They Won, And They Won Big: The Woolworth Strike of 1937, Part One

seen as young "girls," never women, and most reporters insisted on describing the strikers with hair color and body type. Their beauty culture, however, played a crucial part in the strike, along with the "silly girls playing strike" media pitch. This innocence legitimated their struggle, and left the public taking notice of a glaring paradox. "If these were just silly girls, why should Woolworth's exploit them? And if these were boy-crazy young things, just having a bit of fun in the aisles, it would certainly not look good at all if Woolworth's" sent in the police to drag them out by their carefully trussed hair. "Being cast as silly and a little stupid, in other words, protected them." The media depicted the girls as if they were on a holiday, "living in luxury" in the five and dime, but the girls ignored their ridicule and pursued their cause. The strikers were very conscious fn the role of the media, and had even set up a Scrapbook Committee to save all of the articles printed in the papers about them.¹¹

With the press concentrating on them, the Woolworth women remained confident in what they were trying to accomplish. In the few interviews obtained, the strikers mentioned nothing of beautification, but of their reasons for striking. They wrote "All we want is a living wage" in red crayon on the brown wrapping paper that hung in the windows. The women's anger towards Barbara Hutton, Woolworth's heiress, began to appear as another factor in the strike. The press began running stories of Hutton herself, comparing her millions to the miniscule pay that the counter girls were receiving. She had made those millions through inheritance, so she became the "poster child" for the strikers' discontent. They created clever songs that went:

Barbara Hutton's got the dough, parlez vous.

We know were she got it, too, parlez vous.

We slave at Woolworth's five and dime,

The pay we get is sure a crime.

Hinky dinky parlez vous

The press had a wonderful time repeating these songs in their articles.¹²

This negative publicity generated by Frank Woolworth's grand-daughter played another important role in the strikers' quest for victory. The counter girls had decided that if Barbara Hutton could make millions of dollars from the Woolworth dynasty, then they certainly deserved a few dollars more in wages, their personal share of the fortune made with their toil. Pressure from the media became so intense that the

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