Just The Story: Jane Street and the Domestic Workers’ Union

All the story, no horny man

This is a companion piece to its more risqué counterpart. I won’t be sending these out as emails as of now. Instead I’ll link them to the post in case you want the history, but don’t want the man.

Horny History: Jane Street and the Domestic Workers’ Union

Jane was born Jane Tuttle. Her father died in 1905 and her mother deserted the family due to depression. She was groomed as a teenager by an older con man who turned out to be married to another woman, among other lies. It was from him that she took the last name Street, although that wasn’t even his real name. Jane took their child and left with her sister to Denver.

Jane, a socialist, wanted to help better the world. Her views were quite motivated by hearing the story of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which the National Guard, in part orchestrated by J.D. Rockefeller Jr, open fired and attacked a tent colony of striking mine workers and their families, including 271 children.

The wives of Colorado’s elite put out hateful statements about the miner families such as, “They’re nothing but cattle! They ought to have been shot.”

In Denver Colorado she found more of the same callous rich people. The elite lived in mansions on Capital Hill, a clean area high above the dirty Denver city air. In these mansions they employed domestic servants of which they treated horrendously.

Another way in which the domestic servants were hurt was through employment agency sharks. The employment agencies charged a fee from the women of which they had no choice but to pay. They needed the agency to be hired. Jane decided to act as an employment agency herself.

She put out a want ad for servants and then acted like she was an employment agency and matched the women with real jobs. Jane met with the women and as she did, she talked to them about joining together to fight the mistresses. They did this in 1916 when they started The Denver’s Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union.

The women took notes about the employers and made a card on each employer to say how they treated servants, where the husband worked, what the pay was and other important information. They had a catalog of over 6,000 jobs.

From this they created a blacklist of mistresses that mistreated their help. These rich women became furious at Jane as it got to the point where they couldn’t find help. Here’s what one rich lady said about the domestic union “Good heavens! We poor housewives of Denver can cry, ‘Help, Help.’ Since the union started my cook has become so independent that we have been afraid to speak to her.”

The women never hurt the mistresses. Their plan was simple. If the servant was mistreated, she quit and that mistress was blacklisted.  To help women have the power to quit if the job was bad, they made a housemaids home for women in between jobs.

Unfortunately some male members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) also caused problems for the women. Some of the men didn’t support the Domestic Union and some of them went a step further to try to seduce women in need of help.

Regardless, Jane won. The union was successful in improving working condition for domestic servants in Denver. Jane Street is the hero history often forgets, and she did all this as a single mother.

Let me know in the comments if having “just the story” is something you think I should continue.