PROFESSOR PENS BOOK ON SILK WORKERS

"Their Fathers' Daughters" is a new book about the girls and young single women whose work fueled the American silk industry at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It is also a book whose author, Southeast professor Dr. Bonnie Stepenoff, is a product of the value the silk workers placed on education and family loyalty.

Stepenoff's great-aunts, Laura and Lizzie, worked at the Willow Silk Mill in Slatington, Pa., most of their lives. "If they entertained thoughts of a different kind of life, they did not act upon them," Stepenoff writes in the prologue. "But Laura saved enough money to help send me, her grandniece, to college."Stepenoff's book, published last month by Susquehanna University Press, is the first to tell of the role these girls and young women played in their families and in the American labor movement. She delivered a lecture about the silk workers last spring at an international conference in Amsterdam. Stepenoff heads the Historic Preservation Program at Southeast.

Silk mills arrived in the United States once the process was mechanized after the Civil War. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, Pennsylvania girls and single women supported themselves and their families by working in the hundreds of silk mills that located there precisely because the mill owners knew the daughters of coal miners would be a source of cheap labor. At that point in America's social history, miners' wives stayed home to raise the family and their sons began picking slate out of the coal at early ages before going down in the mines. Neither women nor girls were allowed in the mines at the time.

Few men worked in the silk mills because most could find better jobs, so the miners' daughters were cheap labor for the silk manufacturers.

But the girls grew up with powerful models for unionizing. "The girls wanted to be like their fathers," Stepenoff says. "They wanted to stand up and parade. Most of them brought their wages home to their parents."One of the ironies in "Their Fathers' Daughters" is that the loyalty these girls and young women felt toward their families kept their union from fully asserting itself, Stepenoff says. "The girls had to get permission from their fathers to go on strike."The fathers then took over the negotiating process.

The work was not dangerous and was better than employment in cotton mills. The major health problem encountered was deafness, but the silk industry had the worst record for child labor. Children comprised 15 percent of the work force in the silk mills in 1910. Child labor reformers had both good and bad effects on the silk workers, Stepenoff says. Well-intentioned reformers like Mother Jones hurt them, Stepenoff thinks, by their parental attitudes."Most of the silk mill hands were not tots, but young women capable of standing up for themselves and fighting for their rights," Stepenoff writes. Conversely, because of the reforms, fewer and fewer really young girls some started working at age 12 went into the mills and more went to school. "They found a different path," Stepenoff says.

The trend away from child labor started as early as 1900 even though no federal laws against it were passed until the 1930s, she says. "Families were finding other ways."The silk industry began dying out in the middle of the century as rayon and other artificial fibers took over the market. By then, many of the immigrant families had climbed out of the mills through education."By the mid-20th century, girls from working-class homes were able to go out and get white-collar jobs," Stepenoff says. "The ultimate thing was to be a teacher."She concludes in the prologue: "For Laura and Lizzie as for many women in their part of the world, the key to that dream for the future was something they had given up at age fourteen: an education."It took a couple of generations. But finally I was given that key. I was allowed to live their dream. Because of this privilege, I have written this book."