The Price of LibertyBy Mary Gray Peck(In “Life and Labor.” Chairman Committee on Drama, General Federation of Women’s Clubs.)
By Mary Gray Peck
(In “Life and Labor.” Chairman Committee on Drama, General Federation of Women’s Clubs.)
“I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”
Patrick Henry, when he said that, was not asking that liberty come as a free gift. No race or class ever has attained it so cheaply. Fifty yearsafter the battle of Gettysburg, the negro is still fighting for the liberty which the bloodiest war in history could not confer on him. He must get it for himself.
Women have been fighting longer than that for freedom.
It is the glory of the women’s labor movement that working women struck the first blow for women’s liberty in this country.
For a hundred years, working women have made straight the way for all women to follow. It was the women in the mills and the shops and factories who made it possible sixty years ago for women to enter the schools and the professions.
Today, in the ultimate analysis, it is the women in the mills of commerce who gave women the ballot in the suffrage states. It is they who are paying the price.Their strikes are all hunger strikes; not a hunger for bread alone, but a hunger for life and the liberty of soul.
Not till these strikes end in victory, not till the last burning-factory martyr has rendered up her life as a sacrifice necessary to the destruction of the system which thrives on factory fires, can we count the price which working women have paid to make all women free.
“No people can long endure half slave and half free.”
If the working women had consented to be slaves, there would have been no woman movement. More than that—without the woman’s trade unions there could be no organized labor movement.Theirs is the strategic point in the conflict in which the whole world is lining up. Around them will rage the fiercest fight; but the stars in their courses fight for them.