Julia Salter Earle (1878-1945)
5. Continue up the left side of Military Road to #63, the site of union leader Julia Salter Earle's home.
Julia Salter Earle was outstanding among the women of her time for her advocacy to improve the lot of the working classes. She was labour leader and social activist, a full-time worker, a married woman, and mother to six children. Her employment as an engrossing clerk - preparing in script form every law going through the Newfoundland House of Assembly - provided a solid knowledge of laws that she used in her activist work.
Earle provided much of the impetus for the founding of the Ladies Branch of the Newfoundland Industrial Workers Association in 1918 and served as its President. The association represented women workers in clothing, cordage and shoe factories as they sought better wages and working conditions.
In 1921, she co-led a march of about 500 unemployed men through the streets of St. John's to the Colonial Building, presenting a petition seeking government relief for the unemployed. She campaigned for workers as "The Friend of the Working Classes" in her many letters to newspaper editors.
Although not a member of the suffrage movement in Newfoundland, Julia appears to have had strong feminist convictions. She ran in 1925 and 1940 for St. John's City Council as a Labour candidate. Although she came close in 1925, losing by only eleven votes, she was unsuccessful in both attempts. Never one to limit her activism, Earle carried her interests into activities with Cochrane Street Methodist Church and the Old Colony Club, the former Ladies Reading Room, which spawned so many activist women during the suffrage struggle.
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