Alzina Ann Parsons Stevens

• Alzina Ann Parsons Stevens
• Born: May 27, 1849
• Died: June 3, 1900

Labor and industrial reformer and child welfare worker, was born in Parsonfield, Maine, a town named after her paternal grandfather, Colonel Thomas Parsons, who received the land for his service in the American Revolution. Her father, Enoch Parsons, served as a soldier in the War of 1812. After his return from battle, he became a prosperous farmer and small manufacturer. He and his wife, Louise (Page) Parsons, had seven children, of whom Alzina Ann Parsons was the fourth daughter and youngest child. Enoch Parsons died sometime before 1862, leaving the family in difficult financial straits. With two sons fighting in the Civil War, Louise Parsons was forced to send her youngest daughter to work in a local textile mill.

At the age of thirteen, Alzina Parsons received her first and lasting lesson in industrial work. Shortly after entering the textile mill, she was witness to an accident in which a young woman who had worked near her fell to her death in an unguarded elevator shaft. Not long afterward, she herself became the victim of an industrial tragedy. While cleaning her loom, she hurt two fingers on her right hand and was taken to the company doctor, who gave her little attention and, unable to save her fingers, amputated them. After two weeks of suffering, during which she feared the loss of her entire hand, she was sent back to work. The injury and her experience in the mill served as a lifelong reminder of the evils of child labor and the need for industrial reform.

Alzina Parsons remained in the textile mill until an early marriage to a man named Stevens. Little is known of him, and the marriage soon ended in divorce. Her marriage remained an unpleasant memory, and she rarely mentioned it later in her life.

At the age of eighteen, probably with her husband, Stevens left Maine and moved to Toledo, Ohio. There, possibly motivated by her newly divorced status and the need to support herself, Stevens began to learn the printing trade.she soon became a proofreader and typesetter and ultimately an editor, making the newspaper business her life’s work. After five years in Toledo, Stevens took her trade to Chicago, where she became one of the first women to join the Typographical Union. She soon became active in the Chicago labor movement and in 1877 organized the city’s first Working Women’s Union. There she no doubt worked closely with Elizabeth Rodgers who, along with Stevens, would later become prominent among women in the Knights of Labor. Stevens served as president of the Working Women’s Union until 1882, when she moved back to Toledo to work for the local newspaper, the Bee.

Stevens continued her labor activities in Toledo. As soon as the Knights opened its doors to women, in 1881, she joined the Order. The Knights, like other unions, viewed women as potential competitors in the labor market. Rather than organize to exclude them from the market, however, the Knights attempted to include women in their ranks. The Knights’ choice reflected their over-all vision that called for an end to the competitive wage system and the establishment of a socialistic cooperative commonwealth. The Order welcomed women as equal members of the producers’ community and organized both wage-earning women and housewives.

Although the Knights felt that ultimately women’s place should be in the home, the reality of women’s wage work often demanded an immediate defense of their rights as workers, In addition, they viewed their movement as building a working-class community and saw the work of homemakers as an important part of the community’s productive life. The ideal of hearth and home for the Knights was firmly centered in an active producers’ community.

Stevens chartered Toledo’s first female local of the Knights, the Joan of Arc Assembly. She became its first leader and later represented the local in the district assembly, of which she became a member of the executive board. She also served the Knights as a district judge, as recording and financial secretary, and as an organizer. In 1888 Stevens was among the few women to attend the Knights’ national General Assembly, working with Leonora Barry on the committee on women’s work.

The following year Stevens was nominated to succeed Barry as General Investigator for Women’s Work, but she declined, preferring to concentrate on her local organizing. In 1890 Stevens became Masterworkman of Toledo’s District Assembly 72. As head of the district, she presided over representatives from twenty-two locals and played a central role in the city’s labor movement. She was a close friend of the Knights’ leader Terence V. Powderly, who described her as a “spunky little woman.” Notwithstanding his patronizing comment, he often looked to Stevens for advice and comfort.

Like many women in the Knights of Labor, Stevens continued her labor organizing and reform work even after the order’s precipitous decline in the early 1890s. Stevens was active in the Populist movement and in 1892 attended the People’s party convention in Omaha. That year she moved back to Chicago and became half owner of The Chicago Vanguard, a paper “in the interests of economic and industrial reforms through political action.” The paper lasted only one year, and after its demise Stevens turned to the settlement house movement.

During the mid-1890s she became a resident of Jane Addams’s Hull House and along with Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop encouraged the movement to turn toward industrial reform issues. Stevens’s presence at Hull House provided a direct link between the settlement house women and the labor movement. During her stay at Hull House she maintained close ties to labor, helping to organize new unions and aiding in local strikes. In 1893 Stevens became assistant state factory inspector under Florence Kelley.

By the mid-1890s Stevens began to devote most of her energies to juvenile reform issues. In 1894 Stevens and Kelley collaborated on an article for Hull House entitled “Wage Earning Children.” The piece, to become a central document in the history of juvenile reform, was a close study of the condition and lives of children in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, the Hull House neighborhood. The study called for a minimum work age of sixteen, compulsory school attendance until that age, and factory inspectors and truant officers who would be charged with the duty of removing the child from mill or workshop and placing him at school. Stevens recognized that a minimum work age might put a strain on families that could not meet expenses on adult wages alone; her solution called for higher wages and unionization for all workers.

During her last years at Hull House, Stevens became active in the move to establish Cook County (Chicago) juvenile court, the first juvenile court system in Illinois. Through an informal arrangement at first, Stevens, as a representative of Hull House, took provisional custody of all local children arrested for minor offenses. In 1899 she became Cook County’s first probation officer. Jane Addams recalled that Stevens’s “love of children combined with a singleness of purpose and strength of character gave her a great influence over the children in her charge.”

In 1900, at the age of fifty-one, Stevens died of diabetes. She was living at Hull House at the time and was fondly remembered throughout the neighborhood.

Information on Stevens’s life can be found in F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds.,/1 Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967) and in Notable American Women (1971). For information on her activities in the Knights of Labor see the Journal of United Labor, August 16, 1888. Other information can be found in A. Henry, Women and the Labor Movement (1927); and in J. B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions, vol. 10 of Report on Conditions of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States (1911). For Stevens’s career in the settlement movement, see her article (written with Florence Kelley) “Wage Earning Children,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895). See also J. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and D. R. Blumberg, Florence Kelley: The Making of a Social Pioneer (1966).