Mabel Edna Gillespie

• Mabel Gillespie
• Born: March 4, 1877
• Died: September 24, 1923

Labor reformer, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to James and Ida (Scott) Gillespie. Orphaned at a young age, she was raised by an aunt, Sarah Ester Staples, in Concord, Massachusetts. She attended elementary and high schools in Concord and entered Radcliffe College in 1898.

While at Radcliffe, Gillespie heard of Denison House in Boston, one of the earliest college settlements. Leaving Radcliffe in 1900, she became a resident of Denison and a secretary for the Associated Charities of Boston. Increasingly concerned with the problems of women workers, she joined the Women’s Trade Union League when it was founded in Boston in 1903. Thereafter her main concerns were labor organizing and labor reform.

Gillespie’s first major activity for the league was participation in an unsuccessful strike by textile workers in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1903. In 1904 she went to Buffalo, New York, where she was executive secretary of the Consumers’ League and Child Labor Committee. In 1907 she conducted a statewide survey into the canning industry; to experience conditions first hand, she worked in a cannery for twelve to fourteen hours a day for four months. She checked on the enforcement of child labor laws in retail stores by becoming an inspector for the city’s health department.

Gillespie returned to Boston in 1909 to become executive secretary of Boston’s Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a position she held until her death. Soon she gained widespread recognition for her leadership abilities by successfully organizing women workers and allying them with men’s unions, which had often been hostile to women’s organizing efforts. She helped organize garment, textile, and laundry workers; clerks; teachers; and office cleaners. Developing a working relationship with the male Boston Central Labor Union, she brought women’s unions into affiliation with it. The WTUL then worked with men’s unions to aid workers of both sexes. In 1912 Gillespie received the backing of the American Federation of Labor for the organizing of female telephone operators.

Gillespie was a member of the executive board of the National Women’s Trade Union League from 1911 to 1917 and 1919 to 1922. In 1909 the league had begun agitation for a minimum-wage law on the British model. The Boston branch requested the appointment of a Massachusetts state commission of inquiry into the wages and living conditions of women workers, which it hoped would recommend a minimum-wage bill to the legislature. The commission’s work resulted, in 1912, in the passage of the first minimum-wage law in the United States, and Gillespie was appointed to the three-member Minimum Wage Commission, a post she held from 1913 to 1919 and the work for which she is best known.

A skilled organizer and tireless activist, Gillespie was the first woman elected to the executive committee of the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Labor. Elected vice president in 1918, she was a member of the Women’s Committee on Industry of the Council of National Defense during World War I. She also helped to found the Trade Union College in 1919 and was a member of the joint administrative committee of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for women workers, which opened in 1921.

Gillespie died of a heart attack at age forty-six, at a dressmaking shop she then managed in Boston. She was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in nearby Dorchester.

The most complete biographical account of Gillespie appears in Notable American Women (1971). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1931); A. Henry, Memoirs (1944); National Women’s Trade Union League, Proceedings, 1911-24; New York State Consumers’ League, Report. 1907; and Minimum Wage Commission of Massachusetts. Annual Report, 1913-19.