Andria Zaia, curator of the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, points to one of the giant looms in the museum’s Silk and Textiles Gallery. She holds a large wooden shuttle in her hand. “This is heavy, about 30 pounds,” she says. “If it flies off the loom, it can be dangerous, but one woman, Margaret Knight, a silk worker, after an accident, invented a guard to keep the shuttles in place. “She was one of thousands of women, skilled and unskilled, who worked in the silk mills,” Zaia said. They were largely from immigrant families. In fact, women from more than 40 nations took part in a 1912 textile strike. Among their leaders was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who became a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The women worked six days a week, nine or 10 hours. Their work was not valued,” said Zaia, who also teaches anthropology at Northampton Community College. Women typically trailed men in wages with adult males earning about $485 a year and females $345 in the late 1880s. “But they prompted organizations for protecting workers,” Zaia said. “Women in the Lehigh Valley had always sought better circumstances. “Even as early as the late 1700s, there was an interest in silk here and we started to see groups of women standing up for their rights,” Zaia noted. “They have made large strides for industry as a whole.” Zaia said, “From 1915 to 1925, more women were making silk products than men making steel,” a surprising footnote to remember this Women’s History Month. The gallery, one of only three permanent exhibits at the museum, pays homage to the textile workers and explores the era of silk manufacturing in the Lehigh Valley. The era stretched from the 1880s until the 1950s, when mills closed or switched to synthetic fabrics. While a few men were employed for the heavier chores, most of the workers were women and girls and, in the days of child labor, even small children. As America entered the Gilded Age, the middle class, following the lead of tycoons, demanded silk, according to historians. The silk industry was originally situated in Paterson, N.J., but new machines were changing the way silk was spun, knitted and woven. When manufacturers needed to build larger mills they settled in the Lehigh Valley, which offered plenty of water, transportation, power and cheap non-unionized labor. The first silk mill opened in 1881. In 1928, the peak year, there were 106 mills mostly making silk suitable for dress-making and ribbons. As late as the 1950s the Lehigh Valley was the No. 1 producer of silk in the world. Interestingly enough, the workforce included young girls who left when they married and often returned after their families had grown and stayed on into their 70s. Still, their wages were only enough to supplement family income. The exhibit includes a warp loom and a jacquard loom, along with oral accounts from workers and some hands-on items such as a bobbin tray, often carried by young boys. “We recently had a visitor here who said he had been “a bobbin boy,” Zaia said. Cards fed into an early computer-like device on top of the jacquard loom determined patterns in the fabric. Just seeing the jumble of threads proves operating this loom was not an unskilled job. The loom, donated by the Scalamandre textile factory in New York, was used to create fabric for White House restoration projects from the terms of Presidents Hoover through Clinton, including an order from Jackie Kennedy, Zaia pointed out. A rack of large spools contains silk threads in glowing colors and a machine turns the silk threads into large skeins. The exhibit includes some silk lingerie made by the R. K. Laros Silk Mill, which operated for four decades. The museum, founded in 2016, was the first affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. It’s situated in the former Bethlehem Steel electric repair shop at SteelStacks in Bethlehem. Visit nmih.org.

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