Camella teoli way lawrence, ma

What did camella teoli do
Camella Teoli was the daughter of an Italian immigrant.
Camella Teoli's life changed forever in a split second.

•

Teoli, Camella

Excerpt from U.S. Congressional Hearings, March 2–7, 1912

Reproduced in Joyce Kornbluh'sRebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology,published in 1964

When Camella Teoli was in the seventh grade, she did not go to school. She went to work in a factory.

Children had been employed in textile factories ever since textile factories were first built in Britain during the last part of the 1700s. Children made ideal workers: they did not complain about low wages or long hours, they did not argue with overseers, and they were small and nimble—their tiny hands were ideal for operating textile machines.

As with adult workers, children were sometimes injured on the job. Sometimes their injuries resulted in death; other times, they were maimed or crippled for life. In both Britain and the United States, these incidents eventually led to laws barring very young children from working in factories. Most factory owners resisted such laws because it was highly profitable to employ children, who were paid less than adults were.

Child labor laws did not always stop factory o

•

Carmela Teoli

Italian-American labor activist

Carmela Teoli (1897–c. 1970) was an Italian-American mill worker whose testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1912 called national attention to unsafe working conditions in the mills and helped bring a successful end to the "Bread and Roses" strike. Teoli had been scalped by a cotton-twisting machine at the age of 13, requiring several months of hospitalization.

Decades later, a reporter named Paul Cowan revived Teoli's long-forgotten story, generating renewed interest in the history of the strike and prompting discussions on the nature of historical memory.

Biography

Carmela Teoli (also known as Camella Teoli) was born in Rocca d'Evandro, Italy on July 2, 1897[1] and grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In ''A Place at the Table: Struggles for Equality in America'' by Maria Fleming, Oxford University Press in association with Southern Poverty Law Center (2001), we can read: ''Most of the workers, including Carmela Teoli and her father, were recent immigrants from Europe'' [2]. Carmela had one sister and th

•

Camella Teoli Testifies about the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike

When 30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912, they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March 1912. Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in 1912—in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.

CHAIRMAN. Camella, how old are you?

Miss TEOLI. Fourteen years and eight months.

CHAIRMAN. Fourteen years and eight months?

Miss TEOLI. Yes.

CHAIRMAN. How many children are there in your family?

Miss TEOLI. Five.

CHAIRMAN. Where do you work?

Miss TEOLI. In th