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Overview
Betty McCoy was a spinner from Charlotte, North Carolina interviewed by Mary Brown on behalf of the on May 31, 1939.

Early Life
Betty McCoy was born in 1902 in Charlotte, North Carolina. She lived adjacent to Louise Cotton Mill from birth, along with her mother and siblings. As a child, her family’s main source of income came from taking in boarders for the mill’s president, up until the point where McCoy and her siblings were old enough to go to work in the mill themselves. McCoy attended school through around 8th grade, but when she turned twelve years old she began work in the mill as a spinner.

Adulthood and Career
McCoy continued to work at Louise Mill through WWI and the Great Depression. There, she experienced dramatic wage fluctuation as she worked up to 60 hours a week spinning and doffing. She would go on to marry a man she met working at the Mill.

Labor Unions in the American South
The 1930s saw a dramatic increase in organized labor unions, particularly in industries like textiles, mining and steel, as the target of these burgeoning unions shifted away from skilled laborers and to the masses of the American South (Labor Unions During the Great Depression and New Deal). The growing labor movement had a particular focus on the textile industry in the South, as the workers in textile mills represented the largest population of laborers in the region and were more likely to engage in militant strikes than other groups. In fact, “strike figures for the United States show a higher incidence of strikes among U.S. textile workers than among workers in other industries, in all periods from 1916 to 1940” (Goldfield 2020). Textile spinners in the South were often young girls, as they could be paid less and work up to eleven hours a day (McKelway 1913). In this expansion of the movement, “industrial unionism swept workers into the fold, often ignoring the old barriers of race, ethnicity, and gender”, allowing women and other disenfranchised groups to participate for the first time (Cobble 2003). Joining labor unions gave young women and girls unprecedented access to information and power regarding their own employment.

Feminist Sentiments of the 1930s
The 1920s saw an incredible expansion in women’s rights with the suffrage movement, but women still experienced diminished wages, unfair labor practices, and inferior societal ranking as compared to their male counterparts (Souhami 2018). The movement of feminist thought thus turned towards the workplace, a trend which would continue into the start of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. Women were subjected to a “marriage bar, which meant women had to resign when they married” (Souhami 2018). The Union of American Women (UAW) in the 1930s welcomed activists, wives and wage earners alike, to fight for the continued promulgation of women’s rights. Dr. Cobble of Rutgers University has even postulated that the creation of what she deemed “labor feminism” during this time mandates a “re-waving” of classification of feminist thought, due to its significance in the adaptive history of feminism in the United States.