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1900 – 1920
Fort Wayne ran on women's hands: by 1920 some 6,000 women and girls worked in the city's factories — one-third of an industrial workforce of more than 16,300, a higher proportion than in Indianapolis, South Bend or the nation. They were concentrated where the work was called women's: the Wayne Knitting Mills (the city's largest employer of women), the garment and glove shops, and the electrical works, where at GE and the Edison Lamp Works they wound and insulated coils, gauged and inspected lamp parts and assembled small devices. The terms were set by the era's assumptions, which Seigel's study documents in the local record: women were hired young and unmarried, as temporary workers before marriage; GE automatically terminated women who married, and the rule spread; a 1914 federal study found Fort Wayne's garment workers earning $6.62 a week against a statewide female factory average of $7.19 and a computed $468 a year as the minimum for a woman to be self-supporting. Child labor stood inside the same system: at the 1911 legislative hearings on limiting children's hours, newspaper coverage reported that two-thirds of the Wayne Knitting Mills' three thousand employees were children, and as late as 1919 some 1,400 children worked in city factories, the largest employers required to run their own schools — the mills' main branch schooled a hundred girls. Employers answered the "girl problem" — a shortage of female labor — not with wages but with paternalism: Wayne Knitting's 1910 dormitory and clubhouse, three stories housing a hundred out-of-town girls at $3.50 a week for room and board, with a cafeteria seating five hundred, was hailed as the only building of its sort in the state. The change, when it came, came from the war and the women themselves. In March 1917 several hundred women electrical workers joined a union under local labor leaders and an international organizer; through October and November 1918 the organizing spread across the factories on a platform of "equal rights and privileges," and more than seven hundred new women members joined Electrical Workers Local 608. On 19 December 1918, 2,200 GE employees — seventy-five percent of the local workforce, many of them women — struck in solidarity with the fired workers of the Erie works, and women walked the pickets for two weeks. The federal government had a woman's face in the city by then: Florence Madden directed the girls' and women's division of the federal employment office in Fort Wayne, placing women in the jobs soldiers had vacated. The factories' own records are in the Industrial Revolution and Business chapters; the scale, wages and organizing of the women who staffed them are this branch's.
Sources: Seigel, "Industrial 'Girls' in an Early Twentieth-Century Boomtown," Indiana Magazine of History XCIX (September 2003), throughout — the 6,000 and the one-third (U.S. Fourteenth Census, 1919: Manufactures), the marriage bar, the 1914 wage study, the 1911 hearings and the 1919 factory-school figures, the 1910 dormitory (Lockridge, Theodore F. Thieme: A Man and His Times, 1942), the March 1917 and autumn 1918 organizing, the December 1918 strike, and Florence Madden; Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette and News-Sentinel reports as cited there.