Women's History Month: The Triangle Fire and Three Heroic Women You Should Know

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“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.

At a gathering in the Metropolitan Opera House a few days after the fire, labor organizer Rose Schneiderman rallied the crowd with the following words:

"Every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us... I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves."

Schneiderman understood that more was at stake in the days following the catastrophe than fire safety regulations. Instead, she argued that only a strong union movement would guarantee workers a safe and dignified workplace in the long run.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is most often remembered as galvanizing the passage of a series of crucial laws regarding workplace health and safety. But the episode also points to the necessity of a strong union movement and the dangers of doing without a union.

For two years preceding the fire, shirtwaist workers, led by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), had been organizing for better wages and working conditions. The group had tried, unsuccessfully, to penetrate the Triangle factory. Who knows whether the disaster might have been averted if the workers there had been able to bargain collectively for safer conditions. Following the disaster, it was the ILGWU that led the charge to implement stronger safety legislation.

Now, 100 years later, public workers in Wisconsin and around the country are standing up to the largest-scale attack on American workers in recent history. Using the economic crisis as a pretext, and with financing from billionaire businessmen, Governor Scott Walker and others are trying to strip public unions of their collective bargaining power.

This debate is not about trying to balance state budgets. This debate is about the future of American labor.

Contrary to what current rhetoric might have us believe, union pension funds are not bankrupting state governments. Pensions cost, on average, less than four percent of state budgets. As long as the economy remained stable, pension investments grew steadily, and states were able to make good on their commitment. When the economy crashed, these investments—like all others—lost money. When the economy rises again, these investments will rise as well. Pensions did not cause the economic collapse—they are merely a victim of that collapse, like so many of our personal retirement and savings funds.

As for those overpaid, underworked public workers. Research actually shows that public workers are slightly better educated, and work more hours than private sector workers. The salaries of these workers are somewhat less than the salaries of similarly-educated workers in the private sector. Many of these public servants accept a salary cut in order to teach our children, keep our streets safe, and maintain public services.

If Governor Walker succeeds in his attempt to destroy public unions in Wisconsin—and if other states follow suit—we can expect to see the salaries of public workers drop precipitously. We can expect talented teachers, government employees, and police officers leave the field for better-paying jobs in the private sector. We can expect a wholesale disregard for health and safety precautions. We can expect tax dollars to pay top rate for emergency care for public workers who lack health insurance, and therefore go without preventative care. We can expect retiring public workers to end up dependent on public and private financial support.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the early twentieth century, described unions as follows:

"Within the workers’ organization, which is formed for the purpose of guarding and protecting the work conditions, there is an aspect of righteousness and uprightness and tikkun olam... For the unorganized worker works under worse conditions—both in regard to wages and in regard to working hours, etc. And this is likely to make working conditions worse in general."

In invoking the category of tikkun olam, Kook refers not to the modern use of this phrase to mean “social justice,” but rather to the ancient rabbinic understanding of this term. The Talmud applies this phrase to situations in which a legal loophole must be closed in order to maintain the proper functioning of society. For example, tikkun olam justifies forbidding certain divorce practices that may leave a woman unsure whether she is single or married. Hillel invokes this phrase to make change to lending law for the purpose of maintaining a stable economic system.

In applying the term tikkun olam to the labor movement, Kook teaches us that unions are the most effective means of guaranteeing a labor system that works. Unions (like any other institution) may not be perfect. There may be some situations in which non-union workers earn decent salaries and enjoy good working conditions. But, in general, unions are the best way for workers maintain the power to protect themselves from the whims of their employers.

In a New York Times article about the Wisconsin debate, an occupational therapist (whose family income had dropped by about a third since the beginning of the economic collapse) expressed her opposition to unions by saying, “I don’t get to bargain in my job, either.” This is one of the saddest statements I have seen about the state of American workers. Instead of dreaming of building a union that will help her to raise her salary and restore her lost retirement benefits, this woman has resigned herself to the reality that workers must be powerless.

Governor Walker and his billionaire supporters are on the verge of destroying the labor movement in America. If that happens, workers will lose most negotiating power, wages will fall, and many more of us will lose our health insurance and other benefits. If Rose Schneiderman were here today, she would tell us, “It’s up to us to save ourselves.”

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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!


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. Advocates for a just and sustainable economic recovery hope its legacy can be revived. The New Deal came out of immense public pressure and a White House inner circle that helped turn popular demands into policy.

A new book argues no voice in the FDR administration was more influential in shaping the New Deal than the 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. Author Kirstin Downey joins me now here in Washington, D.C. She was a staff writer for the Washington Post for twenty years and in 2008 shared a Pulitzer Prize for the Post’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance, Kirstin, of Frances Perkins, how—the role she played in laying down the New Deal, the programs she was instrumental in getting passed.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: Well, I think the really interesting thing about Frances Perkins is that she was a rather reluctant cabinet secretary. She was very worried about what her life would be like in Washington, if she were to join FDR here. She had been his industrial commissioner for four years in New York. They were already close friends. In exchange for agreeing to take the job, she gave him pretty much a list of demands of what she would insist on happening if she were to become Secretary of Labor. And they are the things that we consider the New Deal now. They’re forty-hour workweek, workers’ compensation as a national program, unemployment compensation, Social Security, a ban on child labor, and national health insurance.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip of Frances Perkins speaking about the Social Security Act of 1935, known as one of her greatest achievements. In 1960, twenty-five years after its passage, Perkins reflected on how Social Security came about.

FRANCES PERKINS: We were not yet out of the woods of the Great Depression. And, of course, it was the Great Depression, which we must never forget in this country, which was the proximate cause of this movement, which was launched at that time, this movement, to write under the—under the lives of the American people a basis of security, which came to them out of the orderly and substantial and regular contributions to their future and to the future hazards. It would not have been done in that year, I am sure, except for the fact that the Great Depression was still staring us in the face, and we were conscious of it whenever we walked on the streets of Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: Frances Perkins talking in 1960 about the act that had been passed twenty-five years before, in 1935, the Social Security Act. Talk about actually how it happened, I think especially for people involved in social movements, Kirstin Downey, to understand the mechanism of change, how Social Security was passed.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: I think that one of the things that we sort of need to put in context here is that the Great Depression wasn’t the first economic cataclysm that people who were in their fifties and sixties had experienced. It was the fourth. You know, we had a very bad downturn in 1893, a bad one in 1907. Things had been very bad in the early 1920s after the First World War. People saw that part of capitalism was a recurring boom-and-bust cycle.

What they were seeking to do with Social Security was to create a shock absorber system for capitalism that would give people—that would give people a grace period to survive or, if they got to the end of their lives and their investments hadn’t turned out the way they thought, despite a lifetime of working, that there would be a safety net for you. The unemployment insurance and Social Security, in particular, were—came out of that understanding that we will have boom times, we will have bust times. During the boom times, we will prosper, capitalism will recover. But we need a way to help human beings get through if they hit a bust at a time that they can’t deal with it anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: Aren’t we seeing the same struggles today? I mean, you had Hoover, you had the Hoovervilles all over the country. He was saying that the economy was going to be OK. Then you have FDR. He, himself, may not have come up with these plans without that inner circle of people like Henry Wallace and Frances Perkins and the New York social worker Harry Hopkins. But those who were saying you needed the government to help. But the others who were saying, you don’t have the government intervene; that’s socialism.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: There was that feeling and always a concern. But the Great Depression was such a devastating event. I think a lot of people forget how afraid business became during this period. Observers in Europe said that American capitalists lost, completely lost, self-confidence, that the things they had done had, in many cases, led to economic disaster. And so, there was a great sense that new systems needed to be established. And later, once business began to recover somewhat, there was a resistance later to some of the New Deal programs. And in fact, you know, Roosevelt and his allies dropped some of the early things they had done, essentially dropped like the National Industrial Recovery Act. But early on, there was a great awareness that something dramatic had to happen. It’s notable that in the early months of the Roosevelt administration, when he went to the Chamber of Commerce, he received a standing ovation.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week marked the ninety-eighth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which had a huge influence on Frances Perkins. On March 25, 1911, nearly 150 garment workers, mostly women, died after a fire broke out at the Triangle Factory in New York. I wanted to turn to a radio piece I produced in 1986, along with Kathy Dobie, to mark what was then the fire’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

PAULINE PEPE: I worked right near where the fire was. There was cutters there. They were cutting the material. And as soon as they were just going out, it was time to go home. It was 4:00 on Saturday.

AMY GOODMAN: Pauline Pepe is a ninety-four-year-old survivor of the Triangle fire.

PAULINE PEPE: I saw the fire in the tables, where they were all filled with lingerie material, you know. And that come up in a flame. When I saw that, I ran out. I went to the door that was closed. I didn’t know that was closed. I went there, and I found the door closed. I just stood there ’til they opened it. Forty people going down the steps, we all tumbling one right after another. And I saw people throwing themselves from the window. And as soon as we went down, we couldn’t get out, because the bodies were coming down. It was terrible.

KATHY DOBIE: The women that died that late afternoon were young Jewish and Italian immigrants. When the fire broke out, they tried to escape down the stairs but found the doors had been locked. The owners believed that, given the chance, workers would sneak out with stolen material, and union organizers would sneak in.

AMY GOODMAN: Some of the women climbed onto the single fire escape. It collapsed. As onlookers watched, women fell nine stories to the sidewalk below. Inside the factory, the fire spread quickly, and with no exit left to them, the women climbed through the windows and leapt to their death. While some union members walked in the vigil, others took buses to a Brooklyn cemetery, where seven unidentified Triangle victims lie buried. Union members pay their respects and read the stone marker above the women’s graves.

UNION MEMBERS: In sympathy and sorrow, citizens of New York raise this monument over the grave of unidentified women and children, who, with 139 others, perished by fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Washington Place, March 25th, 1911.

AMY GOODMAN: I produced that piece with journalist Kathy Dobie. Well, Frances Perkins happened to be just blocks away when the fire broke out. In 1964, she recalled watching the workers jump to their deaths.

FRANCES PERKINS: Everybody who jumped—and a good many did jump from the ninth and tenth floors—was killed. And the other people who died were all people who were burned or smothered by the smoke in the factory itself.

This made a terrible impression on the people of the state of New York. I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry. Mea culpa, mea culpa. We didn’t want it that way; we hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible —it was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the state of New York to face.

I remember that Al Smith—the action happened on a Saturday. I happened to have been visiting a friend in the park on the other side of the park, and we heard the engines, and we heard the screams and rushed out and rushed over where we could see the trouble was. We could this building from Washington Square, and the people had just begun to jump when we got there. They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, crowding, being crowded by others behind them, and the fire approaching closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer.

Finally, the men were trying to put up—trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net, to catch people if they do jump. And they were trying to get that out, and they couldn’t wait any longer. I mean, they began to jump. This is when the window was too crowded, and they were jumping. They hit the sidewalk. The net broke. It was a terrible distance, and the weight of the bodies was so great at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. And every one of them was killed. Everybody who jumped was killed. And it was a horrifying spectacle.

AMY GOODMAN: The fire helped spur a wave of organizing for unionization and workplace safety regulation. As a New York state official, Frances Perkins was instrumental in reforming the New York labor laws to protect worker safety.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: That’s exactly right.

FRANCES PERKINS: Much of the legislation was enacted into law, oh, within a couple of years, I mean, you know, hearings and so forth and bringing out the supporters and modifying the bill, so that we got—we really got a big draw out of that one episode, which, as I’ve thought of it afterwards, seems in some way to have paid the debt that society owed to those children, those young people, who lost their lives in the Triangle fire. It’s their contribution to the people of New York that we have this really magnificent series of legislative acts to protect and improve the administration of the law regarding the protection of workpeople in the City of—in the state of New York.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Frances Perkins speaking in 1964. Our guest is Kirstin Downey, who has written the book about Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal. Kirstin, the significance of this fire for so much that—labor law that came after this and Frances Perkins’s centrality to it all?

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: Well, I think that’s one of the things that’s really fascinated me, riveted me to the story of Frances Perkins and her life, is I was very taken by the fact that this young woman—she was only thirty years old when she saw the fire—witnessed a terrible spectacle. Now, thousands of people were dying in workplace fires all over the country at that time, but this particular fire is viewed by a lot of New Yorkers, but it’s also viewed by this very dynamic young woman. She decides—it galvanizes her. She says this has to change.

She’s a descendant of Revolutionary War patriots. She has a great sense of moral responsibility for the country being the kind of place that it should be. And she thinks that what’s happening to these factory workers is just wrong.

Teddy Roosevelt selects her to be executive director of the—executive secretary of the Committee on Safety. And I found that in documents at the Library of Congress. Even a lot of Teddy Roosevelt scholars didn’t know that. And she leads the charge. She does it in her characteristic way of making alliances with unlikely partners. You see her, of course, gathering all the idealists together, all the people that she describes as looking in shock and terror, but she also finds ways to reach out to the insurance companies to convince them that fire hazards are something that they should be considering a financial issue. She gets insurance company executives to talk to real estate owners.

And she is instrumental in creating a legislative committee in the state of New York that holds fact-finding hearings all around the state to discuss hazards of all kinds. Out of that comes much legislation and things that have had effects on all of us today: occupancy limitations, fire exits, even removing trash, flammable trash, every night from workplaces. These all came from Frances Perkins’s work in New York at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: Kirstin Downey, let’s go on. As we talk about issues like Social Security, the forty-hour work week, which was a demand of socialists early on, in fact, interestingly, Frances Perkins had a socialist background.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: That’s exactly right. When she was a young woman, she became a socialist, I guess you’d say. But, Amy, you have to remember that when she became a socialist, women didn’t even have the right to vote. So I suppose it was more a political statement of support rather than anything that you could vote on if you’re a woman at that time. But she—many of the things that were—became part of the New Deal were socialist ideals: an eight-hour day and unemployment insurance. Those were socialist ideals. She later, after she was—became a civil servant and worked with Al Smith in New York, she joined the Democratic Party.

AMY GOODMAN: Now talk about what she was not able to accomplish, the key issue that she felt needed to be passed, but to get Social Security, to get these other labor issues passed, she gave up on national health insurance, national healthcare.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: That’s exactly right. And that was a source of great disappointment to her. She revisits it. She was with FDR for the entire twelve years until his death. And you see her come back to this issue again and again.

They initially thought in the package of pieces that were part of Social Security, which was unemployment insurance, Social Security and aid to dependent children, which at that point was really aid to widows with children, they had thought that national health insurance would sweep in among—in that package and, in fact, discussed it as sort of a done deal. But at the last minute, very great opposition to it developed in the medical community, mainly through the American Medical Association. And they told the Roosevelt administration that they would kill Social Security unless national health insurance was killed. So they, Perkins and Roosevelt, dropped that from their proposal.

AMY GOODMAN: What advice do you think Frances Perkins would give President Obama today?

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: That national health insurance remains a very pressing national problem. The system that we’ve ultimately developed happened accidentally later. During World War II, when there was a great demand for workers, the United States imposed wage and price controls to try to keep the hyperinflation that had happened in Germany from occurring here. And employers came to them and said, “If you don’t want us to raise wages, can we introduce health insurance?” And the Roosevelt administration agreed. So what happened is a very quick expansion of voluntary health insurance that was offered to mainly the young able-bodied employees of the big manufacturing companies that were quickly growing across America.

Now, we see this problem today. The United States is grappling with the problems that are faced by Ford and Chrysler and General Motors. One of the biggest problems those three big companies face is that they are hobbled with the cost of national health insurance. Their international competitors, other companies, are not required to pay health insurance for their own employees. In fact, the big auto companies pay as much for health insurance as they pay for the steel that goes into cars. This is a very current issue. And it’s—the health insurance quandary is built into many of the problems our economy is facing today.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kirstin Downey, I want to thank you very much for a fascinating book, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.

KIRSTIN DOWNEY: Thank you so much.

AMY GOODMAN: That does it for this show. A special thanks to the Kheel Center’s Triangle Factory Fire archival collections in New York.


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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.


Clara Lemlich was born in 1886 in Gorodok, Ukraine, to deeply religious parents. Like most girls, she was taught Yiddish but was offered no further Jewish schooling. Her parents were willing to send her to public school, but found that Gorodok’s only school excluded Jews. Angered by the Russian government’s antisemitism, her parents forbade her to speak Russian or to bring Russian books into their home. The headstrong child continued her study of Russian secretly, teaching Russian folk songs to older Jewish girls in exchange for their volumes of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Turgenev.

Before she was in her teens, Clara was sewing buttonholes on shirts to pay for her reading habit. Already fluent in written Yiddish, she fattened her book fund by writing letters for illiterate mothers to send to their children in America. When her father found a cache of books hidden beneath a meat pan in the kitchen, he burned the whole lot and Clara had to start collecting again. She began storing books in the attic, where she would perch on a bare beam to read. One Sabbath afternoon, while her family dozed, she was discovered by a neighbor. He not only kept her secret, but lent her revolutionary tracts from his own collection. By the time the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 convinced her parents to immigrate to the United States, seventeen-year-old Clara was a committed revolutionary.

Like so many young immigrant girls, Clara Lemlich found work in a Lower East Side garment shop. Infuriated by working conditions that, she said, reduced human beings to the status of machines, she began organizing women into the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) soon after her arrival in New York in 1905. The older, skilled male workers who dominated the union resisted her efforts, but whenever they attempted to strike without informing the women, Clara brazenly warned them that their union would never get off the ground until they made an effort to include women. Over the men’s objections, she brought her women coworkers out on strike again and again in various garment shops between 1907 and 1909.

In November 1909, despite the warnings of male union officers and of the middle-class reformers of the Women’s Trade Union League who believed that young girls could not sustain a general strike, Clara decided to ignite the long-simmering resentment of tens of thousands of young immigrant working girls like herself. Insisting that she be allowed to address a strike meeting at New York’s Cooper Union, she said: “I am one of those who suffers from the abuses described here, and I move that we go on a general strike.” To the surprise of almost everyone, between thirty and forty thousand young women garment workers—predominantly Jewish immigrants—walked off their jobs over the next few weeks. It was a bitter, only partially successful strike. It galvanized the fledgling ILGWU and set off a wave of women’s strikes between 1909 and 1915 that spread from New York to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Michigan. But it also set the stage for tragedy when union negotiators failed to advance the young women’s demand for safer working conditions. That lapse would come back to haunt the union on March 25, 1911, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women.

After the strike Clara was blacklisted from New York garment shops. She turned her energies to the suffrage movement, helping to found the Wage Earners League for Woman Suffrage, a working-class suffrage group. A fiery and effective agitator for the vote, she was eventually fired from her paid position as organizer for refusing to moderate her radical politics to suit the reform vision of most middle-class suffragists.

In 1913, Clara married printer Joe Shavelson and moved to Brownsville, in Brooklyn, where they had three children—Irving, Martha, and Rita. Far from the shop floor, Clara Shavelson began organizing wives and mothers around such issues as housing, food, and public education. She was a leader in the kosher meat boycotts of 1917, called to protest rapid price increases, and in the rent strike movement that swept New York City in 1919 when a postwar housing shortage dramatically raised the cost of decent housing.

In 1926, Shavelson joined the Communist Party and, along with other CP women, founded the United Council of Working-Class Housewives. The council helped the wives of striking workers raise funds, gather food, and set up community kitchens and cooperative child care. Organizing housewives proved so effective that, in 1929, Shavelson and white-goods worker Rose Nelson created the United Council of Working-Class Women (UCWW). The UCWW led rent strikes; anti-eviction demonstrations; meat, bread, and milk boycotts; sit-ins and marches on Washington. Shavelson argued that consumption was intimately linked to production, and that the working-class housewife was as important a participant in the class struggle as her wage-earning husband, sisters, sons, and daughters.

In 1935, the UCWW changed its name to the Progressive Women’s Councils and began building a coalition with a wide range of women’s organizations not affiliated with the Community Party to protest the increasing cost of staple foods and housing. With Clara Shavelson as its president, the Progressive Women’s Councils mounted a meat boycott that shut down forty-five hundred New York City butcher shops. Though in New York the strike was centered in Jewish and African-American neighborhoods, it soon spread to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and several towns in Pennsylvania, involving women of all races, religions, and ethnic backgrounds.

This housewives’ coalition alleviated the worst effects of the Great Depression in many working-class communities: bringing down food prices, rent, and utility costs; preventing evictions; and spurring the construction of more public housing, schools, and parks. By the end of World War II the housewives’ movement had forced the federal government to regulate food and housing costs and to investigate profiteering on staple goods. Decades of intense antieviction struggles and years of lobbying for public housing helped convince many municipalities to pass rent control laws, and increased support in Congress for federally funded public housing. It also paved the way for the modern consumer and tenant movements and brought gender politics into the working-class home, shining a bright light on hidden power relations between husbands and wives, parents and children—long before the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s popularized the thesis that the personal is political. By demanding to be seen and respected in their own right, Clara Lemlich Shavelson and the housewife-activists laid the groundwork for the personal politics of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1944, after her husband became ill, the fifty-eight-year-old Shavelson returned to the garment trade and to the union movement. During the 1940s she served on the American Committee to Survey Trade Union Conditions in Europe and spoke out against nuclear weapons as an organizer for the American League against War and Fascism. After a visit to the Soviet Union with the American Committee, she and the other members had their passports revoked. In 1951, the year her husband died, Shavelson was summoned to Washington to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her son and her husband were also investigated; indeed, her family remained under surveillance for the next two decades. Government harassment did not silence Shavelson. She actively protested the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 and the United States intervention in Guatemala in 1954.

When she retired from the ILGWU in 1954, the unrepentant radical was denied a pension on a technicality. After a long battle she was awarded two honorary stipends by ILGWU president David Dubinsky, but she never did receive a pension from the union she helped to found—and which hails her as a pioneer on every major anniversary.

In 1960, Shavelson married an old labor movement acquaintance, Abe Goldman, with whom she lived until his death in 1967. At age eighty-one, Shavelson moved into the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. During her years there, she persuaded the administrators to honor the grape and lettuce boycott then being promoted by the United Farm Workers and helped the orderlies to organize a union. She died at the home on July 12, 1982, at age ninety-six.

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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

“The woman worker needs bread, but she needs roses too,” Rose Schneiderman said in 1911. This most famous of Schneiderman’s lines captures the essence of the political philosophy that guided her long and extraordinary career as an internationally recognized leader of American working women. For nearly half a century, Rose Schneiderman worked tirelessly to improve wages, hours, and safety standards for American working women. She saw those things as “bread,” the very basic human rights to which working women were entitled. But she also worked for such “roses” as schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women, because she believed that working women deserved much more than a grim subsistence.

Only four feet nine inches tall, with flaming red hair, the diminutive Polish Jewish immigrant possessed legendary power as an orator. From 1904 through the 1950s, the militant trade unionist and women’s rights advocate spoke on street corners, soapboxes, lecture platforms, and over the radio, impressing even those who did not share her political views. In an age when political oratory was a leading form of entertainment, many contemporaries described her as the most moving speaker they had ever heard. Even her enemies evoked a sense of her emotional punch—dubbing her “the Red Rose of Anarchy.”

Schneiderman’s powers of persuasion won her many influential admirers. A close friend and adviser to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Schneiderman taught them most of what they knew about working people. As president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League (NYWTUL) from 1917 to 1949, and of the National WTUL from 1926 to 1950, Schneiderman served both presidents and governors as a liaison to organized women workers. She was the only woman on FDR’s National Recovery Administration Labor Advisory Board. She played a key role in shaping the landmark legislation of the New Deal: the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. She also helped make New York State a national laboratory for labor and social welfare legislation, first as a lobbyist for the NYWTUL from 1911 to 1932, and then as New York secretary of labor from 1937 to 1943.

Schneiderman had a strong Jewish identity and was active on behalf of Jewish causes throughout her career, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. Her speeches and letter-writing campaigns mobilized the resources of the labor movement to help Jewish refugees escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. She was also a major fund-raiser for the Labor-Zionist Leon Blum Colony in Palestine.

Rose Schneiderman was born on April 16, 1882, to devout Jewish parents in Saven, Poland. Her father, Samuel, was a tailor. Her mother, Deborah, did a little bit of everything; she took in sewing, baked ritual breads, sewed uniforms for the Russian Army, treated the sick with herbal medicines, and even tended the bar at a local inn when the barkeep was too drunk to do it herself. Strong believers in education for girls, Schneiderman’s parents bucked Jewish tradition to send her to school. When she was four, they enrolled her in a heder. At six, they moved to the city of Chelm so that Schneiderman could attend a Russian public school.

The Schneiderman family migrated to New York City in 1890. Two years later, Samuel died of meningitis, leaving three children and a pregnant wife. Deborah Schneiderman did the best she could to support her children. She took in boarders, sewed and washed for neighbors, and even worked as a handywoman. Still, for a time, she was forced to place her three children in an orphanage. When Rose Schneiderman returned home, her mother worked nights so that Rose could attend school during the days. But in 1895, when her mother lost her night job, thirteen-year-old Rose was forced to leave school and enter the paid workforce.

Deborah Schneiderman begged United Hebrew Charities, an organization run by middle-class German Jews, to find her daughter a “respectable” job at a department store. Retail jobs were deemed more respectable than factory work because the environment was more pleasant and sexual harassment was thought to be less common. Deborah Schneiderman worried that factory work would sully her daughter’s reputation. She hoped that a job as a fashionable salesgirl would usher Schneiderman into the middle class. The single mother who had fed her children on charity food baskets was grimly determined to help them escape poverty. Perhaps self-conscious about a childhood that was poor even by Lower East Side standards, Schneiderman latched onto her mother’s obsession with respectability. That preoccupation lasted throughout her life, shaping and limiting her political choices.

But respectability didn’t pay the rent. Then, as now, blue-collar work paid a great deal better than pink-collar jobs. After three years as a salesgirl, Schneiderman asked a friend to train her as a cap maker. She did earn higher wages than in the department store, but, like many women garment workers, Schneiderman quickly grew frustrated by the gender hierarchy in her shop that reserved the best-paying positions for men while relegating women to the worst jobs. When she expressed her frustration, more seasoned women workers began to teach her about three political ideologies that would change her life: trade unionism, socialism, and feminism.

In 1903, the twenty-one-year-old Schneiderman organized her shop for the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers’ Union, a union founded and run by socialist Jews, most of whom were Eastern European immigrants like herself. Initially skeptical of the ability of young women to organize, male union leaders were deeply impressed by Schneiderman’s skill as an organizer and her charismatic speaking style. Within a year, she became the first woman elected to national office in an American labor union.

The following year, as leader of a general strike of cap makers, Schneiderman was offered aid by the NYWTUL, an organization founded by progressive reformers to help working women unionize. Although the women who ran the NYWTUL were sincere, they lacked credibility among the working classes. They hoped to change that by attracting respected women unionists like Schneiderman.

By 1906, Schneiderman’s talents as an organizer had won her the vice presidency of the NYWTUL. In 1908, German Jewish philanthropist Irene Lewisohn offered Schneiderman money to finish her schooling. Schneiderman refused the scholarship on the grounds that she could not accept a privilege that so few working women had. However, she did accept Lewisohn’s amended offer to pay her a salary to organize working women. Schneiderman became chief organizer for the NYWTUL, a post she held until 1914.

Organizing furiously in garment shops throughout Lower Manhattan, Schneiderman helped pave the way for the great Uprising of the 20,000 of New York’s shirtwaist makers in 1909–1910, the largest strike by American women workers to that time. That strike, led largely by young Eastern European Jewish women, galvanized the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and gave the NYWTUL a national reputation. But it also generated tensions between Jewish women and men in the ILGWU, and between working-class Jews and the middle-class Christian women who dominated the NYWTUL. In both cases, the more powerful group chastised the immigrant Jewish women strikers for being too fervent and too uncontrollable.

In the years after the shirtwaist strike, Schneiderman’s relationship with the league’s founders deteriorated. Believing them to be both anti-Semitic and antisocialist, Schneiderman resigned in 1914. For the next two years she worked as general organizer for the ILGWU. That position had its frustrations as well. The male leadership of the ILGWU showed little interest in organizing women. Feeling undermined and angry, Schneiderman left the ILGWU and became chair of the Industrial Wing of the New York Woman Suffrage Party in 1917.

Long an ardent suffragist, Schneiderman had helped found the Wage Earner’s League for Woman Suffrage in 1911 and toured for the Ohio suffrage referendum in 1912. In January 1917, she launched one final, successful drive to win the vote for New York women. That same year, she was elected president of the NYWTUL. By the end of World War I, Schneiderman was a leading figure in both labor and feminist politics in New York State. Her socialist activism and her campaign during the war to prevent the state assembly from suspending labor laws protecting women workers won her the lasting enmity of conservative members of the state legislature. They investigated her officially and publicly dubbed her “the Red Rose of Anarchy.”

Schneiderman fought back by organizing newly enfranchised women to defeat antilabor legislators in the 1918 election. And, in 1920, Schneiderman ran for the United States Senate on the New York State Labor Party ticket. Though she lost, her campaign highlighted issues of importance to American working people. Her broad platform called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans.

By the mid-1920s, Schneiderman was a nationally known figure. In 1926, she was elected president of the National WTUL, a post she retained until her retirement in 1950. Her growing interest in labor legislation had also brought her into a circle of women reformers surrounding a new friend of the NYWTUL, Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1921, when Roosevelt began to stake out a political career separate from her husband’s, she became involved in the NYWTUL. Before long, Schneiderman became a regular guest at the scrambled egg dinners that Roosevelt liked to cook for her friends, and Roosevelt came into contact for the first time with the world of the working class. Her friendship with Schneiderman deepened quickly, and, by the mid-1920s, she was inviting Schneiderman to Hyde Park to spend time with Franklin. These conversations between FDR and Schneiderman laid the foundations for many of the ideas about labor that would become law during his presidency.

In 1933, after his inauguration, Roosevelt named Schneiderman as the only woman on the National Labor Advisory Board. Schneiderman wrote the NRA codes for every industry with a predominantly female workforce. It was a heady experience for a Polish immigrant whose formal schooling had ended at age thirteen. After leaving Washington, Schneiderman was appointed secretary of labor for New York State. In that post, she campaigned hard for the extension of social security to domestic workers, for equal pay for women workers, and for comparable worth. She also used state laws to aid the union drives of the state’s growing legion of service workers: hotel maids, restaurant workers, and beauty parlor workers.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Schneiderman became deeply involved in efforts to rescue European Jews and to resettle them in the United States and Palestine. Her work won her the praise of Albert Einstein, who wrote: “It must be a source of deep gratification to you to be making so important a contribution to rescuing our persecuted fellow Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future.” Schneiderman ultimately could rescue only a small number, and she described herself as “sick with worry” for the duration of the war years.

In 1949, she retired from public life, devoting her time to writing her memoirs and making radio speeches and occasional appearances for various labor unions. Schneiderman never married, but she had a long-term relationship with labor movement colleague Maud Swartz.

Rose Schneiderman died in New York City on August 11, 1972, at age ninety.

Long before the most recent wave of feminist activism, Schneiderman attacked sexual segregation in the workplace, tried to unionize not only industrial women but also white-collar and domestic workers, called for state regulation not only of factory and office working conditions but also of working conditions in the home. She argued for comparable worth laws, government-funded child care, and maternity insurance. And, for more than half a century, she organized women to fight—not just for economic independence but also for the right to have meaning and beauty in their lives. She died just as a new women’s movement was gaining strength. Many of her ideas were taken up by that movement and are still being debated in classrooms, courtrooms, and congressional chambers. Those ideas and dreams, as much as the government protections that most American workers now take for granted, are the legacy of Rose Schneiderman.

source



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.

Comments

[the_future_modernes]

awesome!!!

[mswyrr]

:D IKR? <3 <3

When private security men were hired to beat little five-foot-nothing Clara Lemlich up, she bandaged her ribs up and went back out to protest again and again.

I don't even know how to express awesome like that. It's... just...

GUH.

;_;

Fuck Thomas Jefferson. I want there to be monuments to Clara Lemlich!

[ilyena_sylph]

Thank you for this.