The women of Richmond, VA understood something fundamental about affordability more than 160 years ago -- a living wage is essential to survival.
Labor Day is often associated with the modern American workplace—paychecks, unions, working conditions, the eight-hour workday and workers' rights. But the struggle for economic dignity has a much longer history. Before women had the right to vote, before modern labor laws and before the language of equal pay became part of the national conversation, working women in Richmond, Virginia, took to the streets because their labor was no longer enough to feed their families.
It was April 1863, during the Civil War. Richmond was the Confederate capital, and the war had transformed the city into a major center of military manufacturing. Women were working in Confederate government offices, factories and the Confederate ordnance laboratory, making ammunition and other supplies needed for the war. Many had entered the workforce because husbands, fathers and sons were away fighting. Some women were earning wages of roughly $1 or $2 a day for dangerous industrial work. The National Park Service notes that women and girls performed dangerous munitions work in Richmond, including at the Confederate Laboratory on Brown's Island.
But there was a problem:
Their wages weren't keeping up with the price of food. At that time SNAP or a form of government assistance for food did not exist.
Richmond was experiencing extraordinary inflation. The cost of basic necessities had soared, while transportation disruptions, food shortages, speculation and wartime conditions made life increasingly difficult for working-class families. Encyclopedia Virginia notes that prices in Richmond had risen roughly 700 percent from 1861 to 1863, while wages failed to keep pace.
So the women organized to bring attention to their struggles.
On April 1, a group of women including workers in Confederate ordnance facilities and wives of Tredegar Iron Works laborers met at Belvidere Hill Baptist Church. They decided to go to Capitol Square the next day and ask Governor John Letcher to address their desperate economic circumstances.
They were not simply asking for charity. They were saying their labor should be enough to keep their families alive.
When their attempt to get the governor's attention failed, hundreds of women marched into Richmond's business district. The women raided stores and warehouses, taking food and other necessities. Authorities eventually deployed troops and threatened to use force. More than 60 people were arrested and prosecuted. The reportedly took food and the bear necessities like flower that make food. The protest became the event now known as the Richmond Bread Riot.
The women were not simply passive victims of the war. They were workers contributing to their homes and society. With the war causing food shortages and prices to increase, they needed help. Many of them were single, having lost their husbands in the war by death or distance.
Just weeks before the Bread Riot, on March 13, 1863, an explosion at the Brown's Island laboratory killed more than 40 workers, most of them women and girls. Some were as young as nine.
In Richmond in 1863, working women demonstrated what happens when people work but their labor still cannot provide the necessities of life.
Their protest also exposed a class divide. Wealthier Richmond families had greater resources to withstand wartime shortages, while working-class families were being crushed by inflation. The women who protested were subsequently portrayed by some Confederate newspapers as criminals and social undesirables rather than workers responding to extraordinary economic hardship.
The Richmond Bread Riot was not a modern labor strike. It was a desperate wartime uprising over food, wages, inflation and survival.
But it belongs in the broader history of American workers demanding to be heard.
Ironically, these women had freedom their freedom, unlike slaves who worked for no wages. But slaves could at least get meals while working on plantations. White women were being treated like second class citizens by being neglected as they demanded enough pay to afford food. The preservation of slavery was at the center of the war time economy.