Activism > Labor Rights Archives - Page 12 of 13

Belle Golding

Three remarkable sisters, Annie, Belle and Kate Golding (later Dwyer) were leading suffragists and labour movement activists in New South Wales.

Annie Mackenzie Golding

Three remarkable sisters, Annie, Belle and Kate Golding (later Dwyer) were leading suffragists and labour movement activists in New South Wales.

Labor activist Della Elliott was a strong supporter of causes outside the union movement. She was involved in the wartime Sheepskins for Russia campaign during the war, The League for Democracy in Greece and the Union of Australian Women. She helped historians of the union movement in Australia and, with a collective of women that included Quentin Bryce, worked to establish the Jessie Street National Women’s Library in Sydney. Towards the end of her life, she gifted a scholarship to the University of Sydney Women’s College to assist female Indigenous students.

Dolores Huerta

Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta is one of the most influential labor activists of the 20th century and a leader of the Chicano civil rights movement.
Born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta was the second of three children of Alicia and Juan Fernandez, a farm worker and miner who became a state legislator in 1938. Her parents divorced when Huerta was three years old, and her mother moved to Stockton, California with her children. Huerta’s grandfather helped raise Huerta and her two brothers while her mother juggled jobs as a waitress and cannery worker until she could buy a small hotel and restaurant. Alicia’s community activism and compassionate treatment of workers greatly influenced her daughter.
Discrimination also helped shape Huerta. A schoolteacher, prejudiced against Hispanics, accused Huerta of cheating because her papers were too well-written. In 1945 at the end of World War II, white men brutally beat her brother for wearing a Zoot-Suit, a popular Latino fashion.
Huerta received an associate teaching degree from the University of the Pacific’s Delta College. She married Ralph Head while a student and had two daughters, though the couple soon divorced. She subsequently married fellow activist Ventura Huerta with whom she had five children, though that marriage also did not last. Huerta briefly taught school in the 1950s, but seeing so many hungry farm children coming to school, she thought she could do more to help them by organizing farmers and farm workers.
In 1955 Huerta began her career as an activist when she co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), which led voter registration drives and fought for economic improvements for Hispanics. She also founded the Agricultural Workers Association. Through a CSO associate, Huerta met activist César Chávez, with whom she shared an interest in organizing farm workers. In 1962, Huerta and Chávez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the predecessor of the United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), which formed three year later. Huerta served as UFW vice president until 1999.
Despite ethnic and gender bias, Huerta helped organize the 1965 Delano strike of 5,000 grape workers and was the lead negotiator in the workers’ contract that followed. Throughout her work with the UFW, Huerta organized workers, negotiated contracts, advocated for safer working conditions including the elimination of harmful pesticides. She also fought for unemployment and healthcare benefits for agricultural workers. Huerta was the driving force behind the nationwide table grape boycotts in the late 1960s that led to a successful union contract by 1970.
In 1973, Huerta led another consumer boycott of grapes that resulted in the ground-breaking California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which allowed farm workers to form unions and bargain for better wages and conditions. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Huerta worked as a lobbyist to improve workers’ legislative representation. During the 1990s and 2000s, she worked to elect more Latinos and women to political office and has championed women’s issues.
The recipient of many honors, Huerta received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. As of 2015, she was a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, and the President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

Mercedes Laura Aguiar

Mercedes Laura Aguiar was a writer, teacher and feminist from the Dominican Republic. As a journalist and poet, she wrote works that promoted gender equality and Dominican sovereignty, in opposition to the US occupation. She fought for women’s right to vote, women’s right to education, and employment protections for women and children.

Lillian D Wald

Lillian D. Wald helped to bring health care to the residents of New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century. As a “practical idealist who worked to create a more just society,” Wald fought for public health care, women’s rights, and children’s rights while running the Henry Street Settlement.

Betsy Wade

Throughout her 45-year career, Betsy Wade consistently proved that gender should not be a barrier to opportunity. As the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the New York Times in 1974, Wade transformed the industry and newsrooms across the nation.

Mother Jones

The most famous female labor activist of the nineteenth century, Mary Harris Jones—aka “Mother Jones”—was a self-proclaimed “hell-raiser” in the cause of economic justice. She was so strident that a US attorney once labeled her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

Pauli Murray

Pauli Murray was breaking barriers from a young age. Held back by what Murray dubbed “Jane Crow,” s/he* was a staunch advocate for the rights of women and people of color and fought tirelessly for civil rights. As a poet, writer, activist, organizer, legal theorist, and priest, Murray was directly involved in, and helped articulate, the intellectual foundations of two of the most important social justice movements of the twentieth century.