This Day in History: 1937-01-12

Mrs. F. W. Petri and Mrs. Stephen Biddle attended the BergenCounty League of Women Voters meeting in Hackensack.  Among the topics of the day’s meeting were the new Social Security Act, the Consumer Cooperative movement and sweated home industrial work by women in New Jersey.  According to Mrs. Harriman Simmons of the Consumers League there were about 3,700 women involved in sweated home labor in New Jersey, down from about 10,000 before the Depression but rapidly growing.  As an example of the evils of this practice she spoke of the candlewick bed spreads made by the mountain women of North Carolina.  This business which grossed about half a million dollars a year, she said, paid the women one cent per hour for their work.  She urged the passage of the League’s bill calling for the eight-hour day and fours-four hour week for women working in restaurants, bakeries, and laundries.

(Bristow)