Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver

On today’s show, as Women’s History Month continues, historian Jane Little Botkin explains how Jane Street, a single mother, firebrand, and little-known IWW organizer, orchestrated a 1916 housemaids’ rebellion in Denver, Colorado.

To fight for better pay and working conditions in Denver’s elite Capitol Hill neighborhood, Street worked with—and later, despite—the IWW to blacklist and shame the area’s worst domestic employers, thereby disrupting the comfort and reputations of some of Denver’s most influential and powerful families.

The author of The Girl Who Dared to Defy: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver and Frank Little and the IWW: The Blood That Stained an American Family, Botkin has received two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, the Caroline Bancroft History Prize from the Denver Public Library Western History and Genealogy Department, and the Best Historical Nonfiction Award from the Texas Association of Authors.

Her story comes to us from the Tales from the Reuther Library podcast, which is a fellow member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

On this week’s Labor History in Two: Police Attack Women Sit-Downers.

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Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Produced by Chris Garlock. 

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Music: The Rebel Girl (Alyeah Hansen)