The fact is . . .

The first image (click to enlarge) is from the Nobel Prize website: Claudia Goldin is the third (out of 93 economics winners), and the first solo woman to be awarded the economics Nobel prize, "for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes." An astute researcher and thinker, she considers both economics and history: "The fact is, the past is always with us and it impacts what we're able to do," she said in an interview. "And that's important when you're looking at the shift of women from the home into the economic marketplace."

Claudia Goldin The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 Born: 1946, New York, NY, USA Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Prize motivation: “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes” Prize share: 1/1

Claudia Goldin's achievement prompted me to think about women activists in the "women's labour market." In particular, I decided to post a landmark in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that my longtime friend Sue Kirch recently spotted and photographed for me.

Here are several contemporary newspaper articles about women and the "Allegheny Cotton Mill Strikes": Image below: "A Female 'Strike," Urbana Citizen and Gazette, (Urbana, Ohio), October 14, 1845, p. 1. Note the "beautiful banner," a tactic that is widely used years later by suffragists.

Next image: An article in a Washington, D. C. newspaper, (The Washinton Union, October 23, 1845, p.3.), reported, in the last paragraph, the successful outcome of the strike.

In 1848, strikers protested the relaxing of the 10-hour 1845 agreement. A Newport, Rhode Island, newspaper (The Herald of The Times, August 10, 1848, p. 2) reported: "Six of the factory girls who were most violent in the riotous demonstrations, and four of the principal men in the mob, were arrested this evening. There is a great excitement in the city of this subject."

The historical marker was erected in 2007 by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.