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mswyrr“It’s Up to Us to Save Ourselves”: What Wisconsin is Teaching Us
By Jill Jacobs
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the director of Ma’aseh: The Center for Jewish Social Justice Education and the author of There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice Through Jewish Law and Tradition and the forthcoming Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On Guide to Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community.
Almost exactly a century ago, on March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory went up in flames, killing 146 people, mostly immigrant women workers. The management had locked exit doors and stairwells to prevent workers from leaving early. As a result, workers trying to escape the fire were forced to jump from as high as the tenth floor, or simply to wait and smolder to death.
( full article )
The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience
Amy Goodman: The current financial crisis is widely described as the nation’s worst since the Great Depression. With the comparisons to the 1930s has come a renewed focus on the New Deal, the government initiative of social programs and public service jobs launched by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A new book argues that no voice in the FDR administration was more influential in shaping the New Deal than Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the first-ever woman cabinet member in the United States. The book is called The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. We speak with author Kirstin Downey.
video @ Democracy Now!
( full transcript )
Clara Lemlich
by Annelise Orleck
Clara Lemlich has made cameo appearances in histories of the United States, the labor movement, and American Jewry as the young firebrand whose impassioned Yiddish speech set off the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, the largest strike by women workers in the United States to that time. She has even appeared in that context in the hit Broadway play and movie I’m Not Rappaport. But Clara Lemlich’s career as a revolutionary and activist began well before that famous speech and extended for more than half a century afterward. The most famous of the farbrente Yidishe meydlekh [fiery Jewish girls] whose militancy helped to galvanize the labor movement, she was also a suffragist, communist, community organizer, and peace activist. Clara Lemlich Shavelson lived and breathed politics from her childhood in revolutionary Russia to her last years in a nursing home in California—where she organized the orderlies.
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Rose Schneiderman
by Annelise Orleck
"This [Triangle fire] is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap, and property is so sacred! [...] I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood as been spilled. I know from experience ti is up to the working people to save themselves, And the only way is through a strong working-class movement."--Rose Schneiderman
( full article )
It's Women's History Month, people! :D YEAH. Unfortunately Finals Week is upon me, so I can't blitz y'all with a bunch of posts about awesome historical women. But I thought I'd put together one about women in US labor history since labor is such an important political issue right now. It's a cliche that we look to the past so we don't have to repeat it, but I think a lot of us would be privileged to repeat the kind of history these three women made. I remember learning about Lemlich in one of my classes. I swear to you, when I heard the story about her as an eighty-something year old woman, still pushing for the rights of working people, tears came to my eyes. All of these women are amazing and inspiring and I hope that knowing about them encourages all of you.
You can watch a recent PBS documentary about the Triangle fire which so deeply shaped their lives online here if you're in the US. Alternately, you can read a transcript of it here. The online Jewish Women's Archive has some excellent sources on it here. And David Von Drehle's book Triangle: the Fire that Changed America is also highly recommended. It's very readable as well as being excellent women's history and labor history. It's the kind of thing that gives you a peek into how positive change can come about. Von Drehle is owed a great debt for having done the historical work of preserving the story of the fire and these women, which had been largely forgotten. Feminist male allies FTW! :D
Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that cutting funding for PBS is being discussed in the current US budget debates. I imagine it would make it much easier for Republicans and their big business owners to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate the American people out of their rights if documentaries like Triangle Fire aren't around to remind them of how hard working people had to fight for humane conditions. And that women are more than wombs that need to be controlled and condescended to and dehumanized by regressive anti-choice policies.
eta: Rose Schneiderman's words inspired a male ally to write the poem Bread and Roses in 1911. It was later adapted into a song which was popular in the '60s. My favorite version is the haunting one Judy Collins did, which you can listen to here. It was on YouTube, but unfortunately it's been removed. :-/
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.
