She Called the Strike

On November 22, 1909, the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City was packed. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union had called the meeting. The hall was full of shirtwaist makers, most of them young, most of them immigrants, almost all of them women. They had come to decide whether to call a general strike.

The men running the meeting talked for roughly two hours. Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, was there. He was cautious. The ILGWU leadership was cautious. The talk ran on.

Clara Lemlich had spent the better part of that year on strike at the Leiserson shirtwaist shop. During that strike, company-hired thugs had beaten her badly enough to break six of her ribs. She was 23 years old, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from a small town near Lviv, and she was done listening to caution.

She asked for the floor. They gave it to her. She walked to the stage and spoke in Yiddish: "I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. 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 hall voted yes. The chairman called the crowd to take an old Jewish oath, raising their right hands: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."

Three thousand hands went up.

What walked out

By the next morning, roughly 20,000 shirtwaist makers had left their machines across New York City. Estimates at the peak ran from 15,000 to 30,000; the workers themselves named it the Uprising of the 20,000, and the name held. The strikers were overwhelmingly young immigrant Jewish women, with Italian immigrant women making up a significant share. Most were in their teens and twenties.

Their demands: a 52-hour work week instead of 70 or more, overtime pay, an end to charging workers for their own needles and electricity, and union recognition.

What it won

The strike held into February 1910. Roughly 300 of the 450 shops in the trade signed union contracts. Those workers got shorter hours, overtime pay, and an end to the petty thefts their employers had built into the wage. The ILGWU, weak and small since 1900, became a real union. The 60,000-worker cloak makers' general strike that followed in 1910 built directly on the ground these women had taken.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company refused to sign. Sixteen months later, 146 Triangle workers died in a fire with blocked exits and locked doors.

What it cost Lemlich

Clara Lemlich was blacklisted from the garment industry after the Uprising. She spent the next seven decades giving everything else she had: consumer cooperatives, civil rights organizing, tenants' rights, the fight against the Hollywood blacklist. She was still organizing at 90, leading the staff at her Los Angeles nursing home to form a union.

She died in 1982, at 96. She never stopped.

Sources

• Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (UNC Press, 1995)
• Uprising of 20,000 (Wikipedia, as a pointer to primaries)
• Clara Lemlich (Jewish Women's Archive)
• Clara Lemlich Shavelson (Tamiment Library, NYU finding aid)
• The Uprising of the 20,000, 1909 (AFL-CIO Labor History Events)
• ILGWU Records, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University
• Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 (Monthly Review Press, 1980)