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WOW2: July 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists – 7-17 thru 7-24 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-22
www.historyplace.com/...
www.onthisday.com/...
Women Trailblazers of California: Pioneers to the Present, © 2012 by Gloria G. Harris and Hannah S. Cohen — The History Press
todayinsci.com
A Book of Days for the Literary Year, edited by Neal T. Jones
The Music-Lover’s Birthday Book, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thanks to WineRev — www.dailykos.com/…
www.dailykos.com/… The Guardian newspaper — Top Stories and International sections
newspaper — Top Stories and International sections www.unwomen.org/…
The Feminist Cats Learn About
Clara Lemlich, Union Organizer,
and Working-Class Suffragist
Clara Lemlich was born in Horodok, in what is now Ukraine in March, 1886, to a Jewish family. Yiddish was her first language, but she learned to read Russian in spite of her parents’ objections, and earned money to buy books by sewing and writing letters for illiterate neighbors. Discovering revolutionary literature, she became a committed socialist. After an anti-Jewish riot in Kishnev (now Chisinău, Moldova) in 1903, American Jews organized large-scale financial help, and assisted many Jews in emigrating to America. Clara Lemrich’s family chose to go.
17-year-old Clara found work in the New York garment industry, but conditions were terrible – and growing worse: long hours, low pay, humiliating treatment by supervisors, and escalating production quotas. Many owners demanded workers provide their own sewing machines, which they had to lug from home to work and back. Lemlich got involved with the growing International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), and was elected to the executive board of ILGWU Local 25. She led several small strikes, and challenged the almost all-male leadership of the union to do more.
In November, 1909, at a mass meeting held to rally support for striking shirtwaist workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and the Leiserson Company, for two hours men spoke about solidarity and preparedness. Fed up, Clara demanded to speak. Lifted unto the platform, she declared, “They used to say you couldn’t even organize women. They wouldn’t come to union meetings. Well, we showed them! I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers … What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike!”
The enthusiastic crowd voted for a general strike, now known as the Uprising of the 20,000 – over 62% of the 32,000 shirtwaist workers in New York walked out. Clara Lemlich spoke at rallies until she lost her voice. She returned to the picket line even after thugs hired by the owners to attack strikers broke several of her ribs. Three months later, in February 1910, almost every shop signed union contracts – but not Triangle Shirtwaist.
On a bleak Saturday afternoon in March, 1911, almost 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – died because of locked exit doors while a fire consumed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. A poorly constructed fire escape collapsed almost immediately, sending 20 victims to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Some died in the fire, but others, desperate to escape the flames, leapt from windows 9 or 10 stories up – because the firefighters, though they arrived quickly, had ladders that were too short to reach the trapped workers.
Clara Lemlich, still at odds with the ILGWU leadership, and blacklisted from the industry by the bosses, launched a new campaign – for working women to get the vote:
“The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote. When she asks to have a building in which she must work made clean and safe, the officials do not have to listen. When she asks not to work such long hours, they do not have to listen ... Until the men in the Legislature at Albany represent her as well as the bosses and the foremen, she will not get justice; she will not get fair conditions. That is why the working woman now says that she must have the vote.”
Most of suffrage campaign leaders were middle and upper class women – Lemlich had strong political differences with them, so she founded the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League (WESL) with Rose Schneiderman, Leonora O’Reilly, and others from the garment industry. They did affiliate with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which was campaigning for a Constitutional amendment for national woman suffrage, rather than the painfully slow state-by-state suffrage battles, which often only won women limited suffrage, like voting in school board elections. The WESL was short-lived, but Lemlich continued her suffrage advocacy with the Women’s Trade Union League.
After she married Joe Shavelson, and gave birth to three children, she tried to organize a council of working-class housewives, to address housing, education, and consumer issues like food prices. She joined the Communist Party, which created a Women’s Commission in 1929, and launched the United Council of Working-Class Women (UCWW), organizing picketing butcher shops to protest high meat prices, a protest that expanded to other food prices and spread beyond the Jewish and African-American neighborhoods in New York, gaining national recognition for the UCWW, which changed its name to the Progressive Women’s Councils in 1936.
Lemlich was also became active in the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs which fought evictions, protested nuclear weapons, campaigned for ratification of the United Nations' Convention on Genocide, opposed the War in Vietnam, and forged an alliance with Sojourners for Truth, an African-American women's civil rights organization.
She remained a member of the Communist Party. Her passport was revoked after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951. Lemlich fought a long battle with the ILGWU to obtain her pension.
At age 81, she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. As a resident, she persuaded management to join the United Farm Workers boycotts of grapes and lettuce, and helped the orderlies to organize a labor union.
Clara Lemlich died at age 96 on July 12, 1982.
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For those of you who want to dive deeper,
the extended list of this week’s
Women Trailblazers and Events
in Women’s History is here:
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