Working women: sewing rooms, the sit-down, and the war

1883 – 1945

The sewing rooms: South Bend's largest female workforce was never in the famous factories. It was in the garment trades, and its record stands in the Fashion section, pointed to here at the size this record needs: of the city's 11,789 average wage earners in the census of 1909, 2,510 were women sixteen and over; the clothing row alone counted 418 wage earners, 362 of them women; the Stephenson Underwear Mills employed about 300 garment workers, most of them women; and the great sewing plant south of Sample Street had been recruited to the city on a recorded condition that within ten years it would employ 1,000 women — 1,600 employees by 1926, 2,200 by 1929. The Fashion section's summary is this record's, too: "Sewing was women's work at women's wages, and the plant was built on that arithmetic." Behind the factory rows stand the tradeswomen of the directories: Farr's directory of 1883 lists eight milliners in its classified pages, every one a woman trading under her own name, and the Owners Roster carries the city's women proprietors at directory size across its whole run.

The sit-down: when the United Auto Workers won their foothold at Bendix in 1936, the state's own history records the fact in the form this record repeats: after the local gained its foothold, "men and women workers sat down in the factory and refused to work," and on 26 November 1936 Bendix recognized the union. The strike's whole record stands in the Businesses section; its place here is the plain one — the women of the Bendix workforce were inside the plant, in the occupation, as workers, in the first sit-down in an American auto plant.

The female labor law, 1941: the war's approach put the terms of women's factory work into writing, in a letter that survives in the Allen papers at the IU South Bend Archives. On 4 February 1941 Marvin Heidt, director of industrial relations at Bendix, wrote to J. Chester Allen asking his help in modifying the Indiana Female Labor Law — the state law limiting the hours a woman could work — which the company found a hindrance to overtime in its plants. Allen did not respond. The Reparatory Justice Commission's report of 2026 reads his silence, and prints the reading as its own: Allen perceived, as many did, that Bendix sought to have white women work longer hours rather than hire more Black men — in a plant that, by November 1941, employed nineteen Black workers among seven thousand. The letter is documented; the reading is the Commission's; both are printed at their own strength.

The war work: what followed is documented in the city's own promotional record. The Association of Commerce's film "Arms for America," made as South Bend prepared for the Second World War, shows the city's defense plants at work — and shows women at the benches: a woman war worker at her machine in a defense plant, another assembling parts, in the film's own sequence of the Bendix works and its sister plants. A generation later the Tribune's retrospective, clipped into the Allen papers, summarized the change in a headline: "Dramatic Changes: Blacks and women were welcomed into the wartime work force." For Black women the welcome was the narrowest door in the record: the Commission's report finds that Black women in South Bend had a particularly hard time finding meaningful employment outside domestic work, above all before the war — nursing and teaching being the popular professions, and both segregated in practice in this city — and its account of Lucille Sneed, one of a handful of young Black women who sought training on industrial sewing machines and fought for it, stands in the Black History section's employment entry, where the sewing-class fight is told whole.

Sources:

1. Fashion section of this history (banked) — the 1909 census counts (11,789 wage earners; 2,510 women; the clothing row's 418 and 362), the Stephenson mill's roughly 300 garment workers, the 1,000-women recruiting condition and the 1,600 and 2,200 employment figures, and Farr's 1883 milliners.
2. Hoosiers and the American Story (Indiana Historical Society), chapter 6 — the Bendix sit-down of 1936, "men and women workers sat down in the factory," and the recognition of 26 November 1936.
3. IU South Bend Archives, J. Chester and Elizabeth Fletcher Allen papers, finding aid — the Heidt letter of 4 February 1941 on the Indiana Female Labor Law; the Government Printing Office booklet "Negro Women War Workers" (c. 1945) in the Allens' files; and the Tribune clipping file, including Patrick Furlong, "Dramatic Changes: Blacks and women were welcomed into the wartime work force," 31 October 2004.
4. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (filed 5 March 2026) — Bendix's nineteen Black employees of seven thousand in November 1941; the Commission's reading of Allen's non-response; and the employment record of the city's Black women before and during the war.
5. "South Bend Indiana Prepares for WWII: 'Arms for America,'" Association of Commerce of South Bend (Internet Archive, Periscope Film) — the women war workers at the defense-plant benches in the film's Bendix sequence.