“We’ll Fight To The End:” Working Women and the Winnipeg General Strike

Ella Prisco

This essay is part of a 2-part series. The second post will be published next week.

Depending on who you asked, Winnipeg on May 15, 1919 was either a city in chaos or on the precipice of a brave new world. It was the first day of the Winnipeg General Strike, the culmination of weeks of tension between employers and unions, and upwards of 25,000 workers abandoned their posts.[1] Over the next six weeks, this number grew to nearly 30,000, encompassing a wide variety of workers, from transit workers to those in the metal and building trades, as well as postal service workers. The sheer number of those on strike shut the city down – shops were empty, restaurants were closed, the water supply was limited, and milk and bread deliveries were halted.[2] The strikers’ demands were both simple, calling for collective bargaining rights and a living wage, and transformational, calling to reorient society around people’s needs, striking fear into the hearts of the city’s upper class, and evoking the spectre of revolution, societal upheaval, and uncertainty.

Amidst the widening ranks of striking workers, women played a significant role and did so in ways that transgressed predominant gender norms. By stepping out of their assigned roles in the private sphere to join the fight for a living wage and collective bargaining rights, working women actively contributed to the strike in many ways. As leaders, newspaper saleswomen, and hecklers, striking women were a force to be reckoned with. Their contributions, often characterized as hostile and aggressive, diverged greatly from existing gender norms that highlighted women’s passivity and caregiving nature. Ultimately, this transgression of gender norms contributed to a broader characterization of the strike as a threat to the status quo and possibly a revolutionary movement. Indeed, as striking women took up public roles that countered traditional expectations for women, they contributed to the growing image of upheaval in the city.

But just who were the striking women?^[3] It is a common misconception that women were not a significant part of the workforce until the mid twentieth century, but this is simply untrue—lower class women have always worked as a matter of necessity, as wage labourers or otherwise. As a result, working women have long had their own labour issues, interests, and needs. It should be no surprise, then, that women were well and diversely represented among the strikers as they were deeply affected by workers’ issues. In fact, working women were more often engaged in low-paying work than men. A 1914 study done by the University Women’s Club of Winnipeg found that women required 8-9 dollars per week to cover the cost of living, yet many employers paid less.^[4] Waitresses averaged 7 dollars per week plus two meals, while junior workers at department stores (cashiers, messengers, stock girls) received anywhere in the range of 5-8 dollars per week, with the top end of the range only paid to workers at select stores.^[5] In addition to wages that were largely unlivable, women were also subjected to long hours, poor working conditions, questionable health protections and could be fired with little to no notice.^[6] Working women thus faced their own set of challenges that encouraged them to join the strike.

In all, approximately 2,000 of the 30,000 workers on strike were women. They were telephone operators—known as ‘hello girls’—store clerks, waitresses, and garment workers.^[7] In fact, it was the telephone operators who led the General Strike at 7 AM on May 15th, four hours before the prescribed start time, unplugging telephone lines and not looking back.^[8]

In terms of their actual participation in the strike, working women took on various roles, including harassing strike-breakers, encouraging workers to strike, selling the Strike Committee’s newspaper, the Western Labor News, and creating support networks for striking women. Some women also took on important leadership roles—both Helen Armstrong and Edith Hancox were cited as influential female figures within the strike movement.^[9] For her part, Armstrong created the Labor Cafe, which provided food to striking women with little means to support themselves.^[10] Hancox, too, played an essential role as one of the movement’s leading female orators, speaking to large crowds about the importance of the strike and labour movement.^[11]

In taking on these front-facing roles in the strike, women were often portrayed as uncharacteristically assertive. To that effect, many newspapers of the period depicted striking women as active, confrontational agents who were willing to openly advocate for themselves. In one edition of the Western Labor News, the author recounted the story of a striking woman who sold their paper and was confronted by a man who called her a “poor, miserable, ignorant fool.”^[12] In response to this slight, the woman demanded that he withdraw the insult, and should he refuse, she threatened to strike him across the face.^[13] This incident is both indicative of how striking women asserted themselves and made their presence known in the public sphere and of how women were perceived as aggressive in promoting the strike.

In addition to this incident, there are many other articles that depict striking women as confrontational agents. Most of these articles described striking women discouraging or preventing strike-breaking. One such article in the Toronto Star illustrated how crowds gathered at the Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian National Railway shops, stopping men from scabbing by hurling stones at them.^[14]  Importantly, this article described women as being in the majority of the discouraging group.^[15] In another extreme case, reported by The Enlightener, two striking women were fined for ripping newspapers from the hands of a Winnipeg Tribune saleswoman and tearing them to shreds in the street.^[16] Both of these examples illustrate the ways in which women not only participated actively in the strike, but did so in a hypervisible, public and assertive manner.

This kind of confrontational participation in the strike by women significantly contributed to the understanding of the strike as not only a call for collective bargaining rights and better living standards, but also as the beginning of a revolution in Winnipeg. The narrative of revolution was prominent among those who opposed the strike in the middle and upper classes. For them, the image of empty shops, restaurants, and factories, as well as the temporary cessation of services as simple as milk and bread deliveries, was an overwhelming picture, and one that incited fear.[17] Coupled with massive worker unrest, they perceived the possibility of revolution as a plausible one. It is important to note the historical context here. Scholars of the Winnipeg General Strike have linked the anxiety surrounding social upheaval in Winnipeg to the disruption caused by other contemporary events, such as the Russian Revolution, which began with successful mass labour demonstrations by socialists.[18] Consequently, the achievements of these other movements made revolution in Winnipeg seem quite plausible, giving the Strike a level of credibility and power that it may not have had otherwise.^[19].

This characterization is present in newspapers of the period. It is especially prominent in the Winnipeg Citizen, a newspaper published by an anti-strike group composed of the city’s political and economic elite called the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand. In one edition, the author addressed Winnipeggers with a sense of urgency, writing that “we speak, in stating without equivocation that this is not a strike at all, in the ordinary sense of the term – it is Revolution.”^[20] In this climate, women’s violation of gender norms in the name of the strike added to burgeoning fears about revolution.

Articles of the period are evidence of this phenomenon. Most anti-strike articles were quick to call strike participants ‘Reds,’ or ‘Bolsheviks,’ women included, but some specifically disparaged striking women, tying their participation in the strike to Bolshevism, revolution, and immorality. One article from the Winnipeg Telegram described striking women who assaulted constables as unclean, spiritually incestuous (referencing a supposed alliance to socialism), and “unsexed.”^[21] Indeed, this article described women’s participation in the strike as such a deviation from gender norms that not only did these women lose their morality (or ‘cleanness’) but also their womanhood.^[22] All this to say, the characterizations of women on strike to how offensive their participation truly was to many in Winnipeg and how it contributed to fears of social change.

Thus, it is unsurprising that in joining in the strike and transgressing social mores, women were labelled as immoral, unsexed, and revolutionary for the threat they posed to the social order and fundamental character of Winnipeg. Moving beyond their assigned roles in the domestic sphere to become active participants in the strike movement, these women challenged social expectations that encouraged them to embody passive and nurturing qualities. In doing so, they contributed to a broader characterization of the strike as a dangerous and immoral threat to the city of Winnipeg itself. To be sure, in transgressing the predominant gender norms of the period, striking women contributed to the growing climate of uncertainty in Winnipeg.

Ella Prisco is a recent graduate from the BA history program at McGill University. The majority of her work has focused on changes in women’s status and labour from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, spanning different international and cultural contexts. She hopes to further her research in a graduate program.

This post was edited under the auspices of the project Historicizing Our Times: Histories of Migration and Climate in the Digital Space, which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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^[1] For the title quote, see “Women Attend Soldiers’ Parliament,” Western Labor News, June 13, 1919; Mary Horodyski, “‘That Was Quite a Strike Alright…:’ Women and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919,” Fireweed 26 (1988).

^[2] Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike (University of Toronto Press, 2010), 10.

^[3] Horodyski, “‘That Was Quite a Strike Alright…’.”

^[4] Civic Committee of the University Women’s Club of Winnipeg, The Work of Women and Girls in the Department Stores of Winnipeg (1914), 19; Horodyski, “‘That Was Quite a Strike Alright…’.”  

^[5] Civic Committee of the University Women’s Club of Winnipeg, The Work of Women and Girls, 15.

^[6] Civic Committee of the University Women’s Club of Winnipeg, The Work of Women and Girls, 4, 8-9, 12; Janice Newton, The Feminist Challenge to the Canadian Left, 1900-1918 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 81, 87.

^[7] Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour,and the Left in Canada, 1890-1920 (University of Toronto Press, 1998), 223.

^[8] Harry and Mildred Gutkin, “Women at the Barricades: Helen Armstrong and Others,” in Profiles in Dissent: The Shaping of Radical Thought in the Canadian West (NeWest Press, 1997), 235.

^[9] For more information regarding Armstrong and Hancox, see Gutkin and Gutkin, “Women at the Barricades,” and David Thompson, “More Sugar, Less Salt: Edith Hancox and the Passionate Mobilization of the Dispossessed, 1919-1928,” Labour/Le Travail 85 (2020): 127-163.

^[10] “Women Open Eating House in Strathcona Hotel, Cor. Main and Rupert,” Western Labor News, May 23, 1919; Gutkin and Gutkin, “Women at the Barricades,” 238.

^[11] James Naylor, Rhonda L. Hinther and Jim Mochoruk, eds. For A Better World: The Winnipeg General Strike and the Workers’ Revolt (University of Manitoba Press, 2022), 9.

^[12] “Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander,” Western Labor News, June 9, 1919.

^[13] “Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander.”

^[14] “Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander.”

^[15] “Much Noise and Talk in Strike Parades.” Toronto Star, June 4, 1919.

^[16] “Cases in Court: J.S. Woodworth Remanded – Mrs. Armstrong Committed for Trial,” The Enlightener, June 26, 1919.

^[17] Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 10.

^[18] Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 23.

^[19] Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 23.

^[20] “The Strike Situation in Winnipeg,” The Winnipeg Citizen, May 21, 1919.

^[21] “Women Constables Wanted,” Winnipeg Telegram Strike Editions, June 11, 1919.

^[22] “Women Constables Wanted.”