By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
Lillian Wald encouraged her colleagues to use the Henry Street Settlement as a laboratory for model programs that tested their ideas. The Settlement soon became known as a place where young reformers could make their own careers while at the same time making a difference in the lives of the neighbors whom their programs targeted. While some of the experiments that the Settlement sponsored had limited success, others changed the world.
One of the Settlement’s first experimental programs was a model garment workers’ cooperative. The cooperative was the brainchild of feminist labor leader Leonora O’Reilly. O’Reilly, born in New York City in 1870, had lost her father in 1871. Her mother, desperately poor, worked in a factory to support herself and her infant daughter. Although Leonora was an intelligent child, she was forced to quit school at the age of eleven in order to go to work in a collar factory.
Contemporaries described the young O’Reilly as “a beautiful, slim creature, Grecian in face and manner, so intense that few dared contradict her.” She was, like Wald, quick to form connections with prominent New York City reformers. In 1886, at the age of sixteen, she joined a local of the Knights of Labor, where her mother was already a “staunch” member. The same year, she helped found the Working Women’s Society, a group formed to investigate the working conditions of wage-earning women. It was there that she first joined forces with Josephine Shaw Lowell, whom the Society recruited to write reports and publicize their findings to lawmakers and wealthy philanthropists. Two years later, in 1888, O’Reilly joined the “Syncretic Circle,” a social theory study group organized by labor leader Edward King—the same Edward King who helped lead Wald and Brewster to the College Settlement in 1893.
During her time with the Working Women’s Society, O’Reilly also met Louise Perkins, a wealthy Boston teacher whom the labor leader called “Big Sister.” Perkins became her mentor and benefactor, supporting her both emotionally and financially for many years. Perkins introduced O’Reilly to other influential reformers, including Felix Adler, founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, whom O’Reilly met in 1894. It was most likely Adler who brought O’Reilly into the Social Reform Club, formed two months after they met. At around the same time, O’Reilly met Lillian Wald—another early member of the Social Reform Club—and the two women soon became friends.
By the mid-1990s, Louise Perkins was beginning to worry that her protégée was taking on too much, and that O’Reilly’s health—always somewhat fragile—would suffer as a result. Perkins worries were understandable. O’Reilly was working a ten-hour a day as a forewoman in a shirtwaist factory, and her life outside of work was a veritable whirlwind of reform activities. She enjoyed a growing reputation as an orator, and often spoke to various reform, charity, labor and women’s groups. While engaged in all of these activities, O’Reilly continued to read voraciously in an attempt to make up for her lack of formal education, joined an exercise (“physical culture”) class at the “Y” and took a business training class.
In 1897, Perkins solicited a few of her wealthy friends and raised enough money to allow O’Reilly to quit her paying job for one year and focus on her reform activities. O’Reilly immediately began to put her “free” time to good use. She and Lavinia Dock—a nurse and a resident of the Henry Street Settlement—organized (women’s) Local Number 16 of the United Garment Workers of America in 1897. In 1897-1898 O’Reilly served as secretary for a legislative committee of the Social Reform Club. The same year she was elected the club’s vice president.
O’Reilly chose to spend her year of financial freedom living at the Henry Street Settlement. Although there was no room for Leonora and her mother at 265, the Settlement had other quarters nearby. The two women quickly became part of the Henry Street “family,” spending their evenings at the main settlement house. There,
On Friday evenings, all one winter, the Settlement family listened delightedly while she [Leonora’s mother, Mrs. O’Reilly] told stories and read aloud. Sometimes it was Henry George, but usually, that winter, it was Mazzini. The flaming spirit of the great Italian revolutionary, his love of liberty, were deeply moving.
Wald would later reminisce about the inspiration and influence the O’Reilly women brought to Henry Street during that year:
My associates and I, in the early years of the settlement, owed much to a mother and daughter of singularly lofty mind and character, both working women, who for a time joined the settlement family. They had been affiliated with labor organizations almost all their lives. The ardor of the daughter continually prodded us to action, and the clear-minded, intelligent mother helped us to a completer [sic] realization of the deep-lying causes that had inspired Ma zzini and other great leaders, whose works we were re-reading.”
O’Reilly quickly settled in to the daily whirlwind that was life at the Settlement, running a young boys’ club and working on a sweatshop investigation with Lavinia Dock. But her major contribution that year was setting up and running a model garment workers’ cooperative. Dock described the cooperative as “a little shirtshop where unskilled sewing girls were taught to be skilled and capable of making a complete garment.” The shop had “six girls and six machines.”
One of the “girls” who worked in the shop was Rose Gollup [Cohen], who later wrote about the experience in her autobiography. Cohen was no stranger to the Settlement—Wald had often nursed her and had also encouraged her attempts to educate herself. Although the young woman already had skills as a garment worker, she found a place in the shop after confiding “to Miss Wald” about sexual harassment at her workplace. “I had confessed to her about so many other difficulties, our own and those of our neighbours,” Cohen revealed, “and she had always helped us out. Perhaps she could help here too.”
As Cohen describes it, the day after her “confession” to Wald, on “Monday morning at eight o’clock,” she “went to the Nurses’ Settlement” and from there to the shop, located “on the top floor in the East Broadway House” of the Settlement. Passing through “a gas-lit ante room, she climbed the stairs, stopping at the threshold, her heart beating violently at the thought that she “was entering on a new life.” When she finally “opened the door,” she “was surprised, then delighted” to see Leonora O’Reilly (whom she refers to as Miss “O’There”) standing at “a large table,…cutting.” Cohen, who had already worked with O’Reilly at the Settlement, realized with delight that the beautiful labor leader was to be her “boss.”
O’Reilly greeted Cohen “in her quiet, gentle way” before opening the door and leading the teenager “into a little room where three girls were bending over sewing machines.” While O’Reilly made introductions, Cohen stood by “amazed,”—to her the experience was “more like coming to a sociable and not to a shop in which to work.” Cohen sat down and started making “buttonholes in a scrap of blue gingham.” Although the young girl, already an accomplished seamstress, felt the work was beneath her, O’Reilly was so kind that Cohen could “scarce believe” that she “was not dreaming.”
In fact, “[t]he little shop turned out to be more and more like a shop in a dream” for Cohen. The girls “all sat in a group in the centre of the little attic room where the best light fell.” They got to know each other and became friends. After a few days, a machine arrived for Cohen and she “was taught how to make shirt waists.” Soon thereafter, O’Reilly began to use Cohen as a shirt waist model, taking her to “a fitting room…where everything was covered with blue denim,” a room that the girls called the “little blue room.”
It was “in this room, with her mouth full of pins and while pinning me into a shirt waist” that Cohen, greedy for knowledge, would question O’Reilly incessantly—“There were so many things that I wanted to know,” she wrote. “I wanted to know about our race [i.e. the Jewish people], about myself, about the Irish on Cherry Street, about the shop. The questions went tumbling all over each other in my mind and in my speech.” O’Reilly seemed happy to reward Cohen’s curiosity, telling her “something of the history of the Irish people, of their joys, of their sorrows, of their humour, of their bitter struggle to free themselves.” She also “explained my own race” and endeavored to explain and perhaps excuse the behavior of the men at the shop where Cohen had been harassed—“when you work like an animal you live like an animal,” she said, and continued, “[W]hat are their lives? ….sweating from early to late, some haven’t even their families here. Talking? It is perhaps the only joy within their reach.”
Although O’Reilly seemed to be bending over backward to excuse and forgive the behavior of the men who had abused Cohen, once she encouraged Cohen to empathize with the plight of those who persecuted her, Cohen’s sadness lifted.
Meanwhile,
the life of all of us together in the shop was continuing as in a dream. It was like a dream to be working only from eight o’clock until five with an hour for lunch. For lunch one of us three young girls would get off a little earlier and make cocoa for all. We each paid ten cents a week toward it and two cents a day to Fan [a co-worker] for the fruit which she bought.
When the girls broke for lunch, they sat down “to a prettily set table with blue dishes and bright silver, which Miss Wald placed” for their use.
O’Reilly treated the girls in the shop “as if we were her little sisters, and taught and guided us.” They “led a sweet life” while the little shirt shop was in operation, and didn’t want to leave, even though they “received very little money, a dollar, a dollar and a half, two dollars a week” for their work. Cohen later found that the small wages were justified because the shop was not supposed to be an actual factory, but rather a place to teach young women a trade—the money being “merely meant to encourage us, or help our families.”
Cohen had been working at the shop for about a year when O’Reilly was forced to shut down the experiment. The young girl felt miserable, blaming herself and her co-workers for not working hard enough. Others were inclined to subscribe to the more likely theory that the shop closed because it was unable to compete with piecework manufacturing—“The experiment succeeded so well that it ended after a year and a half: the quality of work turned out was so fine that there was no place for it in a standardized market.”
On that sad last day of work, Wald and O’Reilly “locked” themselves “up all afternoon in the little blue fitting room.” At 5:00 p.m., shortly before the girls were to stop work for the day, the young women “learned that the shop could not pay for itself.” They “all wept at the news.” Soon the girls who had worked so well together, who had become friends and experienced true collegiality, “were scattered all over the city, placed at work for which” they “were best fitted, or wherever there happened to be an opening.”
The model shirt shop was not considered a model for success—unlike many other experiments that would begin at the Settlement. It was, in fact, seen by most reformers as a noble failure. Yet many of the working conditions established at the workshop were commonplace fifty years later, expected and indeed guaranteed by the United States government. Days that started at 8:00 and ended at 5:00 with an hour for lunch, proper lighting, a work space that was not cramped and overcrowded—the conditions that seemed in the 1890s “like a dream” to Cohen—would eventually, thanks to the continued efforts of labor leaders and other reformers, become a reality.
As for Leonora O’Reilly, running the shirt shop furthered her career as a labor leader and allowed her to discover her gifts as a teacher. In September of 1898 she enrolled in domestic arts course at the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn. There she trained as a sewing teacher, graduating in 1900. In June of 1899, she accepted a position as the head worker in the Brooklyn settlement, Asacog House, a position that she kept until July, 1902. During the same period, she taught sewing at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. In 1903, O’Reilly helped to form the Women’s Trade Union League, serving on its first board and speaking at the November, 1903 meeting establishing the New York branch of the League. She eventually resigned her teaching job(s) and became a full-time speaker and organizer, working on behalf of both the union and suffrage movements.
Bibliography
Cohen, Rose, Out of the Shadow; A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Daniels, Doris Groshen, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald, New York, Feminist Press, 1989.
Daniels, Doris Groshen, Lillian D. Wald: The Progressive Woman and Feminism, Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, c1976 (City University of NY, Ph.D., 1977.)
Duffus, R.L., Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939
James, Janet Wilson, ed., A Lavinia Dock Reader, edited with a biographical introduction by Janet Wilson James, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985.
Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Notable American Women, 1607-1950; A Biographical Dictionary, Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Boyer, eds., v. II, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
Schrom Dye, Nancy, As Equals and As Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York, Columbia, Univ. of Missouri Press, 1980
Wald, Lillian D., The House on Henry Street, N:Y: Henry Holt & Co., 1915.
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016