Women Telephone Workers on Strike Photo Archive Showing Women Picketing, Being Arrested, and Voting on Strike Action, 1945-50

Telephone Workers Strike

Photograph

[Women's Labor][Union Organizing] Women telephone workers on strike press photo archive documenting labor organization, picket lines, arrests, and union settlement efforts in New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, and Cleveland, 1945-1950. The images illustrate the postwar labor conflict in the American telephone industry as women workers fought for better wages, pensions, union recognition, and working conditions. The group records labor action through formal union voting, publicity, picketing, mass walkouts, police intervention, and settlement. The archive highlights women at the center of the labor organizing process, showing the workforce that staffed operator positions and other telephone company roles acting collectively during the major strike wave that followed World War II.

Photo archive of 9 silver gelatin press photographs, ranging from 6 x 7 to 8 x 10 inches, New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Cleveland, and related U.S. locations, 194New York5-1950. The photographs show women carrying and preparing strike placards, leaving telephone company headquarters in a St. Louis walkout, gathering on broad city steps with signs, lining sidewalks outside company buildings, sitting with placards reading "N.F.T.W. ON STRIKE," and smiling from inside a police wagon after arrest on an Ohio Federation of Telephone Workers picket line. Several images preserve highly specific labor text: placards call for "$12 per week," a "Union Shop," and a "Decent Pension," while another denounces the "union busting tactics of the Bell System." One image shows a woman tearing up a strike placard beside a noticeboard stating that the FLLTW and the company had reached an agreement and that the proposed strike had been called off. Versos retain typed caption strips, credit and usage stamps, editorial markings, and filing notes identifying scenes such as a New York vote on whether traffic employees of the New York Telephone Company would strike on April 16, 1945; Brooklyn strike cancellation at American Telephone and Telegraph on March 7, 1946; Chicago women preparing picket signs on April 5, 1947; Seattle workers and pickets outside a telephone building on April 7, 1947; coffee served to women strike pickets at St. Alphonsus Hall that same evening; and later Cleveland newsroom handling marked November 10, 1950.

These photographs date to a time of broad labor upheaval of the mid 1940s and early 1950s, when wartime employment, rising prices, and postwar contract battles pushed workers across the United States into repeated strikes. The telephone industry depended heavily on women as operators, traffic workers, and clerical employees, and this archive shows those women as the visible organizers, voters, and public faces of labor activism in one of the country's largest communications networks. The images document five years of telephone strikes across several cities and through multiple stages of escalation and resolution. Moderate edge wear, scattered creasing, surface handling wear, editorial markings, stamps, caption remnants, and some toning or staining to versos; overall good condition. A concise multi-city record of women's labor militancy in the postwar telephone industry, with strong evidence of how strike action operated inside a national communications system.

Item #23344

Price: $885.00