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Agnes Burns Wieck: A Leader of Joan of Arcs -- Part II

© Mara Lou Hawse

Agnes Burnes Wieck was influenced by her mother's experiences. She wrote:

"The years when my mother bore her children were the years when the miners' union was struggling for its existence in this country. Babies and strikes and shutdowns and blacklists -- from one mine to another, moving, always moving -- like bands of gypsies went groups of coal miners' families through the coal fields in those years. Before the union was firmly established my mother had stood by while my father took one reduction after another -- already living on too little she was forced to feed her family on less. Where the union was most active, work was always the poorest. . . . If the blacklist drove my father to seek a new job under a new name, my mother managed somehow to save us from starvation while the job-hunt was on. The union demanded no sacrifice too great for her."

Agnes remember the strike of 1897:

"The miners had nothing, naturally the union had no treasury. . . . Everyone knew there could be no financial relief and nobody had anything to start on. We might as well starve striking as to starve working, was the attitude everywhere. . . . Men grimly set their faces toward the future. Women steeled their hearts. Children went hungry. Children died. Hunger, sickness, death, but silent and unshaken stood the strikers and their families. . . . My very earliest memory goes back to a day of this strike. My mother and women like her went out among the farmers to ask for food. Each morning saw them, baskets on their arms, making their daily rounds. One morning my mother took me with her. I carried back a doll, I remember. My mother carried back a basket of food that I'm sure she never forgot.

"Behind the men who won that great strike stood an army of women. They had taken no union vows but within their own souls they had pledged their lives to the Union. They went to no meetings but in each little home counsel was always taken as to the next move. They formulated no policies but they gave full-hearted support to action. Unfaltering, unwavering they stood, like a wall that nothing could batter down."

According to her son, Wieck "idolized the solidarity" of those women. Like Mary Harris "Mother Jones," Wieck understood that miners' wives were just as much working people as their husbands. This was one of the lessons she learned growing up in the southern Illinois coal fields. Wieck brought this understanding to her writing and her organizing activities.

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