 Born in La Madeleine, Nord as the seventh of nine children in a family of workers, Jeannette Vermeersch joined the workforce at the age of ten, despite the fact that at the time, children under the age of 13 were legally prohibited from working.Her first job was as a servant at a wine merchant's, then in a bourgeois family, before she entered a textile factory as a worker in 1921, all the while continuing to do chores after her hours of work at the factory.Vermeersch began activity as a union activist in 1927.