The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 5, 1932, Page 4

i MARCH 5, u 1932 Million Women Are a Big 1 | \ wage Four sia oe f / { DAILY WORKER, 4WEW YORK, SATURDAY The Worki ng Women Must A SPORTS PARADE OF WOMEN IN MOSCOW Fight Against the Crisis and Imperialist AMTER By 1 country ferent st it protec neverthel have enere children, from exploite men men do instance: certain of autor shops anc sible for the ¢ with their so-ca ard” of ch today we find only in the rapidly are ones. preter woman and men are not but enter The American Feder bor and its Women’s Der the Women’s Trade Union League, carrying on continual propaganda against the work c ied women fm industry, Even in most recent years the A. F. of L. has demanded the removal of married women from industry This, however, the ery of hun; does r, and the car not have avier women not only of their ut also of the working 10 other way can one ex- great “anxiety” that the id the bosses feel re- the suffering of the white slaves, They know well that white collar workers, and trained as they have bee! would be a very powerful orce in the ranks of the revolu- tionary working class and, there- fore, they are trying to win them over to continued support of the present system of robbery of the working c This same “anxiety” is being felt toward the ex-service- men who have been thrown into streets to starve and have no support from the govern- that uses them as cannon cated the four me fodder. With war on against the Chinese with Soviet Union, every kind of organization mong the women is being estab- ed, social clubs, athletic clubs, le clubs, organization among the against the capitalist are being given a wage cut—this is the manner in which the capitalist | class is proceeding in order to win the women for their plans. Why do they lie about and slan- der the Soviet Union? Why do they keep information on the status of women in the Soviet Union from reaching the women in the United States? For the same reason that SOVIET WORKER-STUDENTS In the Soviet Union the working masses, women as well as men, are ! given the widest opportunities for study and education. Schools and courses are attached to,every factory for the special education of the men and women workers. fists, taking advantage of this cry, ere employing these millions of women in order, together with the exploitation of children and Negro | workers, to still further lower the standard of ing of working c! Toda e econo! crisis, out of which capitalist: one way, and that is, through war, especially directed against the So- viet Union, the time has come for the women, together with the other workers, to fight back. All over the country in the strike strug- gles that are taki place in in- dustries in which women are oc- cupied women are playing a leading role. In he textile and needle in- dustries, in the metal industry, the women are on the picket line fighting militantly against the po- lee and gangsters. In the m strike, the miners’ wives are among the m militant on the picket line and in many instances are most feared by deputies and thugs than are miners them- selves. In Dis ew York, where hundreds of thousands of women are employed in the needle, textile, food and indu to say nothing of the hundreds of thous- ands in o: res, etc., women workers p) a leading role. In the present dressmakers’ strike led by the United Front Committee and the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union, most of these @ressmakers are young workers ‘who for the first time have been out on strike and have joined an organization. In the textile strikes of Paterson, the women, a little bit more back- ‘ward than the men, neve! on the picket line showed s spirit. In the rent and bread strikes, the working class hous ‘wives have played the leading role id these strikes haye shown clearly that the women workers can be mobilized for struggle. What has been done up to the present, however, is only slight Hardly a beginning has been | made. The women workers, geld ‘back by man prejudices and fears an and must be drawn into strug- gle. Without the participation of the women workers and without the active support of the working class housewives, no struggle can be won. The position of the Wo- ;Men'’s Trade Uhion League and the wocialist party must be battered \gown. Women have become a basic ‘part of industry and as such must ‘be mobilized into the revolutionary unions for active participation and otruggle. At the present time with the preparations for going on most @nergetically, the bosses are organ- shoe ry, the entire they are lying about the conditions in the Soviet Union as a whole, so that they will be able to better or- ganize the workers of the United States for a war against the Soviet Union. The capitalist system is edu- | war being organized ss women thrown out to them as | umb at the same time that they | cracking and the only way out of the present chaos is to make war against the Soviet Union in the hope of destroying the idea tt workers can take over and run the country for the benefit of the work- ers and farmers. The success of the first Five Year Plan and the preparation of the second Five- Year Plan with all its provisions for women and for the general cul- ture of the working class are s as to awaken the revolutiona termination of the workers all over the world. In the Soviet Union, women receive equal pay for equal | work. No office is too high that a woman worker cannot occupy. ‘Women receive two months off be- fore childbirth and after childbirth with full pay, They do not work as in the United States, 10 to 12 hours a day, but 7 hours a aa with wage increases. The edu tional and cultural facilities are continually improving and it is these facts that the capitalists are trying to conceal and lie about. Particularly, the Negro women feel the crisis and are discontented. They have yet to feel, however, that the white working class, and especially the white women work- ers, are willing to unite with them not only in words and resolutions but in deeds, for a joint fight with the rest of the .working class against the bosses. In Harlem where there are 250,000 Negroes, the City of New York has the nerve to expend only $300,000 for relief. In the Negro section and districts of the coun- try, the misery and poverty are the greatest, the housing conditions are | the worst, unemployment is most widespread and yet little or noth- ing is being done to relieve these workers. The Negro workers know what they were promised before the last World War and how they were treatec after it, and therefore it is our fundamental duty to mo- bilize these Negro women workers, of the needle, laundry industry, etc., for joint struggle. This is the task not only of the revolutionary women but of the whole revolutionary working class Jed by the Communist Party. Up to the present, work among women has been considered a woman's task and until this idea is broken down and the men begin to under- stand that without the active par- ticipation of women in the class struggle for unemployment relief and insurance and against wage- cuts, against persecution of the foreign born, lynching of Negroes, against imperialist war and for de- fense of the Chinese masses and the Soviet Union, there can be no real revolutionary class struggle. Therefore, March 8th and the preparations for March 8th are the task of the entire Party and revo- Jutionary working class, Although March 8th, International Women’s Day, must draw tens and hundreds of thousands of working women | By M. DEAN. In Shanghai women and children make up more than 50 per cent of all industrial workers. In Han- kow women and children make up 58 per cent of all workers in the large industries there. In Antung, Manchuria, there are over 15,000 omen in the silk industry alone. In Wushi there are more than 25,000 women and children in the silk in- dustry. In the cotton spinning cen- ters, women and children make up about 80-90 per cen$ < the total number of workers. Single cotton- spinning mills employ up to two to three thousand women and chil- dren. The textile industry is one of the largest industries in China. ‘Tobacco factories also employ up to 2,000 women workers. The silk filatures are mostly Chi- nese owned. They are old, dilapi- dated fire traps. Even during the unbearable damp-heated summer months, the windows in the silk filatures are not permitted to be open. Women and children work in steam-filled rooms without any rest period up to 17 hours daily. Children from 6 years old, stir silk cocoons in hot water with bare hands. Foremen walk behind the workers and beat them with rods if seen talking to each other. Not in- frequetly there are strikes of the silk workers against the raping of @ woman worker, The building and tools in the silk filature are rented by the employers so that there is | very great resistance by the em- ployers against investment of capi- tal to improve the primitive meth- od of work and to better the work- ing conditions. The wages of wo- men silk workers in Shanghai and Wushi are about 40 Chinese cents a day. (According to the present. rate of exchange it 1s about 10 American cents). In Antung, Mane churia, the wages of the women silk workers Is nine Chinese dollars (present rate of exchange equals about 4 and half Chinese dollars to one American dollar) per month, plus a daily ration of rice. The 9 dollars are paid only if a full month of 30 days is worked. masses in China have launched against the heavy attacks upon ; their conditions of life by the Chin- ese bourgeoisie and by the imper- | ialists is one from which many a lesson can be drawn by the prole- tariat of other countires. In the 10 weeks ending April 30, 1931, alone, there took place 170 large strikes of women cotton and silk workers. Single strikes involved up to 30,000, 17,000 and 20,000 women. ‘These were mostly spontaneous strikes for restoration of wage cuts, against the discharge of women workers, against the brutal treat- ment of women workers, better working conditions for children and for higher wages, ‘The second general strike of the Shanghai silk workers took place in spite of the decisions of the Kuo- mintang government forbidding the strike. Beginning with the occupa- tion of Manchuria by the Japanese invaders, the women’s strikes de- veloped into bigger struggles. There | were general strikes of women work- ers in the Japanese cotton mills against the intervention by Jap- anese imperialism into Manchuria. In Shanghai, Peking, Canton, Chengru, etc., working women and girl students marched at the head of the mass anti-imperialist dem- onstrations demanding arms from the Kuomintang government and disarming the police who fired and killed workers and students during the demonstrations (as was the case in Shanghai where five workers were killed and in Canton where 12 students and workers were killed by the police). To keep in safe channels, the revolutionary ferment among the Chinese working women and to util- ize the women’s activities for their own interests, the Chinese bourg- eoisie is attempting to get control of the working women’s and revo-~ lutionary girl students movement. Under the control of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the counter-revolutionary trade unions of the Kuomintang, women’s na- tional salvation federations have been organized in many cities. In The struggle that the women Shanghai the “Righteous and Brave Parades of this kind are an every-day occurrence in the Workers’ Fatherland. In the capitalist countries only the parasite wives and daughters of the bosses participate in sports. In the Soviet Union sports are an important part of the life of working women, especially the youth. The parade pictured above, like many of its kind, took place right from the factory directly after working hours, into demonstration and activities, nevertheless men must also par- ticipate and by their greater ex- periences help the women workers to organize jointly with the men against the crisis, against imperial- ist war and for the defense of the - Soviet Union. International Women’s Day of this year calls for special efforts to wrench away the women workers from the control and influence of the capitalist class and definitely to line them up in ever increasing numbers with the revolutionary working class in the struggle for a workers’ and farmers’ government under the leadership of the Com- munist Party, Factor in the Struggle of Toilers Against Bosses 1 By GRACE HUTCHINS, So great now are the numbers of women and girls gainfully em- ployed in this country that the im- agination can hardly picture a pro- cession of all women workers—near- ly eleven million in number. If a parade of eleven million workers should march from di in lines of ten abre: each line only two seconds behind another, the lines would take fifty days to pass a given point, Imagine then such a procession marcning for fifty di and you have pictured in numbers the great army of wom~ en who work for a living in the United States. In the half this army has in and in the thirty years since 1900 it has more than doubled. In the | decade between 1920 and 1930 num- | bers of women in paid jobs in- creased by twenty-six per cent, as compared with a fifteen per cent increase of men in the same period. ‘Two out of every nine persons in paid jobs in the United States are women. And two out of every nine women in the population now work for a living. Since 1920, two million more wom- | en have stepped out of unpaid ser- century since 1880 sed fourfold in industry. What these jobs mean in long days, speed-up, ill health and meager earnings, workers noly know too well. Many in Factories Two and a half million women —or in exact figures, 2,416,288, are in the factories and other mechan- ical industries, representing an ine crease of half a million, or twenty- five per cent over the 1920 number, This growth in numbers of women factory workers is of the gretaest importance to the toiling class, for they are engaged in direct produc- tion, in the war industries and in other basic industries where women are replacing men. In comparison with this 25 per cent increase in women in factories, men factory workers barely increased ten per cent, far less than the growth of the general population. Actually, in proportion to the population, fewer men have factory jobs, while half ylight to dark | vice at home into low paid jobs | a million women have taken the places of the men workers In the Crisis Since the Autumn of 19: when the stock market crash first re- vealed the crisis in capitalist indus- try, women of the working class have suffered from the effects of unemployment even more intensely than the men workers. This crisis, the greatest in the whole history of capitalism, has driven an even greater number of mothers with little children out into the labor market in an effort to find work. Unemployment means under- nourishment, starvation, evictions, breaking up of homes, and all of these results come hardest on the women of the household. While undernourishment always has seri- ous effects, it is most disastrous for | pregnant mothers in the year fol- Jowing child birth. Undernourish- ment to the point of starvation ex- ists not only in the coal fields among the miners’ families, but also among the countless families in other centers of the world’s rich- est country in the year 1932. Charity in this crisis has not even kept the workers and their families from starving to death or commit- ting suicide. more than a tiny fraction of the damage that the conditions of capi- talism each year creates anew. Strikes of industrial women work- ers are taking place against wage- cuts and unbearable conditions have been followed by rent strikes and bread strkes of working class ten- ants and housewives. The part al- ready played by women in these strike struggles is a story in itself, ‘When once organized in the revolu- tionary unions, women workers take their places firmly in the vanguard of the working class. Male Chauvinism American Federation of Labor of- ficials have been as ready as the bosses to preach and teach women’s subjection and subordination. Jeal- ous of women’s coming into the more skilled trades, these officials of the craft unions have steadily Opposed equal opportunity for girls and have established restrictions against taking women into the est on It can never repair | American Federation of Labor unions on any equal basis of any kind, Even among some of the more ade yanced women workers who should know that their strength lies in working class solidarity, there still exists what might be called “male chauvinism” toward women work- ers. And just as the white workers often do not recognize in themselves the white chauvinism toward Negro workers which is felt keenly by the Negro workers, so also the men workers do not recognize in them- selves their attitude of superiority to the women. The result of this male chauvine ism often is that women are not brought forward or encouraged to take positions of leadership, and the workers’ movement has been weak- the very front where fi might be strongest—among the masses of unskilled and semi-skilled women workers. When once aroused to class consciousness and the pos- es of, organization, womer have proved themselves among the best and most active ficuers in the workers’ strugs'--. International Women’s Day International Women’s Day is the day of the year when women work- ers throughout the world demon- strate their solidarity with the men workers in the mighty class sirug- gle against the capitalists and their governments. At factory gate meet- ings, in parades, conferences, and working class gatherings of every kind, women come together to re- new their pledge of solidarity and to organize themselves in unbreak- able lines of strength under the leadership of the Communist Party, This year, on March 8th, 1932, un- der the banner of the Communist Party, women workers here in the United States are demonstrating with the men against the imperial- ist.war. International Women's Day this year will see the addition of many new women members in the ranks of the revolutionary ‘unions and in the Communist Party, the only Party which carries on the struggle against imperialist war and against the capitalist system. A Tennessee Women’s Auxiliary of the National Miners Union in Action By GERTRUDE LOGAN. The mine came out on strike on January Ist one hundred per cent, along with many other mines in Kentucky and Tennessee, The strike machinery was working well. But how about the women? Yes, how about the women? How active were they? Did they take part in the activities in the camp? Were they active on the strike com- mittee and all other committees? Army” a separate women’s mili- tary organization was organized; in Peking a Women’s Army was or- ganized. These are under the di- rectorship of Kuomintang military. officers. In some places these Sal- vation Federations have slipped out of the control of the Chinese bour- geoisie and have joined the revolu- tionary movement of the students, The heroic work of the Chinese Communist Party and the All- China Federation of Labor among women, together with the influ- ence extended by the Chinese Sov- jets and the Chinese Red Army had much to do to develop this strong anti-imperialist sentiment and determination to struggle against it by the masses of Chin- ese women toilers. In spite of the conditions of terror egainst all revolutionaries, by the Kuomintang government, which have been mul- tiplied since the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese, the - revolutionary organizations in China are carrying on successful work to combat the influence that the imperialist and Chinese bour- geois organizations, through their different special methods of ap- proach to working women are try- ing to weave about the masses of Chinese women toilers, ‘The imperialist press in China is alarmed about the large number of women who are illegally going over into the Soviet districts to work for the Soviets and for the Chinese Red Army. In a district in North Hupeh, where the Red Army called for volunteers, in addition to the 2,000 men who volunteered, over 200 women who walked distances up to 60 miles came to offer their services to the Red Army. The head of the 19th White Army against the Red Army in August 1931, General Chen Min-chu said that countless numhers of women volunteers for the Red Guard in China, which is the eyes and ears of the Red Army he added, The Communist Party of China and the Central Soviet Govern- ment of China haye called upon Revolutionary Struggle of Working Women in China | the Chinese masses to launch a determined struggle to oust the imperialists from China and to overthrow the imperialist lackeys, the Kuomintang government and to establish the Soviets throughout China. The extension of the Chinése Soviets, the active defense of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, are the central slogans under which the leading revolutionary proletar- iat of China is rallying China’s millions in their struggle against all exploiters and oppressors, For some weeks the women were almost ignored. The men did not realize that their wives and moth- ers and daughters must also be ac- tive in order to make the strike a success. For women are not em- ployed in the mines, and are re- garded as home-makers and not as fighters in industry. - But the women’s organizer of the National Miners Union came along—and what a change! The women, eager to help, eager to be active, eager to fight, at last got their chance. Not only did the or- ganizer immediately help these women to set up a woman's auxil- jary of the National Miners Union, but she bawled out the men for neglecting such a tremendous op- portunity for strengthening the strike. And the men were not dif- ficult to convince. It was just a case of having their eyes opened, Once the Women’s Auxiliary was set on its feet, and once the men became convinced and supported the organizaiton, things began to hum. Activity? More than the women could keep up with. Taking part in every activity, mass marches and demonstrations. And besides that, a special program 1. A certain proportion of women on every committee in the strike, in order that the women can take ac- tive part in every phase of strike marching | side by. side with the men in the| activity—strike committee, relief committee, finance committee, or- ganizational committee, etc., etc. 2. In connection with relief— not only that the women should be active in the distribution of relief at the relief station, but also active in the collection of relief rom the farmers in conducting tag days in nearby cities for money, in going at organizations for help, eic., etc. Also there was expected any day now a large shipment of clothing sent down from the north by the Workers International Relief. The miners, their wives and children, were going about ragged and prac- tically barefoot, and this clothing, sent in a spirit of solidarity by the workers of the North, was badly |needed. But they realized too, that the workers in the North are ffso hard hit, and that they can afford only to send clothing which is al- ready somewhat worn, Shall we distribute this clothing as it comes in, or shall it be put into good shape first? It may hap- pen that one family will get cloth- ing which requires hours and per- haps days of sewing before it can be worn, while another family might be lucky enough to get some brand new clothing. So the women de- cided and held a big sewing bee. ‘The auxiliary held a special meet~ ing when the clothing arrived, for the purpose of sorting it out and sewing on it. Thus this tremendous job was conducted in a social man- ner, stimulating still further the feeling of solidarity of all the work- ers in the camp, in their joint ef- fort to win better conditions for all. And the women did not sit hunched up over the sewing in their piti- ful little shacks, all laone, sew- ing for hours and hours to get the clothes in shape to wear, but all pitched in together and got the work done in record time. Then there was the question of the school children. Some children could not go to school because they had no clothing. Some went to school without breakfast. Others could not study because they didn’t have the schoolbooks, for in this cap the children had to buy their own books. Also the Red Cross, which had made a survey of the needs of the school children before the term opened, refused any aid because the fathers went on strike! So the following demands were worked out: 1, Clothing for the school chil- dren to be furnished by the school authorities. 2. Hot lunch at noon for all chile dren at the cost of the school au- thorities. 3. All text-books to be furnished free. That night the parent-teachers meeting was held. It had been widely advertized that the county superintendent of schools and the county representative of the Red Cross was to be there. The women elected # spokesman to present these demands and a committee to back them up. But these two of- ficials did not appear! They had heard of the militant plans of the ‘ women, and had been scared off. So now new plans have been made. A committee will go with these demands to the county super- intendent of schools and to the Red Cross. If their demands are ree jected, the women will start mass picketing of these two offices, with slogans, and mobilize the men and children to picket with them, Now these women are taking part in all activities of the strike. Only @ little guidance in helping them organize, brought them into this im portant activity and all the workerr in the camp, men and women now realize how important it is to draw the women into the struggle of the workers. Three of the most advanced of these women have already joined the Communist Party Unit in this camp and keep the importance ef utilizing the women in struggles ever before all the workers, And if they put as much energy into organizing for International ‘Women’s Day on March 8th, as they have done in all their activity up to the present time, this mining camp, at least, will have a good turn-out on this day of struggle against the spectal exploitation of women workers ag eee ‘