By Alice Kessler-Harris, Jewish Women's Archive
Jewish American women have played a central role in the American labor movement since the beginning of the twentieth century. As women, they brought to trade unions their sensibilities about the organizing process and encouraged labor to support government regulation to protect women in the workforce. As Jews who emerged from a left-wing cultural tradition, they nurtured a commitment to social justice, which would develop into what is often called “social unionism.” From their position as an ethnic and religious minority, as well as from their position as women, they helped to shape the direction of the mainstream labor movement.
Jewish mass immigration reached the United States just as the ready-made clothing industry hit its stride at the turn of the century—a circumstance that provided men and women with unprecedented incentives to unionize. In the Old Country, where jobs were scarce, daughters were married off as fast as possible. But many immigrant women had learned to sew in the workshops of Russian and Polish towns, and in America, where families counted on their contributions, they were expected to work. Girls sometimes immigrated as teenagers, seeking out an uncle or older sister who might help them to find a first job so that some part of their wages could be sent back to Europe. The wages of other young women helped to pay the rent, to buy food and clothing, to bring relatives to America, and to keep brothers in school. When they married, young women normally stopped working in the garment shops. But, much as in the Old Country, they were still expected to contribute to family income, sometimes by taking in clothing to sew at home.
In early twentieth-century New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other large cities, only the exceptional unmarried woman did not operate a sewing machine in a garment factory for part of her young adult life. Factory or sweatshop work before marriage and the expectation of some form of paid labor afterward fostered a continuing set of ties to the garment industry for this first generation of urban Jewish American women, encouraging a community of understanding around its conditions and continuing support for the ever-changing stream of workers who entered it. Women who worked long hours at extraordinarily low wages, in unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, and faced continual harassment to boot, found succor in their communities and benefited from a class-conscious background.
To be sure, competitive individualism and the desire to make it in America could hinder unionization efforts. But a well-developed ethic of social justice played an equally important role, producing perhaps the most politically aware of all immigrant groups. Socialist newspapers predominated in New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side. Jews were well represented in the Socialist Party after 1901. Though their unions were weak, Jews were among the best organized of semiskilled immigrants. In the immigrant enclaves of America’s large cities, as in Europe, women benefited from the shared sense that women worked for their families, as they absorbed much of their community’s concern for social justice. This did not deflect the desire of working women to get out of the shops, but it did contribute to the urge to make life in them better.
To be sure, competitive individualism and the desire to make it in America could hinder unionization efforts. But a well-developed ethic of social justice played an equally important role, producing perhaps the most politically aware of all immigrant groups. Socialist newspapers predominated in New York’s Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side. Jews were well represented in the Socialist Party after 1901. Though their unions were weak, Jews were among the best organized of semiskilled immigrants. In the immigrant enclaves of America’s large cities, as in Europe, women benefited from the shared sense that women worked for their families, as they absorbed much of their community’s concern for social justice. This did not deflect the desire of working women to get out of the shops, but it did contribute to the urge to make life in them better.
Still, even under these circumstances, it could not have been easy for a woman to become politically active. A number of small unions dotted New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century. There, where the boss was almost always an immigrant like oneself and sometimes a relative, and where shops were small and vulnerable, unions sprang up and flowered, or withered, as trade picked up and declined. Organized largely by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and members of a socialist umbrella organization called the United Hebrew Trades, they reflected the weakness of a labor movement rooted in an industry of poorly paid workers and undercapitalized ventures.
The men in these unions did not, at first, welcome the women, placing them in a dilemma. In order to improve their working lives, incipient activists found themselves choosing between a conservative trade union movement hostile to women in the workforce and a women’s movement whose members did not work for wages. A young and inexperienced Rose Schneiderman, for example, was turned away from the cap-makers’ union to solicit the signatures of twenty-five of her coworkers before the union would acknowledge them or provide aid. Her friend Pauline Newman recalled that when she and her friends “organized a group, we immediately called the union so that they would take the members in.” Despite the early devotion of women—despite the fact that women were often baited, beaten, and arrested on picket lines—the ILGWU insisted that women, destined for marriage, were unorganizable. Even those who managed to enter were badly treated. During the 1905 cap-makers’ strike, for example, married men got strike benefits but even women who were supporting widowed mothers and young siblings received nothing.
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