Oral history interview with Christine and Dave Galliher, August 8, 1979

Christine Galliher was born in 1912 in Elizabethton, Tennessee. Christine met and married Dave Galliher (born 1908) in 1927. Though the Gallihers are interviewed together, the focus is on Christine's memories of life and work in Elizabethton. The same year she was married (at the age of 15), Christine Galliher went to work in the textile mills in Elizabethton, first as a winder in the Bermberg plant and later as an inspector in the Glanzstoff plant (later called North American). In 1929, Galliher was an organizer of and participant in a walk-out strike at the Glanzstoff plant when management refused to raise the workers' wages. Recalling her role in the strike, Galliher describes working conditions in the textile mills, the developing role of organized labor, and her participation in the Southern Summer School for women workers that summer. Both she and her husband were subsequently "blackballed" from the textile industry in Elizabethton. Her husband went to work with the city and in construction work during the 1930s; Christine, meanwhile, did not work again until 1935, remaining at home to care for her new child and struggling to make ends meet during the Great Depression. In 1935, she returned to the Glantzstoff textile plant, where she worked as a winder until 1946. The latter portion of the interview focuses on issues of balancing work and family, changes in working conditions and attitudes in the 1930s, and family history.