“Isn’t your sister and your daughter and your wife a person?”

Margaret Hinchey: Immigrant, Labour Leader and Suffragette

On the 2 February 1914 a delegation of five hundred working women marched on the White House. Their aim was to persuade President Wilson to support women’s suffrage. One of the few chosen to speak to the President was Margaret Hinchey, a laundry worker and Irish immigrant who admitted she was “shaking and trembling” to speak on behalf of the “working women of the United States.” She asked him to use his power “to wipe out this great injustice” by granting women the vote. The President’s head was bowed as he struggled to elicit an appropriate response “I know, I am in an embarrassing position…my party...” His attempt to sidestep the demand was met with a memorable retort. She apparently said

“President, we women are able to take care of ourselves; that’s why we want the vote. Why, when the men of Limerick were fighting the English, the women of Limerick were fighting too, and they gave the Redcoats a bitter pill to swallow.” [1]

Who was this remarkable woman speaking truth to power in the White House? Information about Margaret Hinchey’s early life is not conclusive but it is most likely that she was born in Limerick in 1885.[2] Due to multiple famines, evictions, poverty and a lack of opportunities there was overwhelming emigration from rural Munster and Connaught in the nineteenth century. The Hinchey family were no exception to this. They emigrated to New York when Margaret was 10 years old.[3] They were seeking a better life but things were far from easy in the promised land.

Margaret left school when she was thirteen years of age and entered the workforce.[4] Working hours were extremely long, conditions were appalling and often dangerous. Child labour was widespread (by 1910 over 2 million children under age of 16 were working). Many of the workers in the sweatshops and laundries of New York were immigrant women, and while some of them were represented by unions, their victories had been limited.

One employer that refused to sign any agreement with the unions was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. On the 25 March 1911 a fire started on the eighth floor of the Asch building. This floor, and the next two above it, were occupied by this company, with around 500 of their workers present. Soon all three floors were aflame. The company had previously ordered the steel doors to be locked to “prevent theft” and to guard against the “interruption of work” that would be caused by their employees using the toilets which were off site. The result was that 146 workers died and 123 of the victims were women. 62 jumped to their deaths trying to escape.

This was a watershed moment in U.S. labour history. For the majority of suffragists (who were middle class) women’s suffrage was a question of principle and justice, but for the working class activist it was now seen as an existential issue. They required the vote to change and then enforce laws which would protect them in the workplace. Margaret Hinchey was then a forewoman in the Langfelder laundry in New York and she soon made this connection, that working conditions could only be improved through labour agitation and legislative change. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) and proceeded to lead a laundry strike on the 1st January 1912 which demanded improved conditions and pay.[5] The strike grew to over 30,000 women. She testified before the State Arbitration Board, explaining that she worked a 72 hour week, that there were no seats on the work-floor and that male employees had access to the women’s dressing room.[6] Other testimonies before the Board included that of a fifteen year old girl, Margaret Corbett, who worked a 52 hour week (constantly standing), had to walk 32 blocks to the laundry each day, and whose middle finger on her right hand had been crushed by a machine while at work. The Arbitration Board declared that the strike was lawful and a deal was eventually reached.

Her natural leadership qualities and her powerful orations were noticed by senior members of the Women’s suffrage and labour movement. Leonora O’Reilly, another Irish-American labour activist, asked Margaret to speak at a mass meeting of the Wage Earner’s League in April 1912. Her speech was aimed at anti-suffrage argument that “family was more important than lawmaking” and thus there was no need for women to have the vote.

“You cannot call it a family and go home where the working people go for seven short hours to rest their weary bones. The man cannot make both ends meet; the woman goes out to help, and what becomes of the children? She cannot put them in the nursery when she works 14 and 17 hours — those are not nursery hours. She is too tired to give them care and food when she comes home. Then there is the tuberculosis home for them and another job for the undertaker. We want votes for regular hours, better conditions and the enforcement of laws. We have long hours and no sanitary conditions. A mother works up to the time she brings her baby into the world and four days after she and the baby are laid together in the casket. We get so little for the work of our body, and if we sell our souls we get so much from the man who makes the laws and breaks the laws.”[7]

Hinchey suffered for her efforts. During the shirt waist strike of 1913 she was arrested and imprisoned. She was convicted of assaulting a forewoman in the factory who broke the picket line.[8] She spent thirty days in ‘The Tombs’, the city prison in New York for what Life and Labor labelled her “brave work as a picket.” In typical fashion this did little to dent Maggie Hinchey’s resolve. She sent a cheery telegram from prison to the ongoing biennial convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America which read

“Long live the Women’s Trade Union League. Greetings to all.” [9]

When she was released there over 200 women waiting to greet her and they cheered as she emerged. Most of those present were members of the Henry Street Settlement and had testified during the court case on Hinchey’s behalf.[10] She was also blacklisted by employers in the city.

Around this time Hinchey approached the Woman Suffrage Party (WSP) and she said to them “use me in any way you can for the good of the cause.”[11]
 In October 1913 she was hired by the WSP as an organiser and “street speaker” to help garner support for women’s suffrage among the working class. But Margaret thought that this would be a two way street. When she attended the National Suffrage Convention in December she felt uncomfortable among “ladies” who did not understand her perspective or class. She complained to O’Reilly that she felt that she had intruded where she was not wanted, and that

“…not a word of labour was spoken at this convention…” [12]

After meeting with the President as part of a delegation in February 1914, Hinchey was to the fore in canvassing support for the suffrage referendum in New York. It is no exaggeration to say that she spoke before tens of thousands of people and convinced them to support the upcoming bill. At a meeting of the Equal Suffrage League at the Astor hotel she explained why she was now campaigning for women’s suffrage.

“The engineers got a raise of $2 the other day. They have a strong union and votes back of it. They did not have to strike. You never hear of the ‘Big Six’ striking, but when the shirt waist girls strike they are arrested for asking other girls not to take their positions. We went to the Mayor at that time saying we represented 30,000 women. “Thirty thousand women are nothing to me” he answered. Would he have said that of 30,000 voters?” [13]

Her skill in communicating with the working class impressed Jeannette Rankin (Montana’s most famous suffragist) and she requested that Hinchey assist her suffrage campaign in Montana. Hinchey was immensely popular in the Treasure State, her speeches which linked women’s suffrage with the welfare of workingwomen resonated with the audiences she attracted. In July 1914 she shared a stage (the rear of a motor car!) with Rankin and “several hundred men…with a sprinkling of women…jammed from curb to curb” to hear them speak.[14] The crowd listened that evening for two hours. A local paper referred to Margaret as “an Irish girl, quick witted and enthusiastic” who had “scant opportunity to study books.”

It was as if the newspaper was reminiscing about Daniel O’Connell when it described how she made her audiences “laugh and weep, but applaud little because they fear to lose a word of her powerful appeal on behalf of women.”[15] The East Oregonian claimed that Hinchey was “one of the biggest aids to the suffrage campaign.”[16] When the voting men of Montana went to the polls on 3 November 1914 they voted in favour of the suffrage bill granting women in Montana the vote. Jeanette Rankin later became the first woman elected to Congress in the history of the United States.[17]

Hinchey returned to New York and began a whirlwind tour of the city and state of New York canvassing for votes for women’s suffrage. On the 4th May 1915 Hinchey spoke at the first ever suffrage meeting in the Bowery area of Manhattan at the Vigilance Hotel. According to the New York Times when Maggie got up to speak “the Bowery succumbed to a man.”[18] When she asked them if they were going to vote for women’s suffrage “every hand went up to say yes, they would vote for the women.” During that same speech she showed her disdain for the ongoing War in Europe, and how all the belligerents were “fighting like mad dogs, and don’t know what they are fighting about” and it was “them that call themselves Kings and Kaisers that puts them up to it.”

During the course of her many speeches she also revealed her views on religion “..the father says come this way or you will go to hell, and the Protestant says come with me or you’ll go to hell, but we are all alike…There are different religions, but there is one God and He is constantly driving one thing into our hearts and consciences and that’s justice.”

She continued her tour of the working class voters and in June 1915 alongside Lavinia Dock, she endeavoured to visit the men excavating the new subway lines on Varick Street. They climbed down into the trenches carrying a selection of flags and pro-suffrage leaflets; some were decorated with shamrocks, others were translated into Italian, German, Yiddish and Greek. She asked them “brothers, are ye going to give us the vote in November?” “Sure we are!” they cried back.[19] They also visited the piers and spoke with longshoremen, sailors and dock workers.[20] A New York Times reporter quipped that “there never was a band of suffrage pilgrims who made such a trip as these women.”

Following this Hinchey went on the six week long tour of New York state visiting labour unions, Gaelic societies and Catholic clubs in Rochester, Buffalo, Lockport, Tonawanda, Granite and Niagara Falls. On some occasions Margaret claims that she canvassed up to 300 homes day, leaving suffrage “alive and kicking.” She recalls visiting sixty homes in Buffalo in one day and drank nearly sixty cups of tea for the cause.

“That was some tea, but it was some votes, and while I was drinking my tea and asking pardon of my inside woman for drowning it even with so good a beverage, the men were signing the slips saying that they would vote for us in November.”[21]

Hinchey also claimed that Catholic groups and priests were “coming out more and more for woman suffrage.” She cited an Irish priest, Rev. Felix Scullin of Niagara Falls as being particularly supportive. He hoped that she would “convert every man and woman” in his parish and offered her the use of the church hall. She also mentioned a Catholic Society for Woman Suffrage in Buffalo “doing fine work.” Despite this gargantuan effort the suffrage initiative in New York was defeated.

But Hinchey continued to fight. In February 1916 she offered her support to the striking Children’s Dressmakers, speaking to their workers in Brooklyn.[22] In March 1916 she was one of the WSP members that were anxiously waiting to hear from the Senate Judiciary Committee who had promised (for a 5th time) that they would raise the suffrage bill. The women waited five hours outside only to hear that instead of discussing the bill, the members of the Committee had left the building through a side-door. Hinchey asked “Is there any man with red blood in his veins who will let these men crucify the women in this way?”[23]

In October 1916 she shared the stage with Mother Jones at Mozart Hall where 500 wives of car strikers were gathered. Jones urged the women to “play hell with the scabs”. They left the hall and began to break the windows of a street car outside. Blanche Brace, a pioneering young female journalist, witnessed the police response which was the indiscriminate use of the baton. She saw an eight year old child being struck and when she attempted to intervene she was also assaulted. As she put it “there’s something revolutionizing in the smooth, chilly feel of a patrolman’s club in the small of your back.”[24]

Another vote on suffrage in New York was due in 1917 and Maggie, now labeled the “Irish Thrush of Suffrage”, was once again out canvassing. Hinchey was assigned to carry the message of suffrage to the women in the tenement homes to try “to make them realise what it would mean to them and their children.” At the WTUL Convention that year she described the plight of these families and she “hoped that a better and brighter day is coming for them through the work that is being done by women’s organisations.”[25]

There was also now a change in emphasis in her message. Hinchey was inspired by the 1916 Proclamation and she used it to persuade Irish-American voters that Ireland’s most recent martyrs wished to empower women. She wrote an article that appeared in the Gaelic American the night before the vote which reminded the Irish that “a year ago in Ireland the new Constitution drawn up by Connolly, McDermott and other Irish patriots contained a clause that granted the ballot to Irish women.”[26] The suffrage bill passed.

Hinchey, who was became a naturalised U.S citizen in 1917, was relieved of her position by the WSP as they set their sights on a constitutional amendment in Washington D.C. She returned, heart-broken, to work in the laundry again. Hinchey wrote to Leonora O’Reilly of her new situation.

“I lost my bread and also lost the light when I lost my work — now I have to work long hours in darkness and take my rest in a cellar..[..]…I see it is not a League for the working women only a political [organisation]…”

But Hinchey continued to agitate. She was a fervent supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) which led to her resigning from the WTUL, which now under Rose Schneiderman’s leadership opposed the measure. Schneiderman favoured protective legislation but Hinchey believed this would lead to another form of discrimination against working women. As Hinchey predicted protective legislation did lead to women losing their jobs. 1500 female employees were dismissed because of new restrictions.[27] One of these employees was Margaret Hinchey who had found a “good job” as a subway guard, but was now unemployed because of new labour laws which only applied to women working on railroads. Hinchey claims she rang a prominent woman welfare worker to protest what was happening and was told

“Well, there’s always scrubbing to be done, isn’t there?” [28]

Hinchey joined the National Woman’s Party (NWP) initially as a lobbyist and later becoming the Secretary of the Party.[29] It was in this role that she met another U.S. President. In January 1926 a delegation of the NWP marched on the White House and left a petition for the President to support the Equal Rights Amendment. On the 18th January President Coolidge met the leaders of the party. Hinchey pleaded the case to him as follows

“The people who are working for the ‘welfare’ laws do not know what they do to working women. We ask for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to prevent the adoption of protective laws which only cost us our good jobs to give us others more poorly paid.” [30]

To this day the ERA is being debated and the 113th Congress reintroduced the Amendment on the 13 March 2013. Margaret Hinchey’s instincts were to resist and to change a society which treated her primarily as a should-be-mother, secondly as a woman and lastly as a human being. Her efforts to win the vote for women and to empower workers were singularly influential. Leonora O’Reilly fittingly described her as

“...clean of thought, pure of heart, brave as truth itself...her strength, her courage and big heart have been at the service of every group of girls struggling for the right to live and enjoy life.” [31]

She should not be forgotten.