Helen Armstrong, Hello Girls and Hellions

• Published in: Labour (Halifax) 2019-10, Vol.2019 (84), p.13
• Main Author: Riccio, Giovanna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Girls; Poetry; Wages & salaries; Women
• ISSN: 0700-3862; 1911-4842

Set that red-gilded spring in stone, raise a monument born out of the post-war rumble when Winnipeg's promised spring of cherry blossoms and fair play faded to a fool's paradise; instead, a Red Scare rifled the breeze, Liberty on-the-run, blood-smeared, barred, for calling-out cabinet minsters flying cover for bigwigs gutting worker's wallets, giving Justice the cold shoulder Carve, from a phantom rose of the Luxemburg variety, Helen Armstrong, vanished from history but true, wielding a sabre tongue that lacerated colonels conscripting the hoi polloi for capital's war chest-- stumping, now, for one-legged heroes gimped in shell-shocked breadlines, for the withered mother willing her wing-torn child to fly. Helming the Women's Labour League, Helen preached union; as the Labour Temple's ever agitating angel, she incited the Bread and Cake Girls to organize and match, blow for blow, the masters' union clout guised in the stock exchange, banks, and bootlicker Ministry of Justice, so bread, pastry and candy-makers could cook up a sweeter deal from the manna-hoarding Canada Bread Co., and a year before that 1919 shutdown, Helen wrangled with politicos over women's minimum wage, wangled victory for Manitoba femmes, sparking the second sex to school themselves in the licit poetry of equality. If there's clout in dollars, there's moxie in numbers, avers the Central Committee; coining One Big union as more than a pipedream, they rally a general strike First to hearken, the Hello Girls, took the Mayday call— five-hundred smooth-talking switchboard operators bound business, bluster and number please class to silence the company's yessir, no sir mic; all heart, they warmed to a sympathy strike--sundered the power cord, unplugged the boss's reach, beguiled the mid-May morn with Liberty leading the people— grace and guts rewiring doublespeak, diverting speech.