Illinois Woman's Alliance

ILLINOIS WOMAN’S ALLIANCE. Culminating in the landmark Illinois Factory Inspection Act of 1893, the work of the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, or IWA (1888–1894), stands as an early and successful example of a united front. Although delegates from each of thirty organizations in Chicago participated in its governance, socialist and labor activists led its most vital campaigns.

In 1888 the Chicago Times published a series of articles, “City Slave Girls,” that described the miserable conditions in factories and sweatshops employing women and children. In response, Elizabeth Chambers Morgan (1850-1944), a local socialist and founder of the Ladies’ Federal Labor Union 2703, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, formed a committee to verify the Times’s report. Convinced of its accuracy, the committee called upon a number of women’s organizations to form a coalition.

The IWA, formed in November 1888, according to its mission statement, to "prevent the moral, mental, and physical degradation of women and children . . . employed as wage workers." First off, the IWA waged a major campaign for the investigation of factory conditions and for compulsory-education legislation, including the age from eight to six. In Chicago the IWA worked to improve working-class neighborhoods by demanding more and better schools and by calling for the construction of public bathhouses. In cooperation with the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly and Jane Addams’s Hull House, the IWA sponsored a successful legislative bill prohibiting the employment of children younger than fourteen and promoting the appointment of women factory inspectors. The IWA also campaigned against police harassment of prostitutes.

For its brief life, the IWA stood as a model cross-class coalition. Joining prominent members from the Chicago Women’s Club as well as suffrage, medical, temperance, and charitable societies, the IWA sponsored some of the era’s most important political campaigns on behalf of the state’s working women and children and the Chicago working-class community. The depression of 1893 and the Pullman strike of the following year exacerbated class tensions and pulled apart members of the coalition, and the IWA collapsed under the pressure.




 

Scharnau, Ralph. “Elizabeth Morgan, Crusader for Labor Reform.” Labor History 14 (Summer 1973): 340-51.

Tax, Meredith. The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980.