Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section003/Betty McCoy

Betty McCoy
Nationality	American
Occupation	Spinner at Louise Mills
Spouse(s)	Unknown man

Overview

Betty McCoy was a textile spinner from Charlotte, North Carolina interviewed by Mary Brown on behalf of the Federal Writer's Project on May 31, 1939.

Biography

Early Life

Betty McCoy was born in 1902 in Charlotte, North Carolina. She lived adjacent to Louise Cotton Mill from birth, along with her mother and siblings. As a child, her family’s main source of income came from taking in boarders for the mill’s president, up until the point where McCoy and her siblings were old enough to go to work in the mill themselves. McCoy attended school through around 8th grade, but when she turned twelve years old she began work in the mill as a spinner.

Adulthood and Career

McCoy continued to work at Louise Mill through WWI and the Great Depression. There, she experienced dramatic wage fluctuation as she worked up to 60 hours a week spinning and doffing. Due to their growing popularity in southern textile mills, McCoy experienced several labor unions over the course of her career. They were often predatory organizations from the north, claiming dues and then leaving without enacting much change for workers like McCoy. These experiences led her to develop a somewhat jaded attitude towards her working conditions, believing that the power of capital would always overpower that of the laboring class. She would go on to marry a man she met working at the Mill.

Social Context

Child Labor in Early 20th Century America

Child spinner in a Cotton Mill

The dramatic shift towards manufacturing industries in the 20th century allowed for the increased employment of unskilled laborers. For many industries, particularly textiles in the South, this demand for laborers often fell to children, usually young girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen. The labor in the textile mills, such as spinning and doffing, was considered to be “child’s work” by experts like A. J. McKelway of the National Child Labor Committee, due to their simplicity and ease. In the Carolinas, there were “practically no mill children over the age of twelve in school”, as they were made to work up to eleven hour shifts. Because these children did not receive proper educations, they ultimately continued to work at the same textile mills into adulthood. While work at the factory was considered some of the best-paid employment for children at the time, wages did not increase much for adult wokers. Thus, former child laborers were highly underpaid in adulthood.

Labor Unions in the American South

The 1930s saw a dramatic increase in organized labor unions, particularly in industries like textiles, mining and steel, as the target of these burgeoning unions shifted away from skilled laborers and to the masses of the American South. The growing labor movement had a particular focus on the textile industry in the South, as the workers in textile mills represented the largest population of laborers in the region and were more likely to engage in militant strikes than other groups. In fact, “strike figures for the United States show a higher incidence of strikes among U.S. textile workers than among workers in other industries, in all periods from 1916 to 1940”. However, the textile industry was ultimately less successfully unionized than others in the region due to factors such as violent opposition by employers, union-resistant attitudes, and perceived “incompetence and timidity” of textile union leaders.

Feminist Sentiments of the 1930s

The 1920s saw an incredible expansion in women’s rights for American women with the women's suffrage movement, but women still experienced diminished wages, unfair labor practices, and inferior societal ranking as compared to their male counterparts. For example, women were subjected to a “marriage bar, which meant women had to resign when they married”. Growing labor and class consciousness prevalent among working Americans, coupled with issues like the marriage bar, pushed the movement of feminist thought towards the workplace, setting a precedent that would later influence second-wave feminist thought in the 1960s. The expansion of the labor movement, “industrial unionism swept workers into the fold, often ignoring the old barriers of race, ethnicity, and gender”, allowing women and other disenfranchised groups to participate for the first time . Joining labor unions gave young women and girls unprecedented access to information and power regarding their own employment. Dr. Cobble of Rutgers University has even postulated that the creation of what she deemed “labor feminism” during this time mandates a “re-waving” of classification of feminist thought, due to its significance in the history of feminism in the United States.

References

1. Brown, Northrop. “Labor Can’t Fight Capital”. Interview. From the Federal Writers' Project papers #3709, Folder 306, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
2. Cobble, DS. 2003. The Other Women’s Movement. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
3. Goldfield, M. 2020. The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
4. “Labor Unions During the Great Depression and New Deal.” Retrieved October 9, 2020.
5. McKelway, AJ. 1913. Child Wages in Cotton Mills: Our Modern Feudalism.New York City: National Child Labor Committee.
6. Souhami, D. “The 1930s: 'Women had the vote, but the old agitation went on.'” The Guardian, February 4, 2018.