![]() ![]() Hers was a life of highs and lows: she became president of the local union branch in 1909, but in 1913 she was arrested during a fight surrounding a West Virginia coal miners’ strike and held in the county jail for four months. She traveled between the Midwest and the East Coast to hold the picket line during strikes and negotiate for pay raises. ![]() ![]() It was just the first of Fannie’s many triumphs. Marx & Haas soon agreed to nearly double wages and to shorten the workday. Fannie and her fellow seamstresses formed a local branch of the United Garment Workers of America union in 1902. The sweatshop demanded ten- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week, in poor working conditions. Louis, Missouri, to support her four children. Broadening her scope, she also springboards off Fannie’s experience to give a concise history of the labor movement in America.Īt the turn of the twentieth century, Fannie, a thirtysomething widow, was working at the Marx & Haas Clothing Co. In Fannie Never Flinched, Mary Cronk Farrell charts her heroine’s transformation from sweatshop worker to union president and martyred protester. ![]() On August 26, 1919, Fannie Sellins was shot dead in Natrona, Pennsylvania, while trying to defuse a fight between striking coal miners and police deputies. One Woman’s Courage in the Struggle for American Labor Union Rights ![]()
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