Oral history interview with Christine and Dave Galliher, August 8, 1979
Subtitle: interview H-0314, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Contributors: Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, interviewer; Galliher, Dave, 1908-1982, interviewee; Southern Oral History Program; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library
Edition: Electronic ed.
Publisher: University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
Published: 2006
Place of publication: [Chapel Hill, N.C.]
Language: eng
Subjects: Interviews; Textile workers; Women textile workers; Strikes and lockouts; Textile industry; Labor unions; Organizing; Depressions; Social life and customs; Government ownership; Working mothers; Southern Summer School for Workers in Industry (U.S.)
Other titles: Interview H-0314, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007); Interview with Christine and Dave Galliher, August 8, 1979; Oral histories of the American South.
Description: 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.
Notes: Title from menu page (viewed on Feb. 29, 2008).

Interview participants: Christine Galliher, interviewee; Dave Galliher, interviewee; Jacquelyn Hall, interviewer.

Duration: 01:29:09.

This electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digital library, Documenting the American South.  It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.

Text encoded by Mike Millner.  Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers.

Text (HTML and XML/TEI source file) and audio (MP3); 2 files: ca. 119 kilobytes, 198.3 megabytes.

Original version: Southern Oral History Program Collection, (#4007), Series H, Piedmont industrialization, 1974-1980, interview H-0314, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Transcribed by Jean Houston. Original transcript: 44 p.

Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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