Alice Henry

• Alice Henry
• Born: March 21, 1857
• Died: February 14, 1943

Trade union leader, was born in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, the eldest of three children of Charles Ferguson Henry and Margaret (Walker) Henry. Her father, an accountant, and her mother, a seamstress, had emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, during the 1852 gold rush. Apart from three years in the bush, as her father sought land, Alice Henry spent her youth in the Melbourne area, an observant Swedenborgian and student at private and public high schools.

In her early twenties, after teaching for a short time, Henry became a journalist. Her first newspaper article was published in 1884 and for almost twenty years she wrote features for The Melbourne Argus and its weekly, The Australiasian. She gradually became interested in reforms of many kinds and wrote and lectured on many topics. Her concerns included proportional representation (about which she read in Thomas Hare’s Representative Government), feminism, the treatment of juvenile offenders, anti-imperialism and opposition to the Boer War, prohibition, innovative attempts to care for female patients at the Yalbot Epileptic Colony and the Queen Victoria Hospital, and issues involving labor. The latter foreshadowed her later efforts in the United States. Politically she inclined toward support of the Australian Labour party.

Henry sojourned briefly in England in 1905, representing the Charities Organization of Melbourne at a conference and attempting vainly to seek work for herself. In 1906 she came to the United States, continuing her search and speaking on feminist activity and social reform in her native land. Through her advocacy of proportional representation at home she had developed a friendship with the Australian reformer Catherine Helen Spence, which now, in America, led to acquaintance with the feminist leaders Anna Garlin Spencer and Susan B. Anthony.

Through Margaret Dreier Robins, whom she met at Hull House in Chicago and who would shortly become president of the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), Henry became office secretary of the league in that city. After editing a women’s section placed by the NWTUL in the Chicago Union Labor Advocate, she became editor in 1911 of Life and Labor, a new monthly magazine issued by the league itself. Aided by the Australian novelist Stella Miles Franklin, Henry published such popular features as short stories and articles about women and the labor movement. In the meantime, in 1910, she had helped write a report for the United Brewery Workers’ Union on working conditions of women employed in the brewing industry.

In the United States as in Australia Henry’s interests were broad. Supporting drama at Hull House, backing the NWTUL’s efforts to provide music for workers, and writing poetry of her own, she infused the reform ideas of her homeland into her work in America. She advocated a role for trade unions and social settlements as laboratories for interracial cooperation, having by World War I abandoned the views on inherent differences between races that she had grown up with in Australia. Together with Jane Addams she opposed American entry into the war. She supported such progressive and liberal politicians as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and, ultimately, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Philosophically, she favored evolutionary Socialist change.

In 1915 Henry published The Trade Union Woman, a highly important work that applied social analysis and a feminist perspective to a history of unionism among women, from the early nineteenth century weavers’ strikes through the growth of the NWTUL. Because they had been more easily exploited, Henry said, women especially needed trade unionism. They also needed protective legislation, she noted, contrary to the voluntarist position then held by the American Federation of Labor leadership. She discussed the difficulties women experienced in obtaining vocational training and the pressure placed on married women wanting to work; here she touched upon issues of later feminist concern. In Woman and the Labor Movement (1923) she included parts of her earlier book, along with new material on the Woman’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, the effect of World War I upon working conditions, and the apparent increase of cooperation between the sexes in the labor movement.

From 1918 to 1923 Henry worked for the NWTUL as a staff lecturer and organizer and as head of the education department, coordinating a training program for labor leaders in Chicago. She organized and spoke at a summer school for women workers at Bryn Mawr College in 1921. Lecturing in England and Europe in 1924, she stopped at workers’ schools and attended the International Workers’ Education Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford. Traveling between the United States and Australia for a time, she finally resettled in her homeland, where she supported medical and educational programs for residents of the Australian bush. She died at the age of eighty-five.

Coming from a Catholic tradition of comprehensive reform in Australia, Henry made an activist contribution to the women’s labor movement in the United States and an intellectual contribution to the understanding of the history and needs of that movement.

In addition to the works noted above, Henry’s writings may be found in N. Palmer, ed., Memoirs of Alice Henry (1944). For other biographical material see the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973); Notable American Women (1971), which contains a bibliography, and Who’s Who in America, 1920-21.