Ellen "Nellie" Dawson Kanki, best known as Ellen Dawson, was a Scottish-American political activist and trade union organizer in the textile industry.
10 Facts About Ellen Dawson
1.
2.
An activist in the Communist Party USA during the 1920s, Ellen Dawson was the first woman elected to a leadership position in an American textile union.
3.
Ellen Dawson was born on December 14,1900, in Barrhead, a small industrial town of about 9,000 residents on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland.
4.
Ellen Dawson was the fifth of at least 10 children born to Annie Halford Dawson and Patrick Dawson, a poor working class couple.
5.
At the time of her birth, Ellen Dawson's father worked as an iron foundry worker at Shanks' Tubal Works - a manufacturer of toilets and other bathroom products - in Barrhead.
6.
Ellen Dawson's mother was a former power loom weaver in a textile mill.
7.
Ellen Dawson started work in 1914, probably working in a textile mill as had her mother before her.
8.
Late in 1919, the Dawson family including Ellen, left the Clyde area in search of employment, heading south to Lancashire, England.
9.
Ellen Dawson found work as a spinner and a weaver in local textile mills, remaining in this capacity until April, 1921.
10.
Soon joined by other family members, the Ellen Dawson family settled in the mill town of Passaic, New Jersey, making a home in a working-class neighborhood composed largely of European emigrants, a few blocks from the Botany Worsted Mills.