But women were also part of the factory operations. In the early days, the handful of women who worked at the factory were either seamstresses or embossers in the glass department. Seamstresses, which made up the largest category of female employees at the time, made and repaired all of the textiles used in Pullman cars: carpets, drapes, upholstery, bed linens, tablecloths, and mattresses. None of the other 60+ job types were open to women, though outside of the town, hundreds of women worked for Pullman in laundries that were scattered across the country. By 1885, Hoover notes, a gender imbalance in the population and the economic imperatives of working-class families forced Pullman to expand the opportunities for women to earn wages within the town and factory.
The goal was to offer women work that would be in line with a domestic role and “not interfere with their primary maternal duties.” Pullman centralized the laundry operations and built a new facility on Florence Boulevard (now 111th Street), where in 1892, more than 100 women washed “soiled bed linens, tablecloths and napkins.” In 1899, a Chicago Tribune article marveled at the laundry’s machines that could wash and iron “30,000 pieces in a day” and the “young women” who fed pieces through the tumbler and the mangler, folded them, and tied them in bundles. The encyclopedic 1893 book, The Town of Pullman, described the laundry facility in even more gushing terms: a structure “supplied with every modern convenience for the comfort of employes [sic],” rooms buzzing with “busy girls, all wearing white caps and white aprons while attending to their multifarious duties” and spotlessly clean linens that “when handled by the girls, [were] sweet and clean.”
The idealized conditions of the laundry exemplifies what Lindsey posits as Pullman’s particular vision of paternalism, an approach to improving the conditions of the working classes, not as philanthropy, but “as a business proposition which would yield dividends … and create a contented and industrious force of skilled laborers.” Lindsey carefully lays out the ways in which Pullman kept tight control over the town’s operations as well as its public image, chiefly with town agents like Duane Doty, who frequently gave tours to visitors to highlight all of the benefits of living in and working for Pullman.
Pullman lost that control, not only of his workers but of his town’s reputation, during the strike of 1894. The strike began as a response to the company’s refusal to reduce the rents on the homes even after months of reduced wages and hours during the economic panic of 1893. Though the company’s overwhelmingly male workforce meant that the strikers were mostly men, the women who joined the strike played a pivotal role. That women in Pullman were union members at all was itself unusual. Alice Kessler-Harris notes that, in the late nineteenth century, the rates of unionized women were far lower than men, “something like 3.3 percent of the women who were engaged in industrial occupations in 1900.” That’s partly because women at the time “were young, temporary workers who looked to marriage as a way to escape the shop or factory” and partly because union men saw women as their competitors more than their allies. But the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU), headed by Eugene V. Debs, allowed women in their ranks, and those members were motivated and effective participants in the Pullman strike. A week into it, the Chicago Tribune, reported that “the shop girls are taking the most active part and in reality are accomplishing more…than the men. They are also more enthusiastic and are determined to stay out of the shops until they carry their point.”
One young seamstress at the Pullman shops, Jennie Curtis, served as president of the Girls’ Union Local No. 269. Her impact on the strike has become a Pullman legend. Her overwrought but impassioned speech convinced the members of the ARU to support a boycott of Pullman trains, which effectively expanded the Pullman strike nationwide, as railway workers refused to touch a train with a Pullman car attached to it. And perhaps most damaging to Pullman’s reputation, her letter describing the abuses she witnessed in the sewing room shattered any illusions about the working conditions for female employees:
…the tyrannical and abusive treatment we received from our forewoman made our daily cares so much harder to bear. She was a woman who had sewed and lived among us for years, one, you would think, who would have some compassion on us when she was put in a position to do so. When she was put over us by the superintendent as our forewoman, she seemed to delight in showing her power in hurting the girls in every possible way. At times her conduct was almost unbearable….When a girl was sick and asked to go home during the day, she would tell them to their face they were not sick, the cars had to be got out, and they could not go home. She also had a few favorites in the room, to whom she gave all the best work…