MABEL GILLESPIE

Background

Mabel Gillespie was born on March 4, 1867, in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was the daughter of James and Ida (Scott) Gillespie, but passed her girlhood in the home of an aunt, Mrs. Sarah Esther Staples, in Concord, Massachusets.

Education

Between 1898 and 1900, Gillespie was a student at Radcliffe College.

Career

Gillespie began her public work as a secretary of the Boston Associated Charities; and as a resident of Denison House, one of the early college settlements, she familiarized herself with social and industrial conditions.

Becoming vitally interested in the problems of women wage- earners, in 1903, when the first Women’s Trade Union League was organized in Boston, she allied herself with its work. Her first big task was in connection with women workers in the Fall River textile-strike of 1903-04.

Soon after the collapse of the strike, she was called to Buffalo as executive secretary of the Child Labor Committee and of the Consumers’ League. For the latter, about 1907, she made a state-wide survey of the canning industry in New York, working between twelve and sixteen hours a day for four months as a cannery hand, in order to get firsthand knowledge of conditions.

In 1909, she returned to Boston as executive secretary of the Boston Women’s Trade Union League.

When agitation for minimum wage legislation began in Massachusetts, Governor Foss appointed her labor’s member on the first Minimum Wage Commission in America.

She provided much of the impetus for the Trade Union College (1919), probably the first attempt to start a school for labor people, and she helped the university men heading the enterprise to secure their students. She served on the administrative committee of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, opened in 1921.

To her office at the Trade Union League, Boston, came men and women from churches, colleges, and clubs, seeking light on industrial problems.

She died suddenly of heart trouble at the dressmaking shop of which she was a manager.

Achievements

• Mabel was an outstanding figure in the unionizing of the women workers of the city. She helped to organize the garment-workers, laundry-workers, textile-workers, clerks, teachers, professors, office-employees and office-building cleaners. In the organization of the telephone operators in 1912, she gave outspoken support to the girls and was backed by the state branch of the American Federation of Labor, thus bringing women, probably for the first time, to the fore in the labor movement. She was the first woman elected to the executive committee of the state branch of the American Federation of Labor and was made vice-president in 1918.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Where the Birds Are

    (Octavo, , PP.142,)

Personality

A dynamic force in the early stages of the organization of women workers in Massachusetts and the enactment of social-service laws in their behalf, Mabel rarely spoke in public, preferring to work through her many influential associations.

She stirred up interest in Massachusetts in the eight-hour day law, gathering data and preparing arguments, while another appeared as spokesman.

Quotes from others about the person

• According to one of her colleagues, Prof. A. N. Holcombe, “she was the active proponent of the law before its enactment and to her knowledge and courage was due such success as the administrators of the law obtained in America. ”

Connections

Father:

James Gillespie

Mother:

Ida (Scott) Gillespie

aunt:

Mrs. Sarah Esther Staples