background and experience, but still tells a universal story about sticking with the union, even when the going gets rough.” — KATE BRONFENBRENNER, DIRECTOR, NYS SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL& LABOR RELATIONS, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

“Reading Suzan Erem is like listening to a longtime friend. She writes with the authentic voice of a sister who’s been there, done that, printed the t-shirts, and personally hand painted the picket signs. Labor Painsis an elevated train ride through the lives of real people lovingly rendered without sentimentality or fawning nostalgia.”— ELISE A. BRYANT, GEORGE MEANY CENTER

“This is the painful story of a person who loves the labor movement; a straight from the shoulder, honest recounting of the persons she met and the joys and disappointments which were hers through the years of organizing. Suzan Erem’s questioning of leadership tactics was the outcome of her deep respect for the people she organized. A series of honest encounters are told in a most readable fashion.”
— MSGR. JOHN J. EGAN, DE PAUL UNIVERSITY

“Suzan Erem’s chronicle of one mother’s life and work in organized labor is touching, honest, daring, sometimes uncomfortable, but also instructive and uplifting. For anyone who has ever had to put aside family and personal goals for the betterment of others, this is your story. Keep writing, Suzan; stories like yours are as necessary as water to a land thirsty for genuine heroes, genuine conflicts, and standing tall for genuine solutions.”
— LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ, AUTHOR, ALWAYS RUNNING: LA VIDA LOCA, GANG DAYS IN LA