On Monday morning, March 15, 1937, seven young Black women who worked as wet nurses for the City of Chicago staged a sit-down strike, occupying the City Hall office of Dr. Herman Bundesen, president of the Board of Health. Seated in two rows of straight-backed white chairs in a narrow anteroom, they kept on their coats, their dark, round hats with small feathers tucked into the brims, and their long scarves. Their knees almost touching, they held their purses on their laps, their gloves tidily folded under their hands.

In a photo published in Life magazine, six of the women are turned toward one another, laughing, smiling, full of joy in sisterly struggle. When one of many reporters who showed up — perhaps tipped off, perhaps already lurking around City Hall — asked how long they planned to stay, Mary Hart, age twenty, declared, “We can strike as long as we have to. And we certainly will. We’ll be here every day 8:30–4:30.”

Where did those striking wet nurses, among the most exploited Black women in the United States, find the power to make such an audacious show of militance in the depths of the Great Depression — gloves off?

The history of wet nursing, in which a woman nursed another woman’s baby at her own breast — usually at the expense of her own baby — is ancient, global, and chilling. As an occupation it depended on the existence of one group of women rich and powerful enough to hire or enslave others and another group of women so poor and oppressed that they had to provide their milk to those women’s babies.

European immigrants brought the tradition with them when they came to what is now the United States, hiring white, African American, and in some cases Native American women from the colonial period onward. The cruelties of wet nurses’ lives played out most powerfully under slavery. Enslaved women were forced to perform the exhausting and emotionally brutal work of feeding the babies of their enslavers—babies who would grow up to whip them, sell them, and do the same to the women’s enslaved children. While slaveholders did usually allow enslaved women to nurse their own babies to a limited extent, it was because those babies were valuable commodities.

In the late nineteenth century wet nursing continued under free labor; poor Black and immigrant women were often ejected from poorhouses and placed instead in private homes to nurse elite white women’s babies. Working conditions were terrible: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, live-in. They did have a bit more bargaining power than other domestic servants, since the babies needed their milk. But the women’s own children often died as a result: when one employment agency placed wet-nurses’ babies with other caretakers, 90 percent of the infants died.

As infant mortality rose in the early twentieth century and private wet nursing declined in the face of a shrinking supply of nurses, Boston physicians discovered how to safely bottle human milk, and by around 1910, “milk stations” had been invented. Health authorities paid poor women to show up at these stations to pump their breast milk, which was then delivered to others. By 1929 milk stations had spread to at least 20 cities in the Northeast and Midwest.

The strikers worked at a Chicago milk station on the South Side that was part of broad citywide program promoting infant health. At least two hospitals, Sarah Morris Children’s and Women and Children’s Hospital, also had milk stations. As many as 45 women worked as wet nurses at the South Side station at a time, but in March 1937 there were reportedly 13, including the seven Black women who chose to strike, plus six white women who did not. In another account, three Black women and three white chose not to strike.

While Herman Bundesen oversaw the South Side station from atop the Board of Health, Gertrude Plotzke, a white registered nurse, designed and managed the station itself, aided by subordinate, evidently all-white registered nurses who bottled the milk and pasteurized it. Some of the milk was then handed over in special iced carriers to boys who delivered it to Sarah Morris Hospital. Family members of recipient babies, apparently of many racial and ethnic backgrounds, came to the station to pick up the rest. The recipients were selected through a citywide system that examined all babies and mothers within 24 hours of birth to make sure their mothers were knowledgeable about breastfeeding and were providing sufficient milk.

At work, the wet nurses’ bodies were tightly controlled and surveilled. They had to change into long white uniforms with flaps in front; scrub their hands, fingernails, arms, and breasts; wear face masks; tie bandannas over their hair; and place sterile towels under their breasts. Then they sat together in silence around a table and gave up their milk. “It was so quiet you could hear a penny drop,” Plotzke recalled in an interview years later with the historian Jacqueline Wolf.

Public health officials also exercised close oversight over the wet nurses’ health, including throat cultures, blood tests for VD, and dental exams. If any diagnostic test was positive, a mother couldn’t work. Her milk was sent out for inspection once a week, too. All these “inspections” were performed to guarantee the quality of the milk delivered to the babies of other women (albeit largely poor, too), not to improve the health of the wet nurses. In sharp contrast to the history of wet nursing in the U.S., though, the women’s own babies were not sacrificed. “The mother had to have enough milk to feed her own baby first,” Plotzke insisted.

Despite all the efforts to control them, the wet nurses successfully resisted well before their strike, as when they refused to use breast pumps and insisted on expressing manually. “Oh they thought that was a sin,” a later supervisor recalled, because they “thought it would bruise the tissue.” When the wet nurses were given a quart of cow’s milk every day in order to fortify their own milk, they took it home to their kids instead. The supervisors began making them drink half of it before leaving.

When the women launched their strike, though, the big issue was pay. Wet nurses were paid by the ounce, not by the hour or the day, selling part of their body by piece rate in a payment system akin to picking boxfuls of peaches. At the time of the strike they got four cents an ounce. Plotzke claimed that at 45 ounces a day, that was “a lot of money.”

But when reporters asked the women why they had struck, they quickly contradicted that in a few short quotes full of clarity, force, and a bit of sass. Their average output was 15 to 20 ounces a day, not 45, they insisted. “Why we never make more than 70 cents (a day) and some days as low as 20 cents,” Carrie Burnish announced. “What they been payin’ us ain’t even enough for carfare,” said Mary Hart. “Four cents ain’t enough,” objected another striker, “after we pay someone for watchin’ our own babies at home and buyin’ shoes.” After all those expenses, she said, “we haven’t realized anything.” “Starvation wages, that’s what it is,” exclaimed Burnish. The strikers demanded a raise to 10 cents an ounce and protested racial disparities in payment. “We get 4 cents an ounce, and the white mothers over at Women and Children’s Hospital get 10 cents,” said Louise Clark. “They shouldn’t make any difference between us.” And the work of nursing itself was exhausting. “This sort o’ work is mighty tirin’,” Burnish said. Another agreed: “It is mighty hard work.”

The strikers understood their own powers and had faith that they would win. “We have what they want and we know sooner or later they will meet our demands,” Ella Gold told reporters. “The babies we serve need the milk, and we need the money. No money, no milk.” The rest of the group seconded, “That’s right, no money, no milk.” As another striker put it, “We’re going to sit here until Gabriel blows his horn unless they give us what we want.” Their milk, they knew, was a perishable commodity that babies needed on an urgent basis. According to one news story, the wet nurses’ strike cut off four-fifths of the city’s usual breast-milk supply.

On the first day of the strike, Dr. Bundesen claimed that “we have no way of raising the money offhand,” because “you can’t change a municipal budget overnight.” He met with the women “but was unable to shake their determination, even with the plea that children might suffer if the strike were prolonged,” according to one reporter.

“By 2 p.m. two of the mothers had gone home to nurse their own babies,” The Chicago Tribune reported. The other five stayed until 4:30, when City Hall closed. Tuesday all seven returned. “Mothers Sit Firm! Seven Insist on 10-Cent Milk,” announced The Chicago Herald-Examiner. It reported that the Board of Health had obtained “manufactured preparations” to help meet the diminished supply. Bundesen argued that the city council had to increase the health budget before a price increase could be granted, and “that might take weeks,” he said.

The women’s strike immediately made national headlines. The Black press exulted in the strikers’ courage and highlighted their protest against racism. “Discrimination About Pay Cause of ‘Wet Nurses’ Sit-Down Strike,” reported The New York Amsterdam News. The white press could be approving, but it was also full of mockery, racism, and sexism. “Here are the mothers doing their very best sit-downing at the Board of Health office,” where they had “plumped themselves down,” read one caption. Another, nationally syndicated story likened the strike to those recently launched by grade school children, duck pond employees, golf caddies, and even, supposedly, dogs. The El Paso Herald-Post opined, “If the mammies will just do their sitting down in rocking chairs it will be a swell break for seven pickaninnies.”

The Life photo suggests that the strikers were well aware of the politics of respectability they faced. As women engaged in an occupation involving breasts, providing fodder for titillating innuendo, in a white-dominated world in which Black women were routinely stereotyped as prostitutes and “mammies,” they deflected those images with their own chosen self-presentation. They sat down in that office on Monday morning in coats, hats, sensible dark shoes with square one-inch heels, every hair tucked in place, and held their gloves neatly in their hands on their laps. They presented themselves formally, not as women about to expose their breasts.

In the photo, they are all looking at one another, not at the camera, all laughing and smiling. The photo makes clear an enormous and glorious source of the strikers’ power: not just their ability to withhold their milk, but the strength they drew from one another. They were young, they were full of life, they were daring, and they were, apparently, having a great time.

From the names and addresses they gave to reporters, we know all the strikers described themselves as “Mrs.” and lived on the South Side. Their ages ranged from 16 to 22. Two had one child, two had four; we don’t know about the others. They or their families likely all came from the vast exodus known as the Great Migration, in which six million Black people fled lynchings and racial terror in the South beginning in the 1910s and poured into northern cities. Once in Chicago, whites forced them, often violently, to live in a narrow, crumbling, overpriced strip of the city on the South Side known as Bronzeville.

At the time of the strike, deep in the Great Depression, more than half of Black women in Chicago were unemployed. The vast majority could find work only in domestic service, although most no longer had to live at their workplaces. Others found grueling, poorly paid jobs in commercial laundries, garment factories, or packinghouses; cleaning hotels; or in the informal economy as sex workers or numbers runners. Selling their breast milk was just one terrible option among the few available to Black women desperately trying to keep their children from starving.

But for all its oppressions, the South Side also offered power to Black women. “Within Bronzeville Negroes are at home,” wrote the pioneering Black sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake in 1945. “They find rest from white folks as well as from labor, and they make the most of it." Black women dressed up fine, stepped out to music, and danced all night — usually in their homes, because it was cheaper. They sustained hundreds of churches, both enormous established congregations and new evangelical storefronts, many of which were run by women. They promenaded, swam, and boated in Washington Park. During the 1930s, the park and the streets of the South Side overflowed with speakers and agitators ranging from Black nationalists like the African Legion, Black Cross, the Nation of Islam, and former followers of Marcus Garvey to more staid, middle-class organizations like the NAACP and National Urban League and militant Communists both Black and white. At the center lay the Black-owned Chicago Defender, with a circulation of over 100,000.

In September 1935, two years before the wet nurses’ strike, African American heavyweight boxer Joe Louis beat Max Baer, a white former world champion. Richard Wright described how the streets of Chicago were “jammed with no less than twenty-five thousand Negroes, joy-mad and moving to they didn’t know where …. From the symbol of Joe’s strength they took strength, and in that moment, all obstacles were wiped out.”

Had any of the strikers been among that crowd? One reporter “asked if they acted under instructions of Mr. John Lewis,” the son of a Welsh immigrant who was head of the United Mine Workers and the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) and the driving force behind the union upsurge of the 1930s. But “they had never heard of the labor organizer. ‘You all must mean Joe Louis,’ cried one colored girl, who was an admirer of the Negro boxer.” They took power from Louis, rather than Lewis.

Yet the wet nurses were part of and drew inspiration and strength from a surging wave of successful multiracial labor activism in Chicago at the time, which John L. Lewis was helping make possible. Black, white, and Mexican workers, male and female, in the enormous packinghouse and steel plants were joining unions by the tens of thousands and would soon gain impressive contracts. In April 1937 well over 4,000 Black, and a few Filipino and Chinese, members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph, would wrest an unprecedented contract from the Pullman Company.

Black women activists in the more conservative, usually racist American Federation of Labor (AFL) as well as the more progressive upstart CIO also organized unions and strikes involving women garment workers, laundry workers, and waitresses in Chicago. At the YWCA branch on the South Side, Thelma McWorter (later Wheaton) ran labor education programs for Black women. “We tried to teach the women to learn to speak up,” she recalled in an interview with the historian Beth Tompkins Bates. Her student Katheryn Williams visited women in their homes to talk about unionizing. Another student, Neva Ryan, a former schoolteacher, reached out to domestic workers in the South Side’s Washington Park. When workers, mostly Black women, occupied a can manufacturing plant in the spring of 1937 and police surrounded the factory, union organizer and Communist activist Eleanor Rye “undaunted, slipped through the police lines, scaled a 15-foot fence, got inside the plant, and signed up everybody,” reported prominent Black journalist George Schuyler.

A huge, daring wave of sit-down strikes exploded throughout the upper Midwest in the weeks before the wet nurses chose to sit down. Most spectacularly, newly unionized auto workers at General Motors, the biggest automaker in the world, won union recognition, increased wages, and improved working conditions after a weeks-long occupation of multiple plants in Flint, Mich. That huge victory inspired hundreds of other sit-downs, which became national news. On Feb. 27, more than 100 young white women occupied a Woolworth’s store for a week and won all their demands. The week before the wet nurses’ strike, Chicago restaurant workers, bookbinders, candy factory workers, typographers, and pin setters at a bowling alley, among others, staged sit-down strikes in groups ranging from a handful to hundreds of workers. They almost always won their demands at least in part. Most were evidently white, but the same morning the wet nurses struck, nearly 300 mostly Black women launched an occupation of the Nellie Ann Dress Company factory to demand that their wages be doubled.

The striking wet nurses had no apparent union affiliation, though, which meant they had no access to the resources of solidarity that the CIO or AFL would have offered, nor known links to the NAACP, Urban League, Communist Party, or other allies. They were actually government employees, a category of worker almost entirely untouched by the labor movement of the 1930s. Moreover, government work — like agricultural and domestic labor, where 80 percent of all Black women worked — was excluded from the New Deal’s workplace protections, including the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security pensions, federal unemployment insurance, and the federal minimum wage.

How did the wet nurses’ strike end? We have another photograph of them, presumably taken on the second day of the strike. The same women are seated, but now they’re looking at the camera, not at one another. Their expressions are flat, wary, unsmiling. One of them, sitting up the straightest, has a look of vigilant distrust, her eyes challenging the photographer. What might have just been said to them? What had they been through in the previous 24 hours?

Dr. Bundesen or the city government could have called in the police at any moment, and the strikers would have known that. For all the successful gains of sit-down strikes in Chicago and beyond, in many cases employers were quick to call in force, whether city police or private thugs. On that same Tuesday, 40 police officers brutally broke up a sit-down strike by 100 male and female maintenance workers at a Brooklyn hospital. As Black women, the wet nurses would have been far more likely to be subjected to police brutality than the white men and women who staged other occupations.

The evidence doesn’t tell us when or how the wet nurses ended their strike. As nursing mothers, they needed to be with their own babies, after all. Life reported two weeks later, on April 5, “The nurses finally settled for 4c” — which is what they were already making — without indicating when the strike ended. One article reported that on the first morning, Bundesen “sent word out to the strikers that he would meet with them for collective bargaining,” indicating that they at least forced him to acknowledge their collective power. We are left imagining what happened next. Bundesen must not have called the cops or it would have made it into the papers. Were the strikers fired soon afterward? Did they face retaliation? Or, rather, did they get more respect?

Today, the strikers offer us a powerful example of daring and creative militance. Those seven women were refusing to be quiet, refusing to starve, refusing to accept racial disparities in pay. When they placed their bodies and their labors front and center at City Hall with such sisterly dignity and demanded that their work be respected, they refused the invisibility attached to domestic and reproductive labor, whether in nursing babies, cooking dinner, cleaning the toilet, nurturing kids, or lovingly tending to elders — labor so often erased or boxed off into some female zone, yet grueling in its daily physical and emotional toll, waged or unwaged. The strikers, gazing back at the camera, challenge us to imagine a labor movement that lifts up all workers, all work, and places women of color at its center, as we find our own chairs, our own six friends, and our own joy in struggle.

Excerpted from What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times by Dana Frank (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.