ABSTRACT
On a cold Thursday afternoon in January 1912, the opening curtain was
drawn on the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, one of the most studied strikes
in American labor history. On that day, 200 Polish women walked out of the
Everett Mill to protest a pay cut proportional to a legislatively mandated reduc-
tion in the hours of the work week. They shouted, “Short pay! Short pay!” and
thousands of their fellow workers followed them out of the mills.2 In the words
of one overseer, “like a spark of electricity,”3 the strike began. The curtain closed
a little more than two months later on an unequivocal victory. On that day,
an agreement ended the strike on the strikers’ terms. Twenty thousand strikers
stood in rainy weather on the Lawrence Common for hours as the agreement
was read and approved in all of the city’s languages.4
