Eight women. Five languages between them. Three babies, two toddlers, and a girl of six who pressed herself against her mother’s side and watched the strangers with enormous dark eyes.
That’s the first meeting of the women’s auxiliary in The Promise Trilogy — not in a union hall or a lecture room, but in an attic above the Henry Street Settlement, with a samovar someone had carried up three flights of stairs and a circle of mismatched chairs beneath a single bare lightbulb. The women sew flu masks. They share bread and tinctures and information about which clinic nurses will see patients without paperwork. They keep their own records in their own kitchens, in their own hands, looking like nothing more than household bookkeeping.
It’s fiction. But it’s built on a reality that runs through the entire history of women’s organizing in early 20th-century America — and it’s one of the threads I kept pulling while writing Book Three of the trilogy.
The history books remember the strikes. The Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909, when tens of thousands of shirtwaist makers — mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women — poured into New York’s streets demanding better hours, safer conditions, and the right to organize. The Great Steel Strike of 1919, when 365,000 workers walked off the job in mills across six states. The Bread and Roses strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrant women shut down textile mills and sent their children to live with supporters in other cities to keep them fed while their mothers held the picket line.
These are the events that made the newspapers. But behind every strike, every labor action, every community that held together under pressure, there was another kind of organizing — quieter, less visible, and almost entirely run by women. It happened in kitchens and parlors and sewing circles, in the conversations that took place after the men left for the picket line, in the networks that moved information from household to household like water through roots.
Women’s auxiliaries, mutual aid societies, mothers’ circles, relief committees — the names varied, but the work was consistent. When a steelworker’s family had no income because their father had been on the line for six weeks, it was women who organized the soup kitchens, coordinated the clothing drives, and tracked which families needed coal. When a garment worker was injured on the job, it was often a neighbor — not an institution — who knew which midwife could be trusted, which grocer gave credit, which lawyer would take a case without fees.
This wasn’t charity. It was infrastructure — the infrastructure that made labor organizing possible in communities where formal institutions were either absent, hostile, or under surveillance.
One of the most remarkable features of women’s organizing in this era was the unlikely alliances it produced. The Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903, was built explicitly on the idea that working-class women and wealthy women could make common cause. Its members included both factory workers like Rose Schneiderman and society figures like Anne Tracy Morgan — the daughter of J.P. Morgan — who walked the picket lines alongside striking shirtwaist makers in 1909.
These alliances were imperfect. The “mink brigade,” as the press called the wealthy women who supported the garment strikes, brought resources and public visibility that working women desperately needed. But they also brought assumptions about how organizing should look, what counted as respectable protest, and whose voices should lead. The tensions between the League’s well-heeled supporters and its working-class militants — tensions that Rose Schneiderman articulated with devastating clarity in her speech after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — were never fully resolved.
In the novels, this tension lives in the relationship between Lillian Wald and the women of the auxiliary. Wald comes from money. She chose the Lower East Side, but she could unchoose it. The immigrant women in Lucie’s circle have no exit. When Wald proposes the auxiliary — officially tasked with flu relief, unofficially a network for documenting what’s happening to working families under federal surveillance — she’s offering protection and structure. But she’s also asking women to trust an institution with a board of directors and donor politics that the women themselves cannot control.
What fascinates me most about women’s mutual aid networks in this period is their strategic invisibility. Women organized under the cover of work that was already expected of them — sewing, cooking, visiting the sick, minding children. A mothers’ circle at a settlement house looked like a sewing lesson. It was, in fact, a classroom without desks where women taught each other which landlords could be negotiated with, which foremen were stealing wages, and how to write a letter in English that would make a building inspector actually show up.
During the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, the most powerful organizing tactic wasn’t the picket line — it was the decision by striking mothers to send hundreds of their children to live with supporters in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. This solidarity action kept children fed and safe while their mothers faced arrest, eviction, and violence. But it also did something the factory owners hadn’t anticipated: it made the strike visible to middle-class families in other cities, who saw the children arrive thin and poorly clothed and understood, in a way that newspaper accounts could not convey, what the strike was actually about. When authorities tried to stop the children from leaving, public sympathy swung decisively toward the strikers.
The women who organized the children’s evacuation weren’t recorded as strike leaders. They were recorded as mothers making arrangements for their families. The distinction mattered — not because it was honest, but because it was safe.
In the auxiliary scenes in The Promise Trilogy, I tried to capture this double life. The women sew masks for the flu — real masks, needed masks, work that protects families. But while they sew, they listen. They document. They build a record of what’s happening to working families across five neighborhoods, each woman keeping her own notes in her own kitchen, where the pages look like grocery lists and household accounts.
“Every woman keeps her own records,” Lucie says when she understands what Wald is proposing. “What she sees, what she hears, what her family endures. It looks like household bookkeeping.”
“It looks like exactly what it is,” Wald replies. “Women surviving.”
The tradition of women keeping records — informal, dispersed, hidden in plain sight — has a long history in American labor. During the 1919 steel strike, wives of steelworkers organized relief efforts that sustained families through months without income. Their work was essential to the strike’s duration, even though the strike ultimately failed. The women who ran the relief kitchens, tracked family needs, and coordinated donations across ethnic lines weren’t recognized as labor organizers. But without them, the men on the picket lines would have gone home in weeks instead of months.
In 1919 alone, one of every five American workers walked off the job in a wave of strikes that included steelworkers, coal miners, garment workers, police, and telephone operators. Behind each of these actions stood women who did the work of keeping communities together — feeding children, negotiating with landlords, sharing medicine, and carrying information through networks that were invisible to the employers, the press, and the federal agents who were increasingly surveilling immigrant communities during the Red Scare.
The Women’s Trade Union League, the settlement house mothers’ circles, the neighborhood sewing groups, the informal mutual aid societies that operated in every immigrant community — these were the structures that made it possible for families to survive the gap between what the law promised and what the world delivered. They weren’t written into the history the way the strikes were. But the strikes couldn’t have happened without them.
When the auxiliary is disbanded in The Promise Trilogy — shut down by a board under federal pressure — Lucie climbs to the attic one last time to clear the room. The chairs still hold the shape of the women who sat in them. A child’s red mitten lies forgotten on a seat. The coffee tin where women dropped in whatever coins they could spare still sits beside Clara’s tincture bottles.
She packs the ledger, the attendance sheets, the workplace testimonies — wrapping them in a clean dishcloth at the bottom of a flour sack, where they would look like nothing if anyone stopped her on the street.
She leaves the coffee tin. The work could travel. The ritual couldn’t.
That scene came from thinking about all the rooms women have filled and emptied across the history of organizing — the parlors and kitchens and church basements where the real work happened, where the records were kept in hands that knew how to make them look like nothing, where the soup was both sustenance and strategy. Women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America didn’t always do it at the podium or on the picket line. Sometimes they did it with a needle in one hand and a notebook in the other, in rooms where the only evidence of what they’d built was a circle of empty chairs and the warmth they’d made together.
This post is part of a companion series with “The Woman Who Built the House” and “The House That Held the World.”