Helen Armstrong, Hello Girls and Hellions

Helen Armstrong, Hello Girls and Hellions Giovanna Riccio (bio) Set that red-gilded spring in stone,raise a monument born out of the post-war rumblewhen Winnipeg's promised spring of cherry blossomsand 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 bigwigsgutting 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 colonelsconscripting the hoi polloi for capital's war chest--stumping, now, for one-legged heroes gimpedin shell-shocked breadlines, for the withered motherwilling her wing-torn child to fly. Right the "Famous Ten"to a truth-telling eleven—admit that rabble rousing Bolshevikicrimsoned for capsizing the unseeing lady's crooked scales. [End Page 13] Helming the Women's Labour League, Helen preached union;as the Labour Temple's ever agitating angel, she incitedthe Bread and Cake Girls to organize and match,blow for blow, the masters' union clout guisedin the stock exchange, banks, and bootlicker Ministry of Justice,so bread, pastry and candy-makers could cook upa sweeter deal from the manna-hoarding Canada Bread Co.,and a year before that 1919 shutdown, Helen wrangledwith politicos over women's minimum wage, wangledvictory for Manitoba femmes, sparking the second sexto school themselves in the licit poetry of equality.The only female delegate to the Trades and Labour Councilshe claimed tlc for iron workers chained to long shifts and short-shriftfor bone-chilled vets rattling a St. Vitus dance on park benchesand raw-boned women nailed to the night. ________ A soap box pugilist, Helen punched above her weightboxed the ears of boom-town tycoons feeding on rickety slums.Aching for equal distribution of sun, rain and air,she ploughed a good earth sprouting loavespurged of Crescentwood weevils in pinstripessipping estate wine behind filigreed windows and fretwork iron gates,their hardboiled tickers bolted against sharing the doughwith bricklayers and welders sick of seeing each day end in the red.And 'round May Day, building and metal workers hit the bricks,looking to hammer out a living wage instead of buyingthreadbare clichés about the high cost of doing business,but high-life moguls dicker, offer stale fare or day-old rhetoric. If there's clout in dollars, there's moxie in numbers,avers the Central Committee; coining One Big unionas more than a pipedream, they rally a general strike [End Page 14] First to hearken, the Hello Girls, took the Mayday call—five-hundred smooth-talking switchboard operatorsbound business, bluster and number please classto silence the company's yessir, no sir mic;all heart, they warmed to a sympathy strike--sunderedthe power cord, unplugged the boss's reach,beguiled the mid-May morn with Liberty leading the people—grace and guts rewiring doublespeak, diverting speech. And lickey-split, they spurred a blushing tideof strikelets quitting sweat shops, restaurants, hotels and offices,for shirt makers, cleaners, candy-makers, clerkshad cause to quarrel the gender short-change,had reason to turf Big Daddy's life sentence of daughter,wife and mother condemned to pussyfoot and soft-shoe,shackled to manly moolah, playing second-fiddleto the bogus family wage. And because women ken the gravity of daily breadHelen and entourage whip up the Labour Café --notthe usual women cook and men eat, food kitchen,No—but one dishing out even-handed victualsso no girl need want (and no boy either). And when double-crossing society ladies,bored bourgeois daughters, or single mothers luredby salary hikes spurned the picket line, vexed sistersturned to head-on hellions; stoning retail turncoatsskulking in busses, chasing down backstabber drivers,ditching their lorries and mangling shifty merchandise,they took up the torch of intrepid petroleusesscaring the pants off saboteurs and copsdispatched to quell virago fire. Labelled Bolsheviks, anarchists, aliens,jailed, maligned, gagged and loved—the women of 1919, lurklike footnotes...

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