A Women’s Auxiliary was created at the formation of the Progressives’ new union. In contrast to John L. Lewis’ vocal misogyny, one of the founding objectives of the PMA was “to unite women and to educate them on the struggles of the workers, politically and industrially, and to organize them into Women’s Auxiliaries” (as reported by David Thoreau Wieck, in his 1992 biography of his mother, Agnes Burns Wieck, in Woman From Spillertown).

It should be noted that before the PMA was created, miners’ wives already were setting up soup kitchens at striking mines. The Women’s Auxiliary of the PMA was going to do more. As the first President of the Woman’s Auxiliary, Agnes Burns Wieck delivered powerful speeches, including eulogies for miners slain at striking mines by coal company operatives or company supporters in the National Guard. She began one eulogy for a murdered miner with: “Our men folk need strong women at their sides in this dark hour”. 

Agnes led the way. She already was experienced. She had been born into a mining family and grew up familiar with poverty and strikes; she later married a miner. At twenty-two she was organizing miners’ wives in Williamson County in far southern Illinois but the UMWA did not encourage her initiative. In 1916 she took a training course in Chicago — “School for Women Organizers”—offered by the National Women’s Trade Union League of America. Representing that group she gave an address at the District 12 convention in Springfield to enlist the UMWA’s help in getting Life and Labor magazine into the hands of the miners’ wives and to speak to miners about their wives, arguing that wives were workers, too. As her philosophy evolved, she saw women as being able to assist in strikes and organize campaigns. She began to write for the United Mine Workers Journal. She continued to write and be active. By 1924 she was a paid columnist for the Illinois Miner. In 1925 she broached the topic of a women’s auxiliary. This idea gained new power with her opposition to Lewis’ co-option of District 12. Agnes railed against Lewis in the Illinois Miner.  

The Women’s Auxiliary was as radical as the PMA, with as much ire directed at the coal operators and politicians as at John L. Lewis and his UMWA. Comparisons of Agnes’ militancy to that of Mother Jones were occasionally made as in “Miners’ new ‘Mother Jones’”. She was described as a hell raiser, a phrase Mother Jones had used about herself (Wieck 1992: 132).

Whereas the mine war between the PMA and UMWA can be seen as a negative legacy of the labor movement, the great and inadequately acknowledged achievement of the PMA from its start was the role of the miners’ wives and other female relatives in forming the Women’s Auxiliary. These firebrand women marched and protested in defense of the PMA members’ cause. For example, on January 26, 1933 and led by WA President Agnes over ten thousand women congregated in front of the Capitol in Springfield to protest violence against miners and to demand an end to civil rights violations. Note that Mother Jones had died two years before the WAPMA was created.

source: minewar.org

The WA women were immediately recognizable by their white dresses and white headbands. 

But in the sea of white at the Springfield mass protest, there were the 54 widows of the miners lost in the recent (Christmas Eve, 1932) disaster at Moweaqua, who wore black.

source:  https://www.minewar.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/wwnl_banner.jpg

 Another key figure in the Women’s Auxiliary was Katie DeRorre, an Italian immigrant who initiated exceptional social action by organizing soup kitchens for striking miners and their families as well as pioneering the integration of African American and White mining families. Joann Condellone, who you see below carrying the White City WA banner below, relates the history of Katie DeRorre in this video: CLICK or here: CLICK

Tiny White City, five minutes from Mt Olive, was a hotbed of activity of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners of America. This photo (below) is anachronistic but effective. It shows Mother Jones (portayed by Loretta Wiilliams) holding a stick of dynamite and standing on a box of dynamite alongside a living descendant of a WAPMA member from White City. The White City banner is authentic. 

Sadly, the PMA began to perceive Agnes as an irritant. They launched a smear campaign against her that impacted her popularity among some members of the Auxiliary. In union terms it certainly was the PMA leadership wanting to be in complete control of the union’s agenda. 

The PMA succeeded in breaking the strength of the Women’s Auxiliary by dividing the women into factions. By November 1934 membership in the auxiliaries was greatly diminished. 

Descendants and adherents to the Women’s Auxiliary still honor the WAPMA every year at the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt Olive. 

Listen to this excellent 50-minute audio documentary by Jeff Biggers (author of Reckoning at Eagle Cree. The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, Southern Illinois University Press, 2010): CLICK