“We’re having a baby!”
“This is social change. Progress! The revolution. It’s all the things we’ve been talking about finally carried into action. Are you really going to stand idly by while the blood of other men and women is spilled onto your sidewalk?”
“Angela, maybe you don’t hear yourself, but you’re making my argument for me. The time for radical action is not when I’m pregnant.”
“History is not going to stand still for your baby, Gina.”
“Well, then, I’ll just hop on the next train if it’s all the same to you. There seems to be a revolution every year.”
They stopped speaking. Angela stormed out, and Gina didn’t go with her the next morning. In a crowd of women, Angela went by herself to confront Lester Evans.
It couldn’t have gone less well. The manager fired Angela then and there. He told her that if she ever harassed him in front of his mill again, he’d have her arrested and thrown in jail. Through a megaphone he informed the fifty women shouting behind her that unless they showed up for work the following morning, they would also be fired. “And Miss LoPizo, please tell Miss Attaviano,” he added, “that unless she shows up for work, she too will be fired with all the rest.”
“She’s a married woman, now, Mr. Evans,” shouted Angela. “She doesn’t answer to you or to me. She answers to her husband. And he works for Bill Haywood.”
“Then too bad for her being associated with all those filthy Wobblies,” said Evans. “Too bad for all of you. Now get away from my factory.”
Gina was outraged. “I didn’t go with you and that’s how you punish me?” she said to Angela. “By making me lose my job? I’m going to work. I don’t know how you’re planning to pay your rent, but in this house we work for a living.”
“Gina, this isn’t punishment. It’s war. We have to fight.”
“I can’t and I won’t.”
“You can either stand with your family and your women and your fellow workers fighting for your wages, or you can break the line, but then no one in this town will ever speak to you again. Because we don’t talk to scabs,” Angela said. “Not even family scabs. Tell her, Arturo.”
“We don’t talk to scabs,” said Arturo.
“Get out of my house,” said Gina. “Where is Harry?”
“Striking!”
“How can he strike? He doesn’t work at the mills!”
“Organizing the strikers then,” Arturo said. “Going door to door with Joe. Wiring telegrams to Big Bill telling him he’s urgently needed in Lawrence. Calling Mother Jones. Calling Emma Goldman. Your husband,” he went on with pomposity, “is fighting for our side. Like you should be doing.”
“I thought I told you to get out of my house, Arturo.”
“Gina, this strike is for you, too. The full-time wages of mill employees are inadequate for a family.”
Gina pointedly said nothing. Angela cleared her throat. “Actually, Arturo,” she said, “Gina makes quite a decent wage working in the mending room.” She averted her eyes. “Yes, a generous wage for skilled labor. But even you, Gia, are now making less because they cut your salary.”
“They didn’t cut my salary. They cut my hours.”
“You were working too much.”
“Who decides this—you? I needed the money,” Gina said. “I didn’t want to work less, and I don’t want what’s not due me. I’m a grown-up.” She felt weak, she needed to lie down. “I’m responsible for my own choices. I want to work.”
“The IWW will fully support your efforts for larger pay and fewer hours.”
“Arturo, I thought I told you to leave!”
“If he goes, I go,” said Angela.
Folding her arms, Gina stared them both down.
“Wait till Mimoo hears about this!”
“You don’t want to know what Mimoo thinks about this, Angie,” said Gina.
“I can’t wait to ask her. She always supports me.”
“Not in folly.”
“This isn’t folly!”
“Well, too bad she can’t hear about it because, oh, that’s right—she’s still at work.”
“Wait till Salvo hears.”
“He’s also working. And staying far away.”
“Sometimes,” Arturo said, “you’ve got to not work to fight for what is right.”
“Get out!”
“Let’s go, Arturo,” said Angela. “I know where we’re not wanted.”
That night Harry told Gina what happened when he spoke with Mother Jones. Harry and Joe made a personal plea to the woman to join the coming strike, but she, despite being co-president and co-founder of the IWW with Big Bill, refused to stand with her own fair sex, pronouncing Lawrence a city headed for disaster. She would not support the women’s right not to return to their slave wages. She said all her life she had petitioned for men, not women. “Men work,” she told Harry. “Women work for the family.” Before she ended the conversation she said that Big Bill, whom she had known for years, was a cheap tightfist of a man, but Harry should ask him for a raise so his wife, too, could stay at home.
Gina was pretending to read and only half-listening. “Oh yeah? What did Bill say about that?”
“Publicly, not a word,” Harry replied. “But to us he said he will not rest until that traitor is purged from the IWW for good.”
“I mean about the raise.”
“I didn’t ask him.”
Gina shrugged her indifference. “Then all I want to know is whether come seven-thirty tomorrow morning I’m going to the mending room.”
Harry sat quietly. “No,” he said at last. “You aren’t.”
“So we’re deciding to lose me my job? My easy, well-paying, skilled-labor job that other women wait years to get?”
“I don’t want you to lose it,” he said. “But you were going to quit anyway when the baby came …”
“Seven months from now.”
“So, it’ll be a little sooner than we planned. The baby came a little sooner than we planned. It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”
“If I can’t work, then I’m going on the streets, Harry. With Angela, Pam, Dona, Elda. I have to, or they’ll never forgive me.”
“You can’t,” he said. “Gestation keeps you from other activities ending in tion. Like demonstration. It’s pandemonium out there.”
“It’s chaos in here, too. How do you propose we pay the rent? Buy food? Put money into the electric lamp you’re sitting by as you write your slogans and glue your pamphlets?”
“Mimoo is working,” Harry said.
“Don’t even think about my money,” Mimoo bellowed from upstairs. “Pretend it doesn’t exist.” How did her mother have such good hearing now, and yet was deaf when you tried to ask her all the important questions?
They lowered their voices.
“We’ll use kerosene if we can’t afford the electricity,” Harry said. “And