‘The waiter speaks’: Stella Miles Franklin and the Chicago garment workers' strike, 1910–1911

SynopsisThis paper focuses on Australian feminist novelist Stella Miles Franklin's unpublished one-act play ‘The Waiter Speaks’, previously unremarked by Franklin scholars. Written during Franklin's work as secretary for the National Women's Trade Union League, the play addresses the 1910–1911 Chicago garment workers' strike, a massive conflict that shaped union history through its precedent for arbitration and a female leadership that crossed class and ethnic lines. Franklin was in charge of League publicity for the strike and provided commentary on the conflict through the League's journal Life and Labor. Such experiences provided narrative authority for her protest play that sought to educate and provide a ‘call to arms’. The paper contributes to U.S. women's history and Australian literary studies by giving voice to this long-forgotten play of a notable feminist author, contextualising it in labour history and in the literary traditions that shaped Franklin's writing during this period.