Background
Mary Anderson was born on August 27, 1872 in Lidköping, Sweden, the daughter of Magnus Anderson and Matilda Johnson, who were farmers.
(Woman at Work was first published in 1951. Minnesota Arch...)
Woman at Work was first published in 1951. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This is the story of a remarkable woman whose life has been devoted to the betterment of working conditions for women. Mary Anderson was director of the Women's Bureau of the U. S. Department of Labor for twenty-five years, from shortly after its inception until her retirement in 1944. Her autobiography encompasses almost every movement in this country, and international efforts as well, for the benefit of women workers. In her own simple diction, as told to Mary Winslow, who was associated in many of the same movements, Miss Anderson reveals an almost incredible life story. She recounts her arrival in America as a Swedish immigrant of sixteen and her early years as domestic worker, exploited factory hand, and trade union organizer. She describes her bitter struggles for unionization of the garment, shoe, and other industries in Chicago, and the activities of the Chicago and National Women's Trade Union leagues in helping factory and mine workers gain a start toward living wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions. She tells, finally, of a quarter-century of federal service-setting standards for women's employment during two world wars, and serving the cause of labor effectively under five presidents. As the first U. S. government representative to the International Labor Organization, Miss Anderson championed principles of equality for women that were subsequently embodied in the United Nations Charter. Through the story there are sidelights and appraisals of such notables as Frances Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John L. Lewis, and many others. It is an absorbing book, and one that documents an important aspect of our country's social developme
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public official labor activist
Mary Anderson was born on August 27, 1872 in Lidköping, Sweden, the daughter of Magnus Anderson and Matilda Johnson, who were farmers.
Anderson attended grammar school in Sweden.
At the age of sixteen Anderson emigrated to the United States to join an older sister who had settled in Ludington, Michigan. During her first year in America, Anderson worked as a dishwasher and cook in a lumber camp and learned English.
About 1890, she moved to West Pullman, Illinois, with her now-married sister and held a variety of unskilled jobs until she went to work as a stitcher in a shoe factory around 1891. Working as a stitcher for Schwab's in Chicago, Anderson joined the International Boot and Shoe Workers' Union in 1894. The following year she became president of Stitchers Local 94 and retained that position until 1910; she also represented the union to the Chicago Federation of Labor and for eleven years was the only woman on the parent union's executive board.
When the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) was established in 1903, Anderson joined the Chicago branch. By 1910 she was representing the Chicago WTUL to the United Garment Workers. She participated in the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx clothing workers' strike during the winter of 1911. From 1910 to 1913 she served as an investigator to insure compliance with the agreement that had ended this confrontation. A full-time organizer for the National WTUL from 1913 to 1920, she was involved in investigations of the 1913 copper miners' strike in Calumet, Michigan, and the 1916 spar miners' strike in Rosiclare, Illinois.
She became a United States citizen in 1915. Following the American entry into World War I, Anderson served in the Women in Industry Section of both the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense and the Ordnance Department. Increased employment of women during the war as well as arguments by reformers for more than ten years finally resulted in the establishment of a Women in Industry Service in the United States Department of Labor. Anderson was appointed its assistant director in 1918 and succeeded Mary Van Kleeck as director in 1919.
In 1920 Anderson headed the newly created Women's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, a post she retained until 1944.
Between the world wars, Anderson maintained contacts with national and international labor organizations. She attended the labor conferences at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as a representative of the WTUL, as well as the First and Third International Congresses of Working Women in 1919 and 1923, and the 1928 Pan-Pacific Union Conference in Honolulu. She was the United States' unofficial delegate to the International Labor Organization Conference in Geneva in 1931. President Franklin D. Roosevelt named her adviser to the American delegation to the Technical Tripartite Conference on the Textile Industry in Washington, D. C. , in 1937.
Anderson resigned her official positions in 1944. In retirement she continued to testify on the equal rights and equal pay issues before political conventions and congressional committees and wrote Woman at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson as Told to Mary N. Winslow (1951). This book contains an extensive discussion of the Women's Bureau during the years Anderson served as director.
Anderson was the first "up from the ranks" labor woman to head an executive department of the federal government. She served under five U. S. presidents during her tenure at the Women's Bureau. During this time, there was more than a doubling of the number of women working. She did everything in her, the Bureau's, and legislative power to protect the rights of working women.
(Woman at Work was first published in 1951. Minnesota Arch...)
In both the Women in Industry Service and the Women's Bureau, Anderson emphasized the importance of investigating the working conditions of employed women and establishing firm standards of safety and efficiency.
In her writings as well as in testimonies before congressional and industrial bodies, she particularly emphasized equal pay for equal work.
Quotations: '. .. I lost myself in my work and never felt that marriage would give me the security I wanted. I thought that through the trade union movement we working women could get better conditions and security of mind. ''
She never married.
