Everett’s reputation as a mill town dominated by the lumber and shingle trade – industries that employed only men – has long overshadowed the importance women played in the city’s early industrial economy. Jobs were plentiful in the early 1900s but working conditions in mills were often far from ideal. While lumber and shingle workers organized in battles for fair wages and safer factories, women struggled even harder in lower-paying jobs, working too many or too few hours, frequently in discomfort. And before gaining the right to vote in 1910, they were powerless to make important changes. The focus here is on a few representative Everett industries that employed a significant number of women, in the period ranging from 1900 through the 1940s. Industries covered include a paper mill, laundries, canneries, and World War II-era plane and ship assembly plants.
The Female Workforce
By the end of the nineteenth century, women in Everett were working as teachers, nurses, doctors, retail workers, accountants, secretaries, librarians, business proprietors, landladies, seamstresses, cleaning women, hatters, laundry workers, photographers, prostitutes, gardeners, waitresses, cannery workers, telephone operators, homemakers, journalists, actors, politicians, and more. United States statistics show that in 1910 there were 6 million women working in 400 occupations, largely in urban populations.
Everett’s origins as an industrial city in the 1890s resulted from huge technological changes in factory equipment and production methods, changes that appealed to wealthy investors, seeing the profits that could be made. Factory jobs drew large numbers of people to the Pacific Northwest, including newly-arriving immigrants looking for work where cities were young and factories were new. But these workplaces were often unhealthy and dangerous places, and it did not take long before investors’ dreams of big profits collided with worker unrest, giving rise to unionization. While some trade unions in the early 1900s had women members, most industries did not. Women and children provided a source of cheap labor since theirs was considered supplemental family income.
A basic tenet of unionism from its start was shortening the workday. In the early 1900s, most factory workers, including women, could be worked 10 to 14 hours daily. While miners, machinists, railroad workers, and other union members struggled nationally for an eight-hour workday, their early battles, while hard-fought, were mainly unsuccessful. A victory in Washington state was passage of the women’s Eight Hour Work Day bill in 1911, House Bill 12, authored by State Representative John E. Campbell (1880-1924) of Everett. The bill was strongly challenged by fishery and cannery owners who employed a large number of women.
While it is generally true that lumber and shingle mills employed only men, there were exceptions, possibly due to a worker shortage during World War I and the Influenza Epidemic in 1918-1920. From newspaper accounts we know that the Three Lakes Shingle mill in Snohomish County reportedly employed women as shingle packers in 1917, Robinson Mill hired women in 1920, and the C. B. Shingle Mill ran want ads regularly in 1940 calling for women to work as shingle stainers. A 1919 news item suggests that this may have been more common than is known. In 1919 the topic of wages in sawmills was discussed in a meeting of the West Coast Lumberman’s Association:
"Much time was given to the consideration of wages, the results finally being that 45 cents an hour was fixed in the Coast mills for common labor after July 1 and 50 cents an hour after August 1. This applies to the men. The scale for women was set at 40 cents per hour or $3.20 a day. This is a fine organization that establishes a scale for women and allows them to work in the sawmills and sets a scale of wages below that received by men doing the same work. If the lumber industry is so short of labor at this time that they are forced to work women in the mills, why don’t they pay them the same wages then? This may not be their object though. It could be that they are using these women to drive down the wages of the men" ("4L Scale For Women …").
Lowell Paper Mill
Everett’s initial industrial economy in the 1890s included a paper mill located in the small town of Lowell, now an Everett neighborhood. It was one of four main industries that developers believed would grow and stabilize the city’s economy. The other three were a "whaleback" barge works, a wire nail factory, and a smelter that refined ores mined at the town of Monte Cristo in the Cascade Mountains. Of these four, only the paper mill survived, lasting until 1974. Although officially known as Puget Sound Pulp and Paper (1891-1901), Everett Pulp and Paper (1901-1955) and Simpson Paper (1955-1974), local residents simply referred to it as the Lowell Paper Mill. One of the largest of its kind in the country, the mill produced high quality book papers and book products that it marketed throughout the U.S. and Pacific Rim countries. A broad Asian market gave the company some stability from economic booms and busts. During the Panic of 1893 and the depression years that followed, the Lowell paper mill doubled its profits and its workforce.
Compared to other Everett industries, the paper mill was different. It was considered a good place to work, and it would be decades before the company unionized. Operating under a system of benevolent paternalism, the paper mill seemed like a large family business. Annual paper mill picnics were family events and, as the years progressed, longtime employees were honored for their years of service. Many paper mill employees, including respected manager William Howarth (1864-1937), lived with their families in Lowell.
Originally wood fired, the mill extended its smokestack to 120 feet in 1902 to accommodate a switch to coal. By modern standards the pollution may have been bad, but in Everett, which proudly promoted itself as "The City of Smokestacks," it was a sign of prosperity. The mill’s first employees were men and boys, but corporate photos taken circa 1915 by Seattle photographer Ferdinand Brady (1880-1967) show women working in various paper mill jobs, employed as wire stitchers, paper cutters, paper stackers, and packagers.
Laundry Workers
Commercial laundries proliferated in the U.S. between 1870 and 1930, reaching a peak in the 1920s and then dwindling with the advent of home washing machines. Builders of luxury apartments, even as early as 1910, were beginning to add commercial washers, driers, irons, and ironing boards for their tenants, but costs in those early years were out of reach for average households and businesses.
Prominent early Everett laundries included Everett Cooperative Laundry at 1212 Hewitt; the IXL Laundry at 2112 Hewitt; Everett Laundry at 2806-08 Hoyt; the Star Steam Laundry on Riverside, as well as the Independent Laundry; Everett Steam Laundry, Everett Hand Laundry, Durr Laundry, Standard Laundry at Broadway and 32nd; Paris Laundry, and the Krieger Laundry on Rucker Avenue. The Mutual Laundry and Laundry Service Company were two union plants, the first unionizing in 1917 and the second in 1920.
Laundry customers were individuals, hotels, restaurants and cafes, hospitals, businesses, and care facilities. Inside workers at the laundries were mostly women while laundry wagon (truck) drivers were men. A colorful event happened in 1910 when all Everett laundry workers went on strike for better pay. While not officially part of the strike, the truckers walked out as well, in support of the women. While none of the Everett plants in 1910 recognized the Laundry Workers Union, a number of workers were members. Workers strategized with union leaders and won huge public support. While cleaning prices were raised supposedly because of labor costs, in truth workers had not had a pay raise in two years.
Strikers outwitted laundry managers who planned to hire strike breakers. Strikers asked customers to deliver their dirty laundry to the Everett Labor Temple, where it would be trucked to the Independent Laundry in Seattle, a union shop. The cleaned and pressed laundry was carefully returned to Everett and boxed for pickup and delivery. The ploy worked, giving women their demands in less than a week.
Cannery Girls
Everett had three large canneries in the city’s early decades. Most prominent were two on the bayside of town, Everett Packing and American Packing. Everett Packing, located on Pier 1, on the old nailworks site, began in 1913 as a salmon packing operation and was renamed Fisherman’s Packing in 1928. It operated until 1940. American Packing, bayside, foot of California, began in 1915 as a fish cannery, an enterprise of Captain Harry Ramwell (1862-1935). The company expanded into fruit canning in the 1920s. Ramwell adapted to the plant’s changing needs. When there was a shortage of available cans for purchase, he added a can-making plant as well as a cold storage facility (American Ice and Cold Storage).
Together Fisherman’s Packing and American Packing employed between 300 and 600 people in season, shipping both fruit and fish worldwide, and they employed both men and women.
On Everett’s riverside of town was another large cannery, Everett Fruit Products, at 33rd and Smith Avenue. It employed an average of 400 to 500 workers, mostly women. Work was seasonal and hours fluctuated widely, depending on crop yield. Everett Fruit Products canned a variety of fruits and vegetables, and newspaper want ads were frequently run calling for 50 to 100 additional women workers in peak seasons. The state’s 1911 Eight-Hour Women’s Work Day law was often challenged by plant managers and women hoping for overtime pay.
Cannery work at Everett Fruit Products required long hours of standing, often without stools and in bad working conditions. In 1919 workers went on strike demanding state-mandated sanitary conditions, a minimum wage of 35 cents an hour, abolition of all piece work, and recognition of the Fruit Canners Working Union of the A. F. of L. A news report covering the strike stated that "the girls were working in rooms flooded to the extent that they were compelled to work with wet feet and otherwise in discomfort. This is mildly stated. They were paid a cent a pound for snipping beans, some of them making not more than 15 cents an hour. How could they longer endure it" ("Cannery Girls Strike ...").
Management responded saying, "We have been paying out about $160 a day to growers and pickers and the strike will mean some (produce) will be lost to the community. Something like 10,000 pounds of berries have been coming to us. I might add that the girls’ demands for better working conditions were being fulfilled as fast as we could get to them. This plant was not built for a cannery but was put up for brewery purposes and was not properly equipped, we know" ("Cannery Girls Strike ...").
The strike lasted from September to October and was finally resolved by the heavy hand of the State Labor Commissioner.
World War II
The December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war brought demand for quick production of both military planes and ships. Simultaneously men were being called to serve in the military. The airplane and shipbuilding industries were important to the war effort and both employed women workers.
Taking up residence in old buildings, the Boeing Company began two plane assembly plants in downtown Everett, one on the southwest corner of Rucker Avenue and Wall Street and the second at 2806 Grand Avenue. Each plant hired hundreds of workers.
One of Everett’s Local "Rosie the Riveters," Lorraine Smith, told her story of working at the Grand Avenue plant. She and her husband Orly came west in hopes of finding Orly a "war job." Soon both were working. Two days after arriving in town, Lorraine was hired by Boeing, starting out as a bucker, a person who works with a riveter to flatten the rivets. She later worked as a riveter herself, dressed in overalls and a bandana, the official safety outfit seen in government posters. Boeing had other branch plants in the state including ones in Chehalis, Bellingham, Aberdeen, and Tacoma. Initially these branches accounted for 15 percent of the B-17 "Flying Fortress" production.
Boeing management was not completely happy with women workers. In August 1942 women accounted for 26 percent of the company’s workforce but some bosses claimed that their female hires were not serious workers but were there instead looking for social connections. One person stated to the press: "We intend to put most of them into sub-assembly work, separating them from men in shop" ("Boeing to Segregate ..."). Boeing considered sub-assembly work suited for women workers because it required less skill, was less arduous, and afforded fewer opportunities for flirtations on company time. One woman worker, former teacher Marigale Watson, who had an M.A. in mathematics, expressed her work experience this way: "They’re trying to make an engineer out of me and I hope they do. But after the war and when my husband comes home – he’s a doctor in the army – I’m going to quit work and keep house" ("Boeing to Segregate …").
Meanwhile, several Washington sites were chosen to build and repair much-needed ships and drydocks for the war effort. One of largest plants was on Harbor Island in Seattle, employing both women and men. The Everett Shipbuilding and Drydock Company plant was built with Navy funds in 1942 on Everett’s Bayside for production and repair of drydocks, tugboats, and lighter ships. When the plant was first built, it was hoped that it would continue as a local business repairing ships after the war. Most of Everett Shipbuilding’s production was delivered in 1944 and 1945.
Augusta Clawson’s book Shipyard Diary of a Woman Welder (1944) gives a good look at women who worked in a Portland shipbuilding plant. Clawson was hired by the government to find out why many women workers there were leaving their jobs. Her answer was not simple; there were many reasons including transportation problems, family duties, and even the cost of required working gear. On the whole, women found their male workers supportive and helpful. While Portland’s plant may have differed from Everett’s, it is likely that those same issues applied here as well, and ads calling for workers indicate women were employed in jobs as accountants, welders, and more. One similarity among workers was the workers’ pride in seeing a ship completed and launched.
The plant did not continue after the war. It was leased in 1944 by Pacific Car and Foundry, a company that manufactured barges at its plants in Renton, Seattle, and Tacoma. The lease was terminated in 1949 and the yard closed. The site later was used by Western Gear and is now part of Naval Station Everett.
