Fannie Never Flinched

Fannie’s head pounded from the racket of the high-speed sewing machines. Dozens of mechanized needles pumping up and down sounded a continuous clickety-clack, clickety-clack over the rumble of foot treadles and the whir of spinning spools of thread.
“Faster!” the boss shouted. “Work faster!”
Fannie longed to stretch her arms and legs and straighten her back, but she kept a firm hand on the fabric, feeding it steadily under the needle. One stray glance and the needle could tear through her finger. It happened once or twice a day to some girl in the factory.
“You bleed on the fabric, you pay for it,” the boss always said.
Fannie worked at one of two sweatshops owned and operated by the Marx & Haas Clothing Co., the largest clothing manufacturer in St. Louis. She sewed silk-lined hunting coats, each with eleven pockets. Finishing a pocket, Fannie rubbed her bleary eyes and moved on to the next.
Fannie Mooney Sellins was born in 1867, the oldest daughter of an Irish family living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father worked as a house-painter, and her mother worked at home caring for the family. Fannie had one older brother, a younger sister, and three younger brothers. In the 1870s, the Mooneys moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where Fannie went to school, learned to read and write, and finished the eighth grade.
She eventually married Charles Sellins and they had four children. Charles died when the youngest was still a baby. To support her family, Fannie went to work at the garment factory. Coughing from the sweatshop’s foul air, Fannie dropped the presser foot onto a new seam. Most young seamstresses working with her at the garment factory in St. Louis never had the chance to go to school. Girls as young as ten and women old enough to be grandmothers labored alongside her. They worked ten- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week. The building was hot and stifling in the summer-and bitter cold in the winter.
“All the doors were locked from the outside at 7:15 each morning. Sometimes it made me sick to think what would happen in that big flimsy barracks if a fire should come,” Fannie said.
The families of most of the seamstresses had immigrated from country villages in Italy, Poland, and Russia, just as the Irish had come fifty years before, hoping for a better life in America.
Though poor and unable to read or write, they knew how to work hard, which was exactly what garment manufacturers in St. Louis wanted. Like Fannie, the new immigrants barely earned enough to live on, averaging less than five dollars a week ($145 today). If anyone complained, the boss could fire them. There were always immigrants desperate for jobs.
Fannie heard seamstresses in Chicago and New York City had banded together and demanded higher pay and safer working conditions. They had joined a union, the United Garment Workers of America, or the UGWA.
Toiling at her sewing machine, Fannie stitched together a dream. If women and girls in other cities could organize a union to improve their jobs, those in St. Louis could, too! During brief lunch breaks, she spoke with her co-workers. “If we earned a fair wage, your children wouldn’t have to work,” she said. “They could go to school.”
Uniting forces would give workers more clout to bargain with their employers. If they didn’t get fair wages and safe working conditions, they could strike. In a strike, workers walked off the job and refused to go back until the company agreed to their demands. If all the workers stuck together and didn’t give in, the factory had to shut down, and the company owners lost money. Unions gave workers the power to bargain with employers and improve their lives.
In 1902, Fannie and the other seamstresses launched Ladies’ Local 67 of the United Garment Workers of America. Marx & Haas managers feared that the new union would strike. They agreed to nearly double the workers’ wages and shorten the workday.