Margaret Haley

(1861 - 1935)

The daughter of a labor activist, Margaret Haley began teaching in country schools at the age of sixteen. In her early twenties she moved to Chicago and taught in the city’s meatpacking district until 1900, when she began working full-time for the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. At a 1901 meeting of the National Education Association, a male organizer dismissed Haley’s calls for gender equity in labor movements as hysterical. “I think this audience,” she retorted, “will hope with me that such hysteria will become contagious.”