Pulling Threads, Unraveling History

Embracing family's labor history gives renewed hope to grandchild of 'bobbin girl'

After Election Day 2024, I like many others sleepwalked through those first hours and days. My mind numb with a combination of fear, dread, heartache, and bewilderment, I sought solace among the social media outpouring of angst by people like me. While the echo chamber helped me not to feel alone, it did nothing to offer a way out and a way forward.

Then I found General Strike US. Its mission spoke to me. It amplified the principles instilled in me in childhood, and became a lifeline.

Today, Lawrence’s mills have been renovated into retail spaces, housing, offices, even medical facilities. Built on the Merrimack River for its power-producing capabilities, many mills also used canals to move their products. Photo by Laura Michalski on Unsplash

Fifty years after the defining moment in the modern labor rights movement, and in the shadow of the mill complexes where that action began, this granddaughter of a one-time bobbin girl was born in Lawrence General Hospital in Massachusetts.

Not even a mile away, the woolen mills whose names became synonymous with worker exploitation and the scourge of child labor and unsafe working conditions stood mostly empty, leaving the latest wave of immigrants to the city in search of work and dignity.

My grandmother, Bertha Goulet DesRuisseaux, was a 4-year-old girl when the Bread & Roses strike took place. At the time, her family — mother Loretta (Dion) and father Joseph Wilfred Goulet, and brother Maurice (sisters Annette and Doris and baby brother Robert would come later) — made their living renting rooms to mill workers who either couldn’t meet the requirements for tenancy or the bill for rent in the worker housing that the mill owners built.

In fact, the discrepancy between rising rents and stagnant or falling wages contributed to the workers’ choice to walk out en masse and silence the roar of the giant looms. Of course, the pay cut the mill owners enacted when forced by law to reduce the workweek from 56 to 54 hours, combined with the dangerous, sometimes deadly, working conditions made the Lawrence mills workforce ripe for organizing.

At the time of the strike, my Nana was too young to go to work in the mills, though children just a few years older than she spent long days in the dank, rodent-infested old wooden mill buildings where laborers shivered in winter and sweat right through their clothes in summer in order to supplement the family income.

For a few years after the strike, the Goulet family — including a large extended family of relatives who had moved from Canada’s Quebec province lured by the promise of a steady paycheck and a respite from back-breaking labor on subsistence farms or in talc mines — seemed to thrive. The immigrants married locals and together they helped populate the French-speaking section of Lawrence’s southern tip, living side by side with immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and the eastern European countries under threat from Fascism.

I grew up on the stories of their gatherings, filled with Quebecois quadrilles (a stylized song with fiddle accompaniment, reminiscent of Acadian square dancing), and the foods of home — boudin (blood sausage), tortquieres (meat and potato pie) and cortons (a fatty pork and potato sandwich spread sometimes referred to as a poor man’s pate).

They gave credit to the mills and the “largesse” of the textile barons of the day. They lived lives far plainer than the luxurious ones just a few miles away in towns like Andover, and gave little thought to the extent to which their labor made those excessively grand homes and lifestyles possible.

And to be honest, it was thanks to the stinginess of the mill owners that my great-grandparents were able to make a decent living, allowing them to fill every room with tenants.

But by 1918, the fortunes of my grandmother’s little branch of the big Goulet family tree took a turn for the worse. Her father died, and her mother was left to support four children and run the boarding house alone. Without a husband to do the heavy lifting, the accommodations suffered, as did the amount of rent she could charge. As the eldest of the children, my grandmother was forced to leave school to help. First, she worked alongside her mother in the rooming house and helped take care of her siblings. But eventually, the rented rooms could not bring enough money into the family, and she was sent to work in the mills.

It might have been a respite had the strikes had a more pronounced or lasting effect. Nana’s life in the boarding house was the stuff of a Dickens novel. The house had no plumbing in the upper level, where the men who boarded there lived. Her daily chores included bringing water for washing, and removing chamber pots, the contents of which were often rimmed with ice in the cold months. “For fun, Maman would turn off the lights and we would stand really still, and when she’d turn them back on we would stomp on the cockroaches before they could hide again in the walls,” she said. They called it their “dancing time.”

While she was never blunt about other aspects of life in the house, she often spoke of the young, single men who moved in and out, and her discomfort being in their presence.

Nearly a decade after the Bread & Roses strike, which did succeed in making things marginally better for Lawrence’s textile workers and in mills up and down the Merrimack River Valley, conditions were still atrocious for adults, never mind children, some of whom hadn’t even reached puberty.

My grandmother was part of a small army of children, mostly girls, whose job was to reach their small hands between the arms of the looms to remove spools, or bobbins, wound tight with thread or yarn, replace them with empties, and to transport the loaded bobbins to the next part of the cloth-making process. They were also called on to collect empty bobbins from a vast storeroom. Nana didn’t talk much about the time she worked as a bobbin girl, but she did confide that her fear of rodents was cemented by the experience of entering the dark storeroom and, hand-in-hand with another bobbin girl, dodging the rats that ran to and fro, hoping that their hands wouldn’t encounter something furry instead of the solid wooden form of a spool.

She continued to work in the mills until her marriage. She was lucky that when she left, all her limbs and appendages were still intact. Such was not the case for many with whom she worked.

In the intervening years until my arrival, she and my grandfather, George DesRuisseaux, got married and had a daughter. My grandpa had a love of fashion and of cars, and my grandmother said he considered himself a bit of a dandy. He worked as a chauffeur, and then as a truck driver. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of him extolling the greatness of the Teamsters Union. Next to his dual Canadian/American citizenship, he was proudest of the label “Teamster.”

My mother, Elaine, also brought union pride into our home. She was an AT&T telephone operator, proud to be able to raise her only child on the wages she could earn in the 1960s and ‘70s because of her membership in what is now the Communication Workers of America.

I grew up in a solidly lower-middle class, blue-collar working family that saw the value in organized labor as a way to protect the employees who have the least clout in the workplace. I saw early on how “strength in numbers” is not just a catchy slogan, but a guiding principle for a just society.

In my house, the pope was only slightly more important than the president of the Teamsters, and the 11th Commandment we observed was, “Thou shalt not cross a picket line.” I remember the excitement I would feel when my mom prepared for a day of picketing, not understanding the monotony, drudgery and financial drain that meant. To me, someone telling their boss, “No, I’m not going to make YOU money until you treat me right,” made my mom a bad-ass, the coolest woman in my orbit.

The exact goals of General Strike US are still being crafted through a collaborative practice among a variety of communities, organizations and stakeholders. It is not a single movement, but all the participants have a shared belief that a nationwide strike, which deprives the oligarchs of the fruits of OUR labor, is the best chance to show the power individuals have when they work together.

This is a language I understand. The principles of the modern labor movement are the principles of a just society, a peaceful co-existence with our neighbors, continued availability of natural resources and open spaces, the liberty and justice that the U.S. Constitution promises to all, and an equitable distribution of not only wealth in financial terms, but of capital, time, wellness (both physical and psychological), leisure, and peace of mind.

Please take whatever time you are able to spend to learn more about this process, and if you believe it is a worthy effort and you are ready to commit, visit GeneralStrikeUS.com to sign the strike card. Your signature will move us one step closer to the next leg of our journey. The strike will be called when critical mass has been reached.

Until then, continue to visit here to learn more about the issues addressed by those of us working to make change — not just in politics or government, not just in the workplace, not only in the protection of rights for marginalized communities, not only to shrink the wealth gap — well, you get the idea.

Future posts from me will address the corporate takeover of media, the erosion of Constitutional norms, big money in politics (and elsewhere), immigration (as hinted to early in this post) and more. Feel free to share ideas concerning what you’d like to read about. I’m sure we have a member whose expertise can illuminate the topic. And please visit the linked social media sites where shorter-form content can be found.

Thanks for your time, interest and curiosity. Until next time, peace.

(GreenWolf is a real person, with a real family, pets, friends, wonderful memories, a few regrets, and hope for the future. She lives in the Northeast with her three rescue dogs, and is keeping her fingers crossed (figuratively speaking) that her Social Security Disability checks will continue to arrive.)