MILL MOTHERS: field notes: Lewis Hine, photographer, activist

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Lewis Hine, photographer, activist

Loray Mill, 1908

Loray girls, 1908

Images from the exhibit, "Lewis Hine: Exposing Child Labor in North Carolina, 1908-1918," North Carolina Museum of History.

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Mill Mothers' Song, a novel in progress by Kim Church

Mill Mothers’ Song is set during the Gastonia textile strike of 1929, a seminal struggle in labor history, yet one that is little talked about.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the textile industry was booming in the South. Mill jobs were abundant; mill towns offered creature comforts and social amenities that attracted families looking to escape the poverty and hardship of farm life.

The end of World War I brought an end to the textile boom. Demand for cotton goods plummeted; prices fell. Mill owners intent on maintaining wartime profits began to implement the "stretch-out," a system of management that cut jobs, imposed stringent production quotas on the workers who remained, and paid them less. Workers were almost literally stretched to their breaking point. The mills, many now owned by absentee companies that had no personal relationships with workers, became fertile ground for unions.

In 1929, the Communist-affiliated National Textile Workers Union set out to organize the Loray Mill in Gastonia, then the largest cotton mill in "the fine combed cotton capital of the world." That April, 1,800 Loray workers walked out on strike, sparking a violent backlash among Gastonia's ruling class.

Mill Mothers’ Song tells the story of Lena Sparks and Rae Pruitt, born on the same day in the same valley in Burke County, North Carolina, and raised as sisters. They leave the mountains to work in cotton mills. At the time of the strike, both are young mothers, both fueled by a sense of duty, though with very different notions of what their duty entails.

The strike is met with a brutality that tests the mettle of workers on both sides of the picket line, and tests the sisterly bond between Lena and Rae.

About Kim Church

My debut novel, Byrd (Dzanc Books, 2014), is the fragmented family history of a child secretly given up for adoption. The book won the Crook's Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the South and the Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal for literary fiction. It was a Chautauqua Prize finalist, a Balcones Prize finalist, and was long-listed for the SIBA Book Award and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.

My short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere.

I have received fiction fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. For more information please visit my website.

Mill Mothers' Song was inspired by my grandmother, who worked all her life in cotton mills.