Digital Extra

 Elizabeth Nord (1902-1986)
Activist mixed passion, diplomacy

  By LYNN ARDITI
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Elizabeth Nord was getting off the second shift at a mill in Central Falls one night when she came upon a scene that would forever stick in her mind.

A man was standing in the rain and wind, handing out leaflets to workers.

"I thought, he means it - you've got to mean it to be standing out in this kind of weather," Nord recalled during a 1975 interview. "I didn't realize then that years later I'd be doing the same thing myself."

The year was 1928. The man standing in the rain was Horace Revere, vice president of the United Textile Workers Union of America.

And Nord, a 26-year-old weaver who had spent the better part of her young life toiling behind silk looms in the Blackstone Valley mills, was feeling the first stirring of social activism.

That year, Nord signed up to join the union.

By 1934, when textile workers across the country were embroiled in one of the biggest strikes in labor history, Nord helped organize workers in the Blackstone Valley.

After the strike, Nord became a full-time union organizer, delivering rousing speeches at union halls and traveling around the country.

Nord's identification with workers' causes had deep roots. Her father was a coal miner and her mother a weaver in Lancashire, England, where she was born in 1902. The family lived through several strikes before moving to Pawtucket when Elizabeth was 10. She got her first job when she was 14 at the Royal Weaving Co. in Pawtucket, attending high school classes at night.

Back then, it was almost unheard of for women to choose careers over marriage and rearing families. But Nord did just that. She dedicated her life to helping improve working conditions, wages and education for textile laborers and monitoring child labor laws, first as an organizer and later as vice president for the Textile Workers Union of America.

Organizing in the South, Nord told friends, she had to meet with workers in the cornfields to hide from the company police.

Nord's unique mix of social refinement and fiery determination won her the respect of men and women alike. A petite woman with blond hair swept back from her face and impeccable nails - the tips always colored white and polished - she was equally at ease in the all-male union boardrooms and on the factory floor.

"I learned that if a man thinks you're sincere and knows what you're talking about, there's never any problem," Nord once told a reporter. "Of course, as a woman, you can't shout or pound the table. But you find the calm approach is just as effective."

In the later part of her career, Nord was an assistant director of the state Department of Labor and was a member of the Rhode Island Department of Employment Security's Board of Review, before resigning at the age of 74.

Nord never married, living with her father, Richard Nord, until he died in 1972.

Her cremated remains are buried on top of his grave in the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls. It is a fitting spot: The cemetery is where hundreds of mill workers rioted during the big 1934 textile strike.

Nord's name is carved in a simple granite headstone she shares with her father on a hill overlooking the mills on the banks of the Blackstone River.

Sources: Mill Life Oral History Collection, Special Collections, University of Rhode Island; The Great Textile Strike of 1934, by James F. Findlay; interviews with Ethel M. Flynn, Nord's former secretary in the union, and Mary Beaulieu, a friend and former employee of Nord's at the Department of Employment Security.

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